Stafford went into his wife’s study and checked her schedule, which was neatly blocked out in her Day-Timer months in advance. She had a tennis lesson at ten, a manicure at eleven fifteen, and a tee time on the Plantation course at two thirty. He had given up on the par-seventy-three Plantation but Agnes, a scratch golfer in her prime who maintained a handicap of nine, found it the only one challenging enough to hold her interest. Stafford closed the Day-Timer and picked up the photograph next to it. A little girl in an old-fashioned bathing suit sitting on the edge of a swimming pool, her feet dangling above the waterline. A vintage bathing cap buttoned under her chin. Stafford had looked at this picture a thousand times, but never once had it made him laugh or smile, although he had been told it was a funny picture. He put it down next to Agnes’s Day-Timer and left the room, heading back to the kitchen to get the coffee he had promised her. It was eight o’clock in the morning, and the only thing worse than living in paradise was oversleeping in it.

  CHAPTER 3

  Expectations

  We must sometimes incline toward the excess, sometimes toward the deficiency, for so shall we hit the mean and what is right.

  —Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

  THEY HAD ONE CHILD, a daughter in her mid-twenties, and as much as Stafford loved the child, he could not find a way to love the woman she became. He knew Agnes still believed that they would be a happy family someday, and Callie would come back to them with children of her own, and they would all celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas and the Fourth of July at the appropriate house, and it would be like one of Stafford’s many television shows—insightful, heartwarming, and somewhere in the top twenty. But that could never happen now, and there was nothing he could say or do to convince his wife to give up. He had championed dozens of hits over the years and was still regarded as an industry visionary by a dwindling handful of loyalists, for promoting family drama when it was out of fashion. But Stafford cringed when he thought of the endless hours of dialogue spewed out by actors who had no more experience with happy family life than a colony of feral cats. Giving the audience a happy ending was not difficult. Happiness, like hope, was a commodity. Giving up was the harder sell, and Stafford knew this better than anyone. Calliope Hopkins would never come back. The baby named for the Greek Muse of eloquence, epic poetry, and music sang a different tune.

  In the beginning, though, he loved everything about that little girl, with the exception of her arrival, which tore her mother’s body apart. Unlike the silence of their first baby, this was a long, protracted labor and Stafford was embarrassed by the fanfare of what was described as a birthing experience. He did not want to be the coach, the cameraman, or the whipping boy, and there seemed to be no other roles for expectant fathers. He wanted to pace back and forth in the waiting room. He did not want to time the contractions or whisper words of encouragement or watch the unfolding drama emerging between his wife’s open thighs. He wondered later if there were other fathers who felt as he did and would have preferred not to have seen other doctors performing last-minute episiotomies with sharp, surgical scissors on other wives to “help things along.” Afterward, he felt sick and ashamed, and it was many years before he could look at his wife and his daughter and not see in his mind the moment when the one was cut out of the other’s body like a tooth gone bad.

  Agnes was slow to recover from Callie’s birth, and Stafford was launching a television series at the time that would revive the career of its leading man. No relatives came to help, and none were wanted, so things went badly from the start. To compound matters, Callie was an unsettled baby who cried with colic for months, drawing her tiny legs up and screaming with the rage and the pain of stomach cramps from late morning until midnight, at which point Stafford would walk through the door and take the baby from his hysterical wife who had not brushed her teeth or combed her hair or answered the telephone for fourteen hours and was, she said, ready to draw the bath and open her veins. Stafford would make an effort to come through the door stoically, but his patience for his wife and baby waned quickly. He had worked hard all day, and the demands of his job were relentless, and he resented the transformation of his wife from slender companion to lactating nightmare. It was too hard, this new script, and he was tired. He wanted to read or watch TV. Mostly, though, he wanted to have sex with his wife without thinking about the scissors and the blood and the way she wept and turned away when they handed her Callie.

  “You have a beautiful baby girl, Mrs. Hopkins.”

  Callie eventually settled down, but not until Stafford was persuaded by the men he worked with to hire full-time help.

  “Get a nanny,” they all said.

  The other men had all been through it at least once or twice, some even more and with different wives too, and they laughed at Stafford when he got phone calls at six o’clock from a weeping wife because they had all had the same phone calls and knew how it was.

  “My wife was a lunatic, a fucking lunatic. I brought my mother out to help, right? And she lasted about, well, shit, maybe two days, and then I had both of them yelling and crying and phoning me all day long.”

  “Brutal.”

  “It was brutal.”

  “Have you had sex yet?”

  “With his wife, you mean.”

  “Funny.”

  “I’m a funny guy.”

  “’Cause there’s another milestone.”

  “Doctor promised no stitches, right?”

  “I couldn’t get near Ann for months.”

  “Ann? Who’s Ann?”

  “His second wife.”

  “Right.”

  Stafford’s assistant arranged for an agency to find the right nanny for Callie, and eventually a nice young woman arrived and stayed about two years and then the agency sent another one, and after that two more came and went. With the arrival of Callie, they were never again without household help, and gradually their staff expanded from nannies to housekeepers, personal assistants, gardeners, pool men, decorators, and cooks.

  When Callie was three, she was sent to a prestigious nursery school where three-year-olds were expected to duplicate the accomplishments of their parents. Stafford and Agnes were unfamiliar with the concept of a private preschool education for very young children and had initially laughed it off as something particularly LA, given that Callie was only six weeks old when the subject came up.

  “Dana called, Stafford. About Saturday night. Dinner at their house? Oh, come on, Stafford, don’t look at me like that. I told you about this last week.”

  “I’m golfing on Saturday. Bruce didn’t say anything about dinner.”

  “But we owe them.”

  “Owe them? Who’s having the dinner?”

  “They are. But we bailed on them last time. So we owe them. Well, we can’t keep saying yes and then changing our minds at the last minute, Stafford. It’s rude.”

  “Weren’t they just here?”

  “That was the Roths. The Browns were busy.”

  “Oh, that’s right. Bruce was away.”

  “He was in New York. Dana was pissed about it.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I heard she called the studio and complained.”

  “Mrs. Brown should be careful.”

  “Oh, Stafford, everyone’s used to her. And she’s fun. Dana, I mean.”

  “Sack of hammers, honey.”

  “Well, Brucie picked her.”

  “Brucie is stuck with her.”

  “Anyway, she called.”

  “And?”

  “BBQ at their house after the game.”

  “On Saturday.”

  “Are you listening to me, Stafford?”

  “We have that studio dinner on Saturday.”

  “You’re kidding me.”

  “Don’t you write these things down? You should write them down. Call Dana and cancel. You’ll have to put them off until next week.”

  “Oh God, Stafford. I can’t keep doing this.”

  “But don’t mention the studio dinner.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because they’re not invited.”

  “Oh.”

  “Don’t give me that look. I don’t make these decisions.”

  “Dana thinks we should register Callie for preschool.”

  “What?”

  “I know, I know. But that’s partly why she called. And the BBQ too, of course, but mostly it was about this preschool everybody goes to and how hard it is to get in and what Dana had to go through to get Alexandra in and blah blah blah. You know how she talks. So I said, ‘You know, Dana, Callie doesn’t even turn over yet.’ So then, of course, she had to tell me that Alexandra was turning over on the delivery table or whatever and how this preschool is the best preschool and there’s this gifuckingnormous waiting list and you need references and introductions and, you know, real LA shit.”

  “Forget it. We’re not putting Callie into that world.”

  “I agree. I totally agree.”

  “With me. You agree with me. Is my wife agreeing with me?”

  “Stafford, stop it.”

  “Are you having an affair? Is my wife seeing someone?”

  “Shhh. You’re shouting. Mindy will hear.”

  “Who’s Mindy?”

  “Our nanny, you idiot. Mindy is our nanny.”

  “I don’t want a nanny. I want sex, baby. And I need it bad.”

  “Very funny, Elvis.”

  “I can be funny.”

  “We don’t have time. Stop acting so goofy. What’s the matter with you?”

  “Just ten minutes, honey. Five. Thirty seconds. I’m begging you now. Begging!”

  “Shhh! Don’t pull at the back of my dress.”

  “Let me rip it off, okay? Come on, let’s be wild.”

  “If you rip this dress, I’ll leave you, Stafford.”

  “Okay, okay, where’s the zipper? Ow! What’s at the top?”

  “Oh, for Jesus’ sakes. Let me do it. Don’t mess my hair, Stafford. I don’t want the back all flattened out. I mean it. We’re going to be late, you know.”

  “Let me touch you. Please. Oh God, baby. You feel so good.”

  “Don’t call me baby.”

  A few months later, Stafford and Agnes went for a preliminary interview at the Westhaven Preschool Academy, armed with an introductory letter from Bruce and Dana Brown, shortly before Dana left Bruce for his accountant. Unfortunately, six-month-old Calliope Hopkins was not accepted, but her name was added to the Westhaven waiting list, which contained the names of 168 other babies, some of whom were not yet born. In the ensuing two years, Stafford moved from development executive on one show to production executive on three, and at that point, his wife joked, they rolled out the money truck. With new and better references, Stafford reapplied on Callie’s behalf, and she was quietly admitted to the Westhaven Preschool Academy, along with fifteen other beautifully dressed three-year-olds, on a hot day in September.

  “We demand much from our students, Mr. Hopkins,” Stafford was informed on the first day of school, “and I’m sure Callie will live up to Westhaven’s expectations.”

  The headmistress at Westhaven Preschool Academy, Edith Pugh, was a well-dressed woman in her early sixties and she spoke to Stafford as if they were equals, which annoyed him. In truth, Stafford was ashamed of his own part in thrusting Callie into a world he detested, and he did not visit Westhaven again until the day of Callie’s graduation, some twenty-four months later. It was left to Agnes to deal with the fundraising and the parent-teacher conferences and the intensely complex variables associated with birthday parties and dance recitals and the ferocious greed of other parents for their own children to be better than the others because being better was the only thing they understood, and they did not know how to think any other way.

  Stafford had grown up in a community where children didn’t go to school until they had to, but apparently he, too, had been spoiled, or so he was told. Unlike his older brother, Emmett, Stafford was never hit by his father, except on one occasion when he came home too late and too drunk from a local dance and threw up on the kitchen floor. But Emmett was the firstborn and, like Callie and her Westhaven classmates, much was expected of him. Stafford’s parents were not abusive people by the standards of the day, but they did not understand why Emmett was so difficult, and they were angry and bitterly disappointed with their firstborn, an unreliable boy who got into trouble and lied easily.

  When Stafford’s mother died, he received a box of old photographs and letters, and among them was a picture of Emmett, taken on his third birthday. It had surprised Stafford later, with the birth of Callie, how similar the two faces were, despite his efforts to separate the two worlds. There were, of course, thousands of pictures of Callie by the time she was three, but there was only one of Emmett, an anxious boy with pale eyes and a small mouth, the upper lip curved like a bird in flight.

  “Callie has my brother’s mouth,” he had said to Agnes, studying the picture.

  “Well, she’s got your chin.”

  “My chin.”

  “Look, see how it collapses when she smiles.”

  “My chin collapses.”

  “It crinkles. You tense up and you get these little crinkled lines. Maybe if you let your lower lip relax. I mean, don’t pull it up. Let it go.”

  “I’ll work on it.”

  Stafford put the photo of Emmett back in the box that day and set it aside. He had loved Emmett all his life, even in the many days of failure, but he did not want to be reminded of a face and a life he had tried so hard to forget. His memories of Emmett were like the ones of Bobby Shepherd and other things, things that could only be remembered in small, protected moments like little capsules of reality, more than an insert but never quite a whole scene.

  But as the years passed and Callie transitioned from an unsettled baby to a difficult teenager who got into trouble and lied easily, he would come to see more of his brother in her than the shape of an upper lip. And despite his best efforts, he found himself comparing the misdemeanors of Callie with Emmett’s, as if there were an inherent weakness of character in the Hopkins family.

  On Stafford’s first day of school, his parents told him he was to leave the room immediately when the class said the Lord’s Prayer because it wouldn’t be a Catholic Our Father and Stafford was not to be repeating Protestant prayers no matter what the circumstances of the family had brought them to. In matters of religion, the Hopkinses were reliable. Mass on Sunday, fish on Friday, confession, Ash Wednesday, Palm Sunday, Lent, Good Friday, Easter, Christmas, and an assortment of feast days of personal interest to Stafford’s mother. But his father’s heart attack the year before had made it too difficult for Stafford to attend the Catholic school in the distant town of Bath, and it was no longer possible to rely on Emmett to help with the driving. The local public school only involved a short bus trip into Napanee, and while none of Stafford’s Catholic cousins would be there, he would know some of the local boys from neighboring farms, boys like Bobby Shepherd who were not Catholic but were pretty decent boys all the same.

  Six-year-old Stafford had taken his seat in a Protestant classroom on the first day of school, tense and anxious until the moment finally arrived when the teacher, a young woman with a lazy eye, asked the class to stand and recite the Lord’s Prayer. It was then that Stafford made a dash for the door, knocking over a little girl’s chair and crashing into Bobby Shepherd, whose desk was nearby. Everyone had laughed, even the teacher, and Stafford remembered standing in the hallway outside the class, red-faced and ashamed, how angry he was at what his parents had demanded of him.

  For the rest of that long day, he struggled to keep from breaking down, wondering how he would survive, until finally, at ten minutes to four, he heard the sound of a car engine driven too hard and too fast and he went to the window and looked out, and there was Emmett in an open truck. Stafford ran out of the class without his books or his pencils or his lunch bag or his jacket. He heard the teacher say something, heard the other children laughing, but he didn’t care, and he ran out of the school and across the yard to his brother and threw his arms around Emmett’s waist and wept. But Emmett just laughed and offered no counsel because he didn’t know of any that would help a little brother on his first day of school.

  “So, how’s the new schoolboy liking it?”

  “I don’t like it, Emmett. I hate it.”

  “Ah, you’ll get used to it.”

  “How?” Stafford asked. “How will I get used to anything?”

  “You just will. Nobody knows how.”

  Stafford’s brother was named after a dead boy, a relative from Prescott who died in a hunting accident one late October day when the man behind him tripped and fell forward, the shotgun in his hand. That Emmett was carried home with a gaping hole in his back and laid out on the table in the kitchen, where his parents wept and raged, waiting for the priest to come and say something for a soul gone and a body destroyed. All their hopes and expectations come to nothing. That Emmett was a sandy-haired boy of thirteen who never saw the ocean, never slept alone in a bed.

  “Early ripe, early rot.”

  “Excuse me, Stafford?”

  “That’s what my mother used to say.”

  “And?”

  “It’s a metaphor.”

  “Awesome.”

  “Well, think about it.”