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work in the prison laundry and the day job he had now, putting in fences. “Charles,” he said.
    “Charles, are you looking for work?” she’d asked.
    “Oh. Oh.” Nadine groaned and slashed at a head of broccoli with a carving knife.
    Mrs. Blessing liked to think of herself as a good judge of people, and of horses, although the horses were long gone, sold when Meredith went away to college. The cosmos grew so well in the far field because that was the land on which the horses and, before them, the cows had grazed, when Father had liked the idea of the place as a farm and himself as a gentleman farmer. “You’ve got a good eye, Lyds,” he said when they went to other farms to buy animals. He’d wanted to give the house a name when he first bought it, but before long everyone called it Blessings, and soon another name seemed beside the point.
    She thought now she’d had a good eye for that young man. He was done with the grass in the fields and was clipping the yews around the pond spillway. Ed and Jeanne Chester had noticed an improvement in the property right away when they’d been out there the other night for drinks and dinner. “The place looks grand, Lydia,” Ed had said, sipping his Manhattan. “Wonderful,” Jeanne had added. “I’ve never seen the flowers looking finer.”
    “I have a new man,” Mrs. Blessing had replied, and the two of them had nodded solemnly. Jeanne was the daughter of Mrs. Blessing’s old friend Jess, with whom she had played tennis on the grass courts out back for so many Tuesday and Thursday mornings, filling the hours of their long aimless young lives. But Jess was dead now, like nearly all of Mrs. Blessing’s friends, and her daughter had grown from a young girl into a middle-aged woman. She and Mrs. Blessing, once a generation apart, had somehow become contemporaries and secondhand friends of a sort. Still, Jeanne and Ed were always deferential.
    “Where did you find him?” Ed asked, cocking his head to one side.
    Nadine made a snorting noise as she passed around the cubed cheese and olives. Mrs. Blessing made Nadine stay late when she had dinner guests, although Nadine stubbornly refused to wear a uniform.
    “Nadine doesn’t countenance change,” Ed said, with that twinkle that Mrs. Blessing had always found so irritating.
    “Pick up like dog,” Nadine said. “No references, no nothing.”
    “That’s enough, Nadine,” Mrs. Blessing had said.
    Nadine did not like change, but, then, neither did Lydia Blessing. It had been many years since she had cared to travel outside of Mount Mason, more than thirty since she’d driven up Park Avenue, which had once been the Main Street of her life. She liked her routines now, her breakfast, her Times, her letters posted, a light lunch, a walk around the pond with her stick at her side, perhaps a surreptitious doze in one of the Adirondack chairs with a book facedown on her lap, an hour of talk shows on television, an hour of news, a bowl of soup, two drinks, and an early bed. She didn’t sleep most of the night. She rested for the day ahead and thought about the days behind. It was a puzzle to her, how eagerly she’d rushed into life when she was eighteen or twenty, and in what a desultory fashion it had dragged out ever since. Even when she had been younger, thirty, forty years before, when there had been long house parties at Blessings and games of golf and swimming at midnight and dinners for twelve—even then, the days were so long, and the years somehow so short.
    “Nadine,” she called, sipping at her coffee. “Nadine. Tell Charles not to prune the hydrangeas. Or the rhodies. Not until fall. Nadine?”
    She watched Nadine march across the drive, clenched fists at her side. “What a brave thing to do, hiring someone like that, Lydia,” Ed had said, but Mrs. Blessing knew people, and she had recognized in the young man holding jumper cables in the Wal-Mart parking lot that delicate balance between efficiency and