"So why would you believe them when they tell you I live on a farm? Anyway, you have my phone number and my e-mail address. Why didn't you just ask me where I lived?"

"It seemed like too weird a question to ask my own father. Maybe you should write your own Wikipedia page. So your children know something about you."

"We have animals," said Jackson defensively. "Chickens. Pomus. One rabbit that died."

The rabbit had been recommended to them as a way to assuage Jackson's fears about the imminent death of his father. Tucker couldn't remember precisely how the idea was supposed to work-maybe that the kid would learn about the natural order of things by looking after a pet over its natural life span, was that it? It made sense at the time, but the rabbit died after two days, and now Jackson talked about his dead rabbit all the time. It was true, however, that he seemed slightly more phlegmatic about the end of Tucker's life, expected any day now.

"The rabbit's buried just over there," Jackson told Lizzie, pointing at the wooden cross on the edge of the lawn. "Dad's going next to him, aren't you, Dad?"

"Yep," said Tucker. "But not yet."

"Soon, though," said Jackson. "Maybe when I'm seven?"

"After that," said Tucker.

"Well. Maybe," said Jackson, doubtfully, as if the point of the conversation was to console Tucker. "Is your mom dead yet, Lizzie?"

"No," said Lizzie.

"Is she well?" Tucker asked.

"She's very well, thank you for asking," said Lizzie. Was there acid in there? Probably. "She was the one who thought I should come to see you."

"Okay," said Tucker.

"It's that thing," said Lizzie.

"Uh-huh." This thing, that thing . . . They all turned out to be the same thing, more or less, so why insist on a definition?

"When you find out you're going to have a kid of your own, you want to understand more about everything else."

"Sure."

"You guessed, didn't you?"

"What?"

"What I just said."

He got the feeling that there had been some information given to him that he hadn't processed properly yet. Maybe he shouldn't treat these getting-to-know-you conversations as a genre.

"Hold on," said Jackson. "That means . . . You're my sister, right?"

"Half sister."

"So . . . I'm going to be . . . What does that mean?"

"You're going to be an uncle."

"Cool."

"And he's going to be a granddad."

Tucker finally understood what he was being told when Jackson burst into tears and went running to find his mother.

Finally, Lizzie thawed a little-at least on the side nearest Jackson, when Tucker led him back a couple of minutes later.

"It doesn't mean your dad's old," she said. "He's not."

"Okay, so how many other kids at my school have dads who are granddads?"

"I'm sure not many."

"None," said Jackson. "Not one."

"Jack, we've been through this," said Tucker. "I'm fifty-five. You're six. I'm gonna live a long time. You'll be a big man before I'm ready to go. Forty, maybe. You'll be sick of me."

Tucker wouldn't want to bet on the life span he was predicting for himself. Thirty years of smoking, ten years of alcohol dependence . . . He'd be amazed if he even got his threescore years and ten.

"You don't know I'll be forty," said Jackson. "You might die tomorrow."

"I'm not going to."

"You might."

Tucker always got sidetracked by the logic in these conversations. Yes, I might die tomorrow, he wanted to say. But that was true even before you found out I was going to be a grandfather. Instead of embarking on paths like these, however, he just had to talk rubbish. Rubbish always worked.

"I can't."

Jackson looked at him, hope renewed.

"Really?"

"Nope. If there's nothing wrong with me today, I can't die tomorrow. There's just not enough time."

"What about a car crash?"

Which anyone of any age could have at any time, you moron.

"Nope."

"Why not?"

"Because we're not going anywhere in the car tomorrow."

"The day after."

"Or the day after."

"How will we get food?"

"We have a ton of food."

Tucker didn't want to be thinking about whether they'd be starved out if they couldn't drive anywhere. He wanted to think about how old he was, and how he was going to die soon, and how his whole life seemed to have slipped away without him noticing.

A while back, Tucker had promised himself that he'd sit down with a piece of paper and try to account for the last couple of decades. He'd write the years down in sequence on the left-hand side, and write down one or two words next to each, words that would at least give some sense of what might have occupied him in those twelve months. The word "booze" and a few ditto marks would do for the end of the eighties; occasionally he'd picked up a guitar or a ballpoint, but mostly he'd just watched TV and poured scotch down his throat until he blacked out. There were other, healthier words he could use later on-"painting," "Cooper and Jesse," "Cat," "Jackson," but actually, even they didn't explain away as many months as he'd be asking them to. How long had he really spent in that tiny apartment he'd rented and used as a studio in the painting years? Six months? And his sons, in the years they were born . . . He'd taken them for walks, sure, but a lot of the time they'd been nursing, or sleeping, and he'd watched them do both. But then, watching was an activity, right? You couldn't do much else, if you were watching.

Occasionally he thought about what his father would have written if faced with a sheet of paper containing a list of all his adult years. He'd had a long, productive life: three kids, a good, strong marriage, his own dry-cleaning business. So what would he write next to, say, '61-'68? "Work"? That one short word would cover seven years of his life perfectly adequately. And Tucker knew for sure what he'd have chosen for 1980: "Europe." Or probably, "EUROPE!" He'd waited a long time to go back, and he'd loved every second of it, and the holiday of a lifetime lasted a month. Four weeks out of the fifty-two! Tucker wasn't trying to flatten out the differences-he knew his dad was the better man. But anyone trying to account for their days in this way was going to wonder where they had all gone, what had been missed.

Jackson was tearful for the rest of the afternoon and early evening. He cried about losing to Lizzie at tic-tac-toe, he cried about having his hair washed, he cried about Tucker dying, he cried about not being allowed to smother his ice cream in chocolate sauce. Tucker and Cat had presumed that he'd stay up and eat with them, but he was so exhausted by his emotional exertion that he ended up going to bed early. Seconds after the boy fell asleep, Tucker realized he'd been using him as a small but effective hostage: nobody could get a clear shot in while Jackson was around. When he went downstairs and rejoined Cat and Lizzie in the garden, he was just in time to hear Cat saying, wryly, "Well, he'll do that to you."

"Who'll do what to who?" he said, cheerfully.

"Lizzie was just telling me about her mom being hospitalized after you dumped her."

"Oh."

"You never told me about that."

"It just never came up when we started dating."

"Funny, huh?"

"Not really," said Lizzie.

And they took on from there. Cat decided that she already felt comfortable enough around her new stepdaughter to give her a candid assessment of the state of her marriage; Lizzie reciprocated with a candid assessment of the damage Tucker had caused through his absence. (She held her stomach protectively all the way through her complaint, Tucker noticed, as if he were about to attack her unborn child with a knife at any moment.) Tucker nodded sagely at various points, and occasionally shook his head sympathetically. Every now and again, when both women simply stared at him, he'd shrug and stare at the ground. There didn't seem an awful lot of point in attempting to defend himself, and anyway he wasn't absolutely sure what line of defense he would have taken. There were a couple of errors of fact embedded in the stories they told each other, but nothing worth correcting. Who really cared that, in her bitterness and rage, Natalie had told Lizzie that he'd slept with another woman in her apartment in her apartment, for example? It was only the location she had wrong, not the act of infidelity itself. The only word that would have explained anything, most of the time, was "drunk." He could have said that, at regular intervals, possibly even after every sentence, but it almost certainly wouldn't have helped.

At the end of the evening, he showed Lizzie to her room and wished her good night.

"Was that all okay?" she said, and she made a face, as if he'd spent the evening dealing with acute heartburn.

"Oh, yeah, fine. You were owed."

"I hope you sort things out with Cat. She's lovely."

"Yeah. Thanks. Good night. Sleep well."

Tucker went back downstairs, but Cat had gone. She had used his absence as an excuse to go to bed without him, and without explanations. They mostly slept in separate rooms now, but they were at a peculiar stage in their relationship where this wasn't accepted as a given: they talked about it every night. Or it got mentioned, at least. "Are you okay in the spare room?" Cat would say, and Tucker would shrug and nod. A couple of times, after a really savage argument that seemed to push them to the point of no return, he'd followed her into their bedroom, and eventually they'd swung things around. There was no talking about it tonight, though. She'd just vanished.

Tucker went to bed, read a little, turned the light out. But he couldn't sleep. It isn't you really, is it? It isn't you really, is it? that woman had asked, and he started to phrase answers to the question in his head. Eventually he got up and went downstairs to the computer. Annie was going to get more than she'd bargained for. that woman had asked, and he started to phrase answers to the question in his head. Eventually he got up and went downstairs to the computer. Annie was going to get more than she'd bargained for.

five.

From: Tucker

With best wishes,Tucker Crowe Tucker's reply was waiting for Annie when she arrived at work. She could have checked her e-mail on her home computer, before breakfast, and of course she'd been excited enough to have wanted to. But if there had been a reply, there was a chance that Duncan might have seen it, and easily the best thing in her life at the moment was her secret. It had been the best thing even yesterday, when all she'd received were two functional but still amazing messages that gave very little away, but now she had information that Duncan would have regarded as the key to unlocking the mysteries of the universe. She didn't want him to have that key, for all sorts of reasons, most of them ignoble.

She read the e-mail twice, three times, and then went to get her coffee early. She needed to think. Or rather, she needed to stop thinking about the stuff she was thinking about, if she were to have a chance of thinking about anything else today; and what she was thinking about, more than Tucker Crowe and his complicated life, even, was how Naked Naked had poisoned the air that she breathed in her home. had poisoned the air that she breathed in her home.

The night before, Duncan had come home late and smelling of drink; he was monosyllabic, curt even, when she'd asked him about his day. He'd fallen asleep quickly, but she had lain awake, listening to him snoring and not liking him. Everyone disliked their partners at some time or another, she knew that. But she'd spent her hours in the dark wondering whether she'd ever liked him. Would it really have been so much worse to spend those years alone? Why did there have to be someone else in the room while she was eating, watching TV, sleeping? A partner was supposed to be some mark of success: anyone who shared a bed with someone on a nightly basis had proved herself capable in some way, no? Of something? But her relationship now seemed to her to betoken failure, not success. She and Duncan had ended up together because they were the last two people to be picked for a sports team, and she felt she was better at sports than that.

"Hello, gorgeous," said Franco, the man in the coffee bar.

"Hello," she said. "Usual, please."

Would he have said "Hello, gorgeous" if she were bad at sports, as it were? Or was she reading too much into a cheesy greeting from a man who probably said it twenty times a day?

"How many times a day do you say that?" she said. "As a matter of interest?"

"Honestly?"

"Honestly."

"Only once."

She laughed, and he looked mock hurt.

"You don't see who comes in here," said Franco. "I could say 'Hello, gorgeous' to people who look like my mother or my grandmother. I used to. But it feels wrong. So I keep it for you, my youngest customer."

His youngest customer! Was everything an accident of geography? She could believe it about this town. Franco wouldn't have said what he said if his coffee bar were in London or Manchester; she wouldn't have sleepwalked through fifteen years with Duncan if she lived in Birming ham or Edinburgh. Gooleness was the wind and the sea and the old, the smell of fried food that somehow clung on even when nobody seemed to be frying anything, the ice-cream kiosks that seemed to be boarded up even when there were people around . . . And there was the past. There was 1964, and the Rolling Stones, and the dead shark, and the happy vacationers. Somebody had to live there. It might as well be her.

On the way back to the office she realized that it was Thursday, and Thursday was the day that Moira worked at the front desk. Moira was a Friend of the Museum who was convinced that Annie's childlessness was the result of some lack, a lack that could be cured. She was right, probably, but not in the way she thought. There had been absolutely no conversation prior to Moira's intervention, which had apparently been prompted entirely by Annie's age, rather than by any longing that she had articulated to this woman she didn't actually know. Annie hated Thursdays.

Today it was celery. Moira, a sprightly octogenarian with a fine head of purple-tinged hair, was standing there waiting for her, with a big bunch.

"Hello," said Annie.

"The leaves are what you want. What he wants, anyway."