A/N: Thanks as always to my betas: Jan, Barbara, and Alison.

Chapter 4

For various only half-articulated reasons, Lizzy's parents hadn't been able to make it to New York to meet Emma yet, even though they had hinted over and over that they would. Lizzy knew that it was mostly because they couldn't be bothered to go anywhere anymore, so she tried not to take it personally. Still, she had to admit it hurt. She and Will had talked about it and agreed that, since Tom and Lillian weren't coming to them, they would go to Artemis. It was important that Emma have some kind of relationship with her grandparents. Thanksgiving seemed like the right time to go. Since Lizzy and Will's marriage, they had spent a couple of tense Thanksgivings with Lillian and Tom and spent the others with Jane and Charlie. This year, though, Jane, Charlie and the boys were going to spend the holiday with his family. Lizzy couldn't say she blamed them.

Unfortunately, all the uncertainty about whether Tom and Lillian would visit resulted in Lizzy and Will's getting a very late start in planning for the trip, and therefore a number of things didn't go as smoothly as they would have liked.

When Lizzy had first asked Lillian if they could come visit, her mother had enthusiastically welcomed them to stay at the house and insisted that she would pick them up at the airport. After some discussion with Will, Lizzy had agreed they would stay at the house but told her they would rent a car instead. It seemed to Lizzy and Will that it would be a good idea to be able to get out of the house whenever they needed to, which would probably be often. Lillian had been put out, offended that her car wasn't good enough for her big-shot son-in-law. Then, embarrassingly, the next day Ahmed had told Will that he had checked everywhere, and there was not a single rental car to be had in Artemis because of the holiday. Not a one. So Lizzy had had to call Lillian back and accept her offer, after all. Lillian had agreed, but Lizzy could hear that she was still feeling touchy about it.

They left early on Wednesday morning, the worst travel day of the entire year, because Will had meetings on Tuesday and couldn't get away any earlier. They took the WPD corporate jet out of Teterboro airport rather than driving. This had a couple of advantages: they wouldn't get stuck in the huge traffic jam on the highway out of the city, and they could hold Emma most of the way, so they would only have to listen to her screaming for an hour on the plane instead of for four or more hours in the car. Lizzy felt a little guilty knowing that their money was buying them a much easier flight than all the other travelers would face that day. But she didn't feel guilty enough to fly coach.

Lillian was her usual histrionic self when she met them at security in the private terminal of the dinky Cascadilla County Airport. Her bracelets clanked, and under her open winter coat her boxy Eileen Fisher linen tunic flapped around her equally boxy frame when she moved. She gave them, even Will, big dramatic hugs and kisses.

"Oh! She's beautiful! She looks just like you at her age," Lillian exclaimed as Emma screamed in Lizzy's arms.

"I looked like an angry monkey?" quipped Lizzy, trying to hide her perplexity that Lillian didn't seem interested in holding Emma.

A skycap materialized with a cart holding their mountain of baby gear and luggage. Another perk that came with not flying commercial, thought Lizzy, as Lillian led them all out to the ancient Volvo station wagon in the parking lot. While Lillian and Lizzy tried to organize the carry-on bags inside the car, the skycap loaded the bags into the back, and set the car seat on the ground next to the back door. Will tipped the man and grabbed the car seat.

"Do you want some help getting that in?" asked the skycap.

"No, thanks, we've got it," Will assured him, so he pushed the cart back into the terminal.

Then Will belatedly noticed that the back seat didn't have the LATCH hooks that made installing the car seat a breeze.

"Sweetie, can you help me figure out how to use the lapbelt here? I don't quite see—."

Lizzy thrust Emma at Lillian. "Can you take her for a minute?" Lillian did so with obvious reluctance, holding Emma a little away from her body as if perhaps she smelled bad. And maybe she did.

Lizzy and Will stood staring at the car seat base for a few moments before they finally decided to dig around in the bags for the instructions and the locking clip. After 15 minutes of wrestling with the car seat and trying to get the retractable seatbelt to go just here around the locking clip and failing over and over, they gave up on the base altogether and belted the car seat directly in with the seatbelt. The manual said that was acceptable as a last resort.

"Well, it's not the absolute safest way, but it'll do," Lizzy said as she leaned inside the car to examine their handiwork. Then she noticed blood on the seat belt. "Oh my God, Will, are you bleeding?"

"What? No." Then he looked at his hands and discovered that in fact the knuckles on his left hand were bloody. "Crap, I must have caught it on the clamp."

"Mom!" Lizzy called to Lillian, who by now was standing next to the car tapping her foot in irritation as Emma cried. "Do you have any bandages?"

"I'm sure I have some in here somewhere. Back to you." With obvious relief, Lillian shoved Emma back into Lizzy's arms and crawled into the car to paw around in the glove compartment, the pockets on the doors, and the underside of the sun visor.

"Aha!" she said, waving an old, disintegrating Band Aid, which she had finally found in the ashtray, high in the air. "Here, let me take care of that for you." She held out her hand to Will, who cautiously reached out and let her dab off his knuckles with an old tissue she had pulled from her coat pocket. Anything to avoid holding Emma, thought Lizzy.

Finally they all piled into the car, Lillian driving, Will sitting in front so he could extend his legs almost fully and avoid getting carsick, and Lizzy in back with Emma. She closed her eyes when Lillian swerved around at high speed on the up-and-down country roads, trying to will some airbags into being.

Lillian did her typical cheerful motormouth thing. "Well, we don't have a lot planned while you're here, just a dinner party tonight and the usual Thanksgiving fête tomorrow. Maybe you can go to the special farmer's market Friday morning. I'm going to have some of my pottery there in Lulu's stall, isn't that fabulous?"

As Lillian was pulling the Volvo into the driveway and parking it outside the garage so as to avoid knocking it down, she said, "Oh, did I mention that Mary and Kevin are going to be here for dinner? They're driving down from Rochester this afternoon in their RV."

Lizzy rolled her eyes. "No, Mom, you forgot to mention that."

"Be nice, lovey. They've come all this way just to see you and to meet Emma."

"I don't know why. We all know how she feels about babies," Lizzy grumbled.

Will gave her a questioning look, but she only mumbled, "You'll see." He had met Mary once, at their wedding. Mary and Kevin themselves had eloped, no family allowed, and they had never connected at holidays after that.

Will said he would come back outside in a minute to get their enormous number of bags full of baby junk, and they all went inside. Carrying Emma, he followed Lizzy into Tom's study to say hello. Tom got up from behind his desk to give Lizzy a hug, and then he stuck his hand out and said, "Will."

Will, just as coolly, reciprocated "Tom," as he shifted Emma to his left and gave Tom a firm shake with his right.

"So this is Emma," said Tom, drawing just a little closer and peering at her through the bottom half of his bifocals. She started crying. "I see she has her mother's fine singing voice."

"Would you like to hold her, Dad?" asked Lizzy.

"Maybe after dinner," Tom said. "Right now it smells like she needs a change."

Will silently went back out to the car to get the bags and gear, while Lizzy took Emma in search of Lillian to ask whether they would be in Lizzy's girlhood room.

"Oh, no," said Lillian. "Your old room has our exercise equipment in it now. Jane's room has a double bed."

"I think we'll need a second bed. What about Lydia's room? Could we sleep in there?" asked Lizzy. Lydia's room was a little bigger because it had been added on to the house as an afterthought following her unexpected birth.

"No, I'm sleeping in there. Your father's snoring has gotten unbearable. And Mary's room is the junk room, now. So, Jane's room it is," Lillian said, ushering Will upstairs and into the room when he reappeared with the first load of bags. "Why do you need another bed? Didn't you bring a portable crib or something?"

"No, Emma shares the bed with me and Will, but I don't think we'll all fit on Jane's bed."

"What?" Lillian was aghast. "You let her sleep with you? You'll never get her to stop nursing, never. Oh, that's a big mistake."

"Thanks, Mom," Lizzy said, trying to remain civil. "So, about the bed..."

"Well, I can dig up an air mattress for you, I guess." Lillian turned and started out of the room. "I just never thought you'd want—" she muttered as she headed down the hall.

During this exchange, Will had returned to the car for a second load of bags. When he re-entered the room, Lizzy said, "Well, there's nothing like a warm welcome to make a person feel right at home, is there?"

"Are you OK?" Will asked, rather than answering her admittedly rhetorical question.

He never, ever directly criticized Lizzy's parents and their shenanigans. If she complained—and of course she did, loudly and often—then he did his best to support and affirm her interpretation of events. But he, himself, never started it. Lizzy thought it might have something to do with good manners. However, she suspected it probably had more to do with the philosophy that while it was OK to criticize one's own family, nobody else should because it caused hurt feelings. Whatever the reason, when her parents were around, Will usually hung back with a pained expression on his face and didn't say much. There really was no point in mixing it up with them, anyway.

Lizzy took his hand and looked up at him. "Yeah, yeah, I'm fine. Look, I'm really sorry, but it seems like one of us is going to have to sleep on an air mattress. Why don't you take the bed and Emma and I will sleep on the floor? Not as far for her to fall if she rolls off." That was a joke because Emma couldn't roll over yet by herself.

"No, don't be silly. I don't think it's safe for a baby on an air mattress. I'll take the floor, of course," Will immediately replied, ever her gallant husband. He clearly had no idea what he was volunteering for.

"Have you ever slept on an air mattress before?" she asked doubtfully.

"Really, I insist." He had his "you are never going to change my mind, ever," look.

Lizzy sighed. "OK. But I'm going to start calling hotels right now and see if we can find a room in town. I don't think we can do this for three nights. Even one night is not a good idea. I'm really sorry. I thought it would work out all right, like last time."

Will changed Emma on the bed while Lizzy made some phone calls.

"Don't forget the diaper cream," Lizzy said, tossing it to him. "Her rash is pretty bad."

It turned out that there were no rooms available in any of the two relatively nice hotels in town for that night, but she was able to book a room in one for the two nights after that.

"I'm sorry, I really don't think you'd like the Cliffside Inn," Lizzy apologized, referring to the only motel where she'd been able to find a vacancy for today. "It has roaches and it looks like it's going to fall into the gorge at any second. I think it was even condemned at one point. I don't know how they stay open for business." It was no surprise that the Cliffside had rooms available for tonight, but there was no way in hell she was letting her baby anywhere near that rattrap.

Will laughed at this dire description. "It's OK. I think I can handle an air mattress for one night."

She apologized profusely some more, he said it wasn't a problem, and they headed back downstairs, Emma in his arms.

Walking down the stairs and hearing the sound of her mother singing and banging stuff around in the kitchen took Lizzy back. She had a lot of fond memories of peering around the doorway at the bottom of the staircase late at night when she was supposed to be asleep, listening to her parents and their friends' raucous, wine-fueled after-dinner conversations.

There had always been lots of jokes about ribald 18th-century French poetry from the guy in the Romance Languages Department, travel tales of all around the world from the raconteur in the Anthropology Department, and endless double entendres and allusions to Greek and Roman mythology from the guy in Classics. There had also been rollicking, good-natured, and years-long political arguments between the Adam Smith-loving economist and the philosopher, who had seemed to believe that Plato's Republic truly was a great model for a properly ordered world. Their wives had participated in these discussions, too. They were all well-educated and well-informed about their husbands' studies. This was no doubt partly because so many of them had secretly co-authored their husbands' dissertations, or at least typed them, back in the day when people wrote things longhand and then had them typed. The men were never allowed in the kitchen to clean up at the end of the evening because they would just break things.

Feeling nostalgic about those evenings and her stolen moments observing them, Lizzy decided to see what Lillian was up to. Will threw on a coat, asked Lizzy if she knew where he could find a blanket to wrap around Emma because he wanted to take her outside. She grabbed an afghan from the sofa and gave it to him, and then he headed into the backyard while she made for the big stainless steel kitchen.

"Mom, you said there's a dinner party tonight. Do you still have those as often as you used to?" Lizzy asked as she walked into the room. Glass of red wine nearby, Lillian was whipping up some kind of mousse-like masterpiece with egg whites and whipped cream in her industrial Kitchen Aid mixer.

After the roaring stopped and Lillian paused to measure out some sugar, she replied, "Yes, but not as frequently as before, and they're not as big anymore. I do miss them. They were a lot of fun."

"Why the change?"

"Well, let's see. Some of that old crowd has retired. The Murphys moved to Florida—they couldn't stand the snow anymore." Roar, roar, roar went the Kitchen Aid. "Bob died—do you remember his awful accident?—and Marianne went to live closer to their son in Detroit. And...let's see...Hugh totally lost it after Lavinia left him, and he sexually harassed his grad student, so I won't have him in the house anymore. Um...Louis was stolen away by Harvard. We still see the others."

Roar, roar.

Lillian stopped for a sip of wine and then went on, "But also, the department just isn't the same as it was. Did you know that more than half of the faculty in the English department are women now?" Lizzy nodded, vaguely remembering having heard something about that.

"None of the younger women have time for dinner parties. The standards for tenure are a lot higher now than they were when your father came up." Lillian scraped the sides of the huge stainless steel bowl with a rubber spatula. "Also, a lot of them have little kids, and you know what that's like."

"I'm beginning to get the picture, anyway," Lizzy laughed.

"Well, you know, times have changed. I miss that sometimes, but those days are gone. It was nice while it lasted."

"So you don't have any regrets about those days?"

Lillian looked at her curiously and took a sip of wine. "What do you mean? Donnez-moi le chocolat, will you?" Lizzy handed her the blocks of Guittard, and Lillian broke them up and got out the double boiler.

"Well, I meant...did you enjoy being a homemaker?"

"Yeah, I loved it! It was hard work when you and your sisters were little, and money was tight on an Assistant Professor's salary even then. But it was wonderful, magnifique. It was a great life." She put some water in the bottom of the double boiler, plonked the reassembled pot onto the massive range, and turned the burner on to a very low flame.

"If money was tight, why didn't you get a job?"

"What was I going to do in little old Artemis with a B.A. in Art History?" Lillian asked, raising an eyebrow. "Anyway, back then a family could still get by on one salary. I don't think you could do it anymore. A house like this is probably...I don't know, a quarter of a million dollars now? Or it was before the crash. I saw it on that website. What's it called? Pillow? What a weird thing to name a real estate website." Actually, it was called "Zillow," and Lizzy had to agree about it being a weird name.

"Did you ever think you missed out by not having a career? I don't mean you didn't work hard. I know you did."

"Thank you, I appreciate that. Hand me the wooden spoon? Like I said, things were different then. It was really hard back then for a woman to have a career, and I was never one to rock the boat. I was always busy, and I got to do and see a lot of interesting things because of your father's job. Do you remember the summer we all spent in the French Alps when he was teaching summer school? Mon Dyoo! Paradis!" She laughed, pronouncing it "pah-rah-DEE," French style. More or less.

"Yeah, that was great. Bread and cheese, yum."

"And don't forget the vino! But anyway, after you all grew up a little, I had more time for my art, and cooking classes, and le jardin. Those things have always made me happy. Enjoying the beauty all around us."

The chocolate was melted now and Lillian took it off the stove to let it cool. Now she devoted herself more fully to the glass of wine.

"I know it probably doesn't seem like much to you or your sisters, considering all your accomplishments," Lillian sniffed.

"Mom, you know that's not true," Lizzy sighed in frustration. It always came back to this.

"I think you all work too hard." Lillian turned away to stir the cooling chocolate to keep it smooth. "And you let that baby walk all over you. Sleeping in the same bed with you, for heaven's sake," she snorted.

"Mom!"

"I know, I know, I promised I wouldn't tell you what to do. She's your baby. With four of you, we just had to have a lot of rules and routines. Maybe it's different with only one or two. Speaking of two, you know, it's really not healthy to raise an only child. They're always lonely, and so selfish and maladjusted and spoiled."

Lizzy rolled her eyes and thought, as opposed to all the mutants in our huge family. "God, Mom. She's not even two months old yet. Give me a break."

Lillian laughed. "You're right, I know. Come over here and hold the bowl while I fold in the chocolat."

Later, while they were putting the mousse into dessert goblets, Lizzy told her mother that they would be moving to a hotel for the next couple of nights. Lillian looked hurt and muttered something that Lizzy didn't quite catch. She thought she heard the phrase "not good enough," though.

When she left the kitchen, Lizzy noticed that Mary and her husband, Kevin, had just arrived. Tom had emerged from his study to let them into the foyer. Lizzy took a detour into the living room to join Will and Emma before Mary could get there.

Mary was a difficult case. She had read Lizzy's copies of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead when she was 15 and, much to Lizzy's great regret, had taken them absolutely to heart. She had joined the Students for Ayn Rand Club in high school, and had met her future husband, Kevin, when she had become the Objectivist Club president at Syracuse University. The two of them seemed to have some kind of master/disciple relationship, as far as Lizzy could tell. Mary was definitely the master. Together they looked down on just about everything and everyone, bemoaning the mediocrity of the world around them. They had their own architecture firm in Rochester and were working, one building at a time, to restore the city's architectural purity. Lizzy wished they would just get it over with and move to a damn cave in Colorado to wait for John Galt while the world ran itself into the ground.

Instead, for reasons that Lizzy couldn't quite fathom, they still periodically dragged themselves to family gatherings. She thought it must have been out of some misguided sense of obligation, because it clearly wasn't for their own or anyone else's enjoyment. They had probably come in their RV so that they could have their own space if the going got rough.

Everyone said hello, and Lizzy took Emma from Will and carried her over to Mary to be introduced.

"Emma, this is your Aunt Mary. Shake hands." She held out Emma's hand to Mary. Mary was having none of it.

Her lips in a tight, thin line, Mary snapped, "Very funny, Lizzy. Just because you breeders make the choice to have children, it doesn't follow that everyone is equally interested in them. She's incapable of rational discourse at this age."

"Yes, but she's surprisingly productive in her own way," said Lizzy, pointing to Emma's diaper. The diaper was currently empty, but it still made the point.

Mary put her hands on her hips. "That's fine, make fun of my beliefs. I understand that you're only trying to maximize your own happiness by choosing to have children. But just because you breeders make that choice, it doesn't mean that everyone else should pay the price. For example, why should I have to pay taxes to fund your child's education when I have chosen not to breed?"

Lizzy knew that if Jane had been part of the conversation, she would have said something lofty like, "Because children are the most wonderful, valuable thing in the whole world, a beacon of hope and the path to a brighter future for all of humanity!" When Jane said things like that, Mary just snorted and muttered something about everyone pulling their own weight.

So, taking a more practical angle, Lizzy said, "Because children are the ones who will be keeping the Social Security system afloat when you retire, and wiping the drool off of your mouth when you're too old to do it yourself."

Mary looked at her like she'd gone crazy. "What makes you think I've been paying into the Social Security system? I'll support my retirement through my own hard work, and wise investments that I, myself, have made in the free market. Kevin and I won't have to rely on the government." She sneered, as if the government were the worst, vilest thing she could think of.

Yeah, Lizzy thought, and you won't get anything from it, either, in your secret underground lair. She smiled a big fake smile at Mary. "That sounds like a super plan. Oh, is that Mom calling me? Sorry, gotta run."

Mary and Tom got into a big fight over something or other before dinner, and so, as usual, she and Kevin left in a huff and roared off in their RV before the meal even started. Lizzy rolled her eyes, Will looked pained and confused, and Lillian sulked and fussed a bit. Then she phoned the next-door neighbors, old friends who were used to her last-minute invitations, and they all too gladly trooped on over to fill the eleventh and twelfth places at the very, very long dining table.

After the dinner and decadent dessert had been devoured and the dishes washed, family and friends sprawled out in the living room, passing Emma around and admiring her. Lillian sat a little apart from them.

"Here, Mom, do you want to hold Emma?"

"Oh, no, thanks. No need." Lillian looked away a little evasively.

"Really? I thought you might like to."

"No, no, that's all right."

"Mom, what's going on?"

"Well...you know, little babies are not really my thing. They're much more interesting after they can talk." She stood up and dusted herself off. "More vino! White or red, may-DAMs et mon-SEWERs?"

Will looked at Lizzy with a definite "WTF?" expression. She just shrugged.

That night was awful. Will's feet dangled off the end of the air mattress, and every time he moved it made a loud whooshing sound. When Lizzy saw the look of surprise and horror on his face the first time he heard it, she was positive he had never slept on one before.

"Are you OK down there, sweetie?" she asked, once she had nursed Emma to sleep on the bed.

"Yeah, I'll be fine," his disembodied voice floated up in the dark.

She started to apologize some more, but he stopped her.

"No, don't. It's not your fault."

She dangled her hand off the bed and felt around for him. He took her hand in his.

"I don't know how things got this bad," she said quietly. "I don't know how to reach them at all. They won't talk about any of the things that need to be said."

Will sighed. "I don't know what to tell you. I'm hardly an expert on these things." Will was still only in sporadic contact with his extended family members except for his cousin Richard and Richard's brother Sean, the congressman. Everyone else was off jet-setting around or consumed in one way or another with their own outsized dramas.

"But I think it's the right thing to keep trying," he said.

"Yeah, you're right. No matter how much it hurts." Lizzy sighed, too.

The three of them hardly slept that night.

Thursday was taken up by the creation and consumption of Lillian's usual over-the-top Thanksgiving feast. Lizzy and a couple of neighbor girls whose families would be joining the Bennets for dinner took directions from Lillian. Together they cranked out a huge, magnificent meal that contained three pounds of butter, a half gallon of cream, and a lot of ingredients that Lizzy, if left to her own devices, would have had no idea what to do with: truffles, chestnuts, wild rice.

Meanwhile, Will talked to the neighbors and played with Emma in the living room, explained the football game on TV to her, and took her outside to check out the quarry in the backyard and the woods all around them. Every two hours, he stuck his head into the kitchen, which was full of steam and enthusiastic banging of pots and exclamations in faux French, to call Lizzy out for Emma's milk break. He also stuck his head in at various times to ask where the burp cloths, a clean romper, the wipes, and sundry other things were. He could take care of Emma, it seemed, but he was kind of high maintenance while he was doing it. Through all this, Tom hid in his office, as usual.

Dinner was fantastic. As always, the party expanded to include close to twenty people, including neighbors and friends, Tom's students whose families lived too far away for them to go home for the holidays, and various other strays. They ate, they drank. It was a regular bacchanal. Even Will managed to have some laughs, sharing business jokes with the economics professor.

Too bad Lydia wasn't there. She and her girlfriend, Susanna, had gone to have Thanksgiving with Susanna's family in New Jersey.

That night, Lizzy, Will and Emma moved to the hotel. With a pinched expression on her face, Lillian watched them leave in a taxi, but she didn't say anything about it. The hotel was OK, not what Will was used to, of course, but at least it was better than the air mattress. They got a king-sized bed. All three of them were so tired that they went to bed together at ten o'clock and turned off the light, Emma nestled in between Lizzy and Will.

On Friday, Lizzy, Will, and Emma did indeed go to the Artemis farmer's market as Lillian had urged them to do. They wandered around for a couple of hours, eating golden fried samosas, and laughing about a stall filled entirely with baby clothing made from hemp. They debated the feasibility, which Will suggested, of combining all of the tofu stands and futon stalls into a single huge "tofuton" store, and checked out Lillian's pottery. The pottery was really not half bad.

Lizzy bought some artisanal walnut raisin bread that she knew her father especially liked. It was just the next in what seemed to have become an endless number of peace offerings to him since she'd gone off into the big, wide world, marrying Will and joining a social scene Tom couldn't respect and wouldn't try to understand.

She knocked on his office door and stuck her head in. She noticed that, before he looked up from his computer, he had closed what looked like an online poker game, leaving only his book manuscript on the screen. He'd been beavering away writing that same book for a couple of decades. She was a little concerned about the poker, although maybe it exercised a few more brain cells than Minesweeper or one of those other games.

"Hey, Dad, you want to come out and join us? I brought you some bread from the farmer's market."

"Oh, hi, Lizzy. You're all back? Well...I just find it so chaotic when there are so many people around. Why don't you come in here instead?"

At one time, they had enjoyed having far-reaching political discussions, and those discussions and arguments had been one of the things that had inspired her to become a lawyer. Now he seemed to have lapsed into political indifference to match his personal indifference. Whereas he used to enjoy complaining about the stupid policies coming out of the Albany statehouse or Washington, now he just said, "Ah, they're all the same. A bunch of idiots."

She went in and sat down at the chair next to his desk. "What are you working on there?"

"Oh, you know, my 'critique of postmodernism' book." He made air quotes. "The same one we were discussing last time." Left unsaid was that it was the same book as the visit before, and the visit before that.

When Lizzy had studied at Oxford during her junior year, she'd had a tutorial on contemporary political theory as one of her classes. Even then, almost 15 years ago, his approach had already been passé. She knew the book wasn't going anywhere; they both did. So they had a short, meaningless conversation about it before she could change the subject.

Sunlight was streaming in through the window, giving her a better look at him than she'd had earlier on this visit. She noticed that he wasn't looking too good. He was pudgier than before, his grey hair in an increasingly exaggerated combover. All of that seemed normal for a man approaching 70, especially one who had never exercised much or taken care of himself. But what really worried her was that his complexion was sort of chalky in a way she'd never seen before.

"Daddy, how are you doing? Is your health all right?"

"Sure, sure. The doctor says there's something going on with my heart, that's all. It's nothing."

"What's happening? Are you getting treatment?"

He made a dismissive gesture. "I'm not paying that doctor much attention. I don't think he knows what he's talking about. Wants me to change my 'lifestyle' or something. Forget it. What will be will be."

Lizzy grinned at him. "Really, Daddy? Quoting Doris Day? How prosaic." Neither of them could stand Doris Day. It was one of the many things they had bonded over when she was growing up, laughing over uptight Doris Day movies. Jane had loved them, of course. Anyway, she knew she could get more information out of her mother than she'd ever get out of him, so she meandered out of his office and to the kitchen to find Lillian.

As she did so, she wondered: had he always used his research, his writing, his work, as a way to duck out of his responsibilities and to avoid real connections with other people? Had he been playing solitaire instead of writing all those years, or was it only since he'd gotten tenure? Or was this something entirely new in his old age?

That night at the hotel, as Emma nursed and drifted off to sleep in the dark while they all three lay in the king-sized bed, Lizzy said, "Will, did you notice? I had a little chat with my dad this afternoon."

"How did it go?" he asked.

"Very weird. Kind of sad." She told him about the poker game and the never-ending book. "Mom says that he has some kind of heart disease. The doctor told him he has to exercise more and eat better, but he won't do it. She hasn't adjusted her cooking, either."

"Yeah. Lots of cream."

"And butter. That's her thing. Mom also said that if it weren't for the crash, he would have retired a few years ago. But they still can't afford to retire since his 401(k) tanked(1). He has to keep teaching even though he's really checked out."

"Hmmm..." said Will speculatively. Of course money was one area where they could actually be of assistance, but it had to be handled delicately.

'Yeah, I know. I told Mom we could help them out if they wanted, and she told me 'thanks but no thanks.' So anyway, they're just going to keep muddling along, I guess, until there's some kind of crisis. He's never going to get promoted to Full Professor, except maybe as a sort of gift at retirement. I don't think he's published anything new since he got tenure, and that was thirty years ago." She paused.

After a minute she went on. "This is it for him, really. This is what he's going to have to show for himself, and what he's accomplished in his life. Because he certainly wasn't a very involved father or husband. So the work is it. But it looks like he just frittered that away, too."

"Oh, that's harsh, Lizzy."

"I know, but it's true. And the thing is, would I feel less less sad for him if he'd published more, even if nobody read what he wrote? That's ridiculous, too."

Will asked, "Well, I guess what you're asking is, are we the sum of what we have done at the end of our lives?"

"Yeah, I guess he's got me thinking about that. I don't want to end up like my dad. But how's it all going to add up for me at the end of the day? I mean, do I have to have some brilliant career so I'll be able to look back at my life and feel satisfied with what I've accomplished? What if I only have a so-so career, like my dad's? Would that be enough, if it meant I could spend more time with Emma? I'm just not sure."

"You've already had a pretty brilliant career, you know."

"Yeah, well. But I'm also not sure if that's enough, if this is as far as I go. On the other hand, can I live with myself now if I miss out on too much of what's going on with Emma?"

Her father's story was pretty much written, as he approached the end of his career and the end of his life, which might not be too long in coming if he refused to take better care of himself. What would her story be, and how would it end? These were pretty deep thoughts to be having in a small-town hotel room, lying there staring at the light reflecting off the sparkles in the flocked ceiling and listening to Will's light snores. Emma woke up to nurse and fell back asleep again twice before Lizzy finally drifted off.

They left on Saturday morning. That was more than long enough for everyone.

Footnotes:

(1) 401(k): A 401(k), or a 403(b) for a non-profit employer, is a private retirement account that employees, and more generous employers, can pay into. The name comes from this sort of account's moniker in the tax code. Since the funds are invested in the stock and bond markets, many people lost a whole lot of money in their 401(k)s in the market crash of 2008. Naturally this most severely affected people of, or close to, retirement age. The US does not have a mandatory retirement age, so following the crash quite a lot of people continued working well after they had thought they would be able to retire.

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