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Show 126 Jacob stepped forward; he clasped and unclasped his big hands. "It was Adam, wasn't it?" he said. "Oh yes," I said. Carlo was sitting at the table with Morgan; he was in dry clothes but still barefoot. I looked at him carefully to see how he took this news, but apparently it was news only to me. "I've known all along he was dead," Alice said. She picked up Adam's kettle and shook it to see if it was full; her face still showed nothing. "Would everybody like some tea?" Some of the sharpness had gone out of her since I'd last been home. She had been weathered down by life; those bitter edges were blurred. My father's girl was aging gracefully, as some women will who were not all that pretty to begin with. She was a little older than Jacob, nearly fifty years old now, I guessed, but for the first time I found her attractive. I had asked myself a hundred times why Alice, knowing Adam needed love but thinking my dad could have done better-he was a handsome man and could have had his pick. But now I saw that she could have had her pick as well, and it occurred to me to ask why Adam? I watched her move around the kitchen; she took down from a shelf five cups that Adam had made for us a long time ago, before I left home. There was something tentative about her motions, a certain grace, new to her, that comes from |