LATE AUGUST BROUGHT with it a longing for fall. By the end of the month the grass was brown, singed by days of heat and no rain. Mirella’s impatiens, usually a bright pink and red mound on either side of the back doorstep, were small and lackluster. The air smelled strangely of basalt and car exhaust, and of marine life flung up on the beaches by the tide and cooked by the sun.

The only one made happy by these endless clear days was Pearl.

“Mama,” she said, when they had arrived at the first week of September. “Mama, will you hire me to take care of Jacob?”

“Oh honey,” said Mirella. “If only I could.”

“I don’t want anyone else,” said Pearl crossly.

Mirella reached up from where she was pulling weeds in a flower bed to touch Pearl’s cheek, but Pearl moved away. A honeysuckle vine was strangling the azaleas, twining all over the fence and into the Applewhites’ rosebushes next door. Mirella began tearing it away, stuffing the vine into the cardboard box of weeds beside her.

Already she was finding it hard to remember that Randi had ever been with them, that she had ever slept in the antique spool bed in the attic, had ever roasted chickens in the oven, hooked pot holders, organized the closets, had ever held Jacob. She was gone, her room swept, vacuumed, and dusted by the Puerto Rican cleaning service.

They had heard from her once. A postcard arrived three weeks ago, picturing a red race car and a shot of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. “Greetings from the Crossroads of America” was written in black letters across the top. The postcard was addressed to Jacob and read simply: “It’s been sunny every day. The neighbors have a cute kitten. My little brother loves trucks. You would like it here.” Howard had insisted on reading the card to Jacob. Mirella would have thrown it away.

She sat back on her heels and watched Pearl drift around the garden, peering into the windows of Howard’s studio, tearing leaves off the lilac bushes, snapping twigs. Tomorrow Pearl would start kindergarten at New Aylesbury Elementary School. Yesterday she and Mirella had gone to Wal-Mart to purchase a purple plastic lunch box and a red umbrella with a handle shaped like a duck’s head.

In a week Jacob would begin at the Rainbow Center in Salem, which Dr. Michaels had recommended.

Howard said it looked like a nice place, friendly staff, lots of blocks, a computer for the children with enough coordination to use it. Whenever Mirella thought about the Rainbow Center, she pictured Jacob sitting in the fireplace inside one of his nests.

Upstairs in their bedroom, Howard was lying down, watching a show about renovating old houses. All morning he had been in the garden with her, working silently but companionably, trimming hedges, mowing the grass. Now he deserved a little rest. Howard had bought a color TV set, which he placed on the dresser. Every evening the four of them gathered in the bedroom to watch television shows, even Jacob, although he would not sit on the bed. They watched almost anything, but everyone seemed to like nature shows best. Howard said they should consider getting cable.

Pearl finished touring the garden. She lay down on the newly cut grass a few yards from Mirella, then sat up, bouncing her feet up and down. Bits of grass clung to the soles of her feet. Mirella smiled at her, then together, mother and daughter gazed up at the small hard green apples in the apple tree and at the tepee underneath, breathing in the curiously congested air. The tepee was partly collapsed. Jacob had been caught one day throwing rocks at it.

When Mirella last checked on him, Jacob was lying inside on the kitchen floor with his wooden trucks and cars. He was there most of the time these days, sitting under the table, lining up his vehicles. Howard had bought him more trucks for his birthday, and also a fleet of fifty shiny metal Matchbox cars in bright colors. Jacob liked to arrange the cars chromatically. Then he would lie down on the floor with his eyes close to the lines of cars. Perhaps he was imagining them in motion, rushing down the highway. Sometimes he would lie there for hours.

“Let him be,” Howard told Mirella.

Mirella’s mother had been coming up every other day, driving herself back and forth from Beacon Hill, although she complained that she wasn’t seeing as well as she used to. Twice she’d brought Mirella’s father along, whom she parked in the living room. Pearl liked to sit on his lap and roll the wheelchair into the hall. Last week, Mrs. Applewhite had told Howard that she and Mr. Applewhite were thinking of selling their house and living year-round in Florida. “Aha,” said Mirella’s mother at this news.

“Can I at least have something?” demanded Pearl now, flopping across the grass to lie beside Mirella at the flower bed. Then she jumped up and headed for the fence to gaze at the Pilkeys’ glittering blue pool.

Mirella reached out to pull a clump of dandelions. Shaking the dirt from the roots, she thought of her mother’s wedding admonition about not expecting too much, which she felt she at last fully understood. It had been a solid piece of advice, unromantic but shrewd. She tossed the dandelions into the box beside her. With so much wanting came all the promise and damage of the world.

Soon it would be time for lunch. She would go into the kitchen and say Jacob’s name. She would tell him that they were having soup for lunch, crackers, sliced cucumbers. While she opened a can of soup and got out the crackers, she would hear him breathing under the table, encircled by his gleaming automobiles. If she were lucky, if this was a good day, his face might appear above the table edge, a raw-looking patch under his nostrils.

He didn’t look unhappy. He looked to be waiting, his expression withheld. At certain moments she would stare at him and remember kneeling in the rainy garden in her wet nightgown, the grass slick under her knees. Then she would stop before she pictured the rest. Perhaps today he would sit on a chair at the table for lunch and let her sit down with him. Or maybe not. Maybe not today.

She reached through the Applewhites’ picket fence and picked a rose to give to Pearl, who had returned from envious contemplation of the Pilkeys’ pool. Pearl stuck the rose behind her ear, then leaped barefoot around the garden in her shorts and T-shirt, doing arabesques. In a clear, unmelodious voice, she sang: “Shall we dance? Te-dum-dum-dum. On a bright cloud of music, shall we fly?” Mirella stood up slowly, aware of the ache low in her abdomen and how it pressed all the way into her back. Cautiously she put her hands on her hips and arched her spine, hearing her joints crack.

At two o’clock this afternoon, Vassbacher was coming to see her to discuss his appeal. He seemed to prefer visiting her at home to meeting at the office. Ruth said she was being unprofessional, but Mirella decided that his visits were productive and perhaps even therapeutic. She made him tea; last week she put some cookies on a plate. Not only had Vassbacher’s wife received custody of their daughters last month, she had convinced the judge to order Vassbacher to undergo parental counseling. At present, he was not allowed to see his daughters except in the presence of his counselor. The odds weren’t in his favor, but Mirella knew he had no choice but to appeal. “We’ll take it one step at a time,” she told him. Vassbacher would sit at her dining room table, smelling of unwashed flannel and motel soap, heavy and defeated and yet reassuring, in the way that people whose luck is worse than your own are always reassuring. Or if not exactly reassuring—because luck, of course, can change—then fortifying. After all, he hadn’t subsided; he was still there. Together they would fashion his argument.

Then at three-thirty, an applicant from the Homelife Agency would be arriving for an interview. The agency, recommended by a friend of Blanche Pilkey’s, specialized in what it referred to as “mature women.” Old bags, Mirella’s mother said approvingly.

Richard and Vivvy’s oldest daughter, Hannah, was another possibility; she wanted to take a year off from college (“Identity crisis,” Richard had said on the phone) and might be interested in being an au pair. Lately Mirella and Howard had also been talking about moving back to Boston, to end Mirella’s commute. Yesterday Howard mentioned that his co-housing clients were looking into converting an old paper mill on the river in Watertown. “The idea has merit,” he said speculatively; whether he was talking about co-housing in general or the old mill in Watertown, she wasn’t sure.

She looked up at the house to see the curtains in her bedroom window belling in and out. Above the roof, a few leaves on the maple trees had already turned red.

“I could do it,” said Pearl, who had finished her dance and come to lean against the apple tree. She kicked at the bark with her bare heel. “I could take care of Jacob.”

“You could,” Mirella agreed.

“Then why won’t you let me?”

Mirella closed her eyes, then opened them again to find Pearl standing close beside her. Pearl’s hair was in her face; she was wearing a yellow T-shirt that had several reddish-colored stains. It could be spaghetti sauce. Recently Pearl had started helping Howard cook dinner. But she did not seem unkempt; she looked instead preoccupied, like a person who has given herself over to a day of household tasks—unpacking after a long trip, or rearranging furniture. Mirella studied her daughter carefully, noting that her nose might be just on the point of declaring itself, and that it might be declaring itself to be Howard’s long nose, and that in the last few months Pearl’s mouth had acquired a determined set that reminded Mirella strongly of her mother’s mouth. There was even a hint of Richard in the slant of her dark brown eyes. How strange, she thought, to gaze into the face of your child and see other faces, other histories, beginnings that were not yours. And above all, to see the face of a person who was herself, unto herself. A person who would not be with you for very much longer, because she had plans of her own.

Indeed an instant later Pearl seemed to forget about being hired to care for her brother and instead wanted to know if she and Aparna could make jelly sandwiches for lunch. They would drink milk, Pearl promised. They would make Jacob drink milk, too. Maybe after lunch they could pop popcorn in the microwave. Daddy had rented a movie, Little Women. Aparna had seen it twice.

Looking into Pearl’s intent face as Pearl discussed lunch and Little Women, eyes bright, strands of dark hair sticking to her cheek, Mirella wondered if what she herself had been forgetting all this time, for years and years, was that none of this would last very long, that all of this, the terrible, desirable, exhausting plenitude of her life—the children, Howard, this house, her job—all of her worries and failures and abilities and cares, all of it mattered so dearly, but so briefly, and that it was all in a way nearly over, even the parts of her life that were still to come.

It was at that moment, as she stood bending over Pearl, that Mirella for the first time felt the rough stuff of existence pass under her fingertips like a bolt of sand. Bargains, mistakes, gambles—the life she had made, guided by hurry, guided by hope, counting on other chances for every chance she took.

“I will cut off the crusts,” swore Pearl, grumpily pushing her away. “I’ll even cut the corners off. I can do it myself. I’ll do even more than you.”

“Yes,” said Mirella, straightening. “But maybe I can still help.”

As Pearl skipped off toward the house, Mirella closed her eyes once more, letting the hot, grass-scented breeze brush against her face. Then she laid her hands on her belly, spreading her fingers wide. And after a little while it seemed that the warmth of her spread hands calmed the precariousness within her, at least for the moment. At least for a moment, everything felt bearable.