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Show Woodworth/151 to her. She looks up at her, startled. Forgot she was at a party. Have they been looking? "I put them in the downstairs bedroom," Kathy interjects, emerging from the house with a tray of hors d'ouvres. "Did you want to swim now? There's plenty of time before dinner." "Oh, no. That's ok," Ruth mumbles. She notices that Ned is watching her from his chair. Their eyes meet, and he looks down immediately, taking a swallow from his drink. She climbs out of the pool, leaving her shoes, and taking the drink from Grayson. "Well," Grayson says as they settle into chairs, "I feel like I haven't seen you all summer, What've you been up to?" "It's been pretty quiet," Ned says. "We haven't gone out much and, except for one weekend when I went up to look after the boats, we haven't been to Nantucket al all." "I bet it's odd, now that you don't have any children living at home," Kathy says. She looks sympathetically at Ruth. "It's hard for me," Ned comments. "Suddenly the house seems so empty. After Megan moved out, it was quiet, but it didn't seem so bad because' I knew that Marty would be home in a couple of months. But now"she's moved, it's like they are all adults." "Really," Kathy says. "When the kids first went away, I kept wandering around the house all morning, worrying that they wouldn't make the bus, that they wouldn't make their beds, that something wouldn't get done right. It took me about six months to realize that they weren't even in the house." The Grayson's children, both girls, had gone to boarding school in Connecticut, and had gotten married right after college. They were older, but only a year or so older than Jake would have been. Imagine Jake married. "I used to hate to go into their rooms because they |