The dog arose with a grunt and staggered down the porch stairs, pausing only long enough to favor Laura Stanton with a reproachful gaze.

‘He can’t help it,’ Eden said. She sighed, looking up the road after the Ford. ‘It’s too bad,’ she said. ‘They seem like such nice people.’

‘Nor can we help that,’ Henry Eden said, and began to roll another smoke.

So the Grahams ended up eating dinner at a clam-stand after all. They found one in the neighboring town of Woolwich (‘Home of the scenic Wonderview Motel,’ John pointed out to Elise in a vain effort to raise a smile) and sat at a picnic table under an old, overspreading blue spruce. The clam-stand was in sharp, almost jarring contrast to the buildings on Willow’s Main Street. The parking lot was nearly full (most of the cars, like theirs, had out-of-state licence plates), and yelling kids with ice cream on their faces chased after one another while their parents strolled about, slapped blackflies, and waited for their numbers to be announced over the loudspeaker. The stand had a fairly wide menu. In fact, John thought, you could have just about anything you wanted, as long as it wasn’t too big to fit in a deep-fat fryer.

‘I don’t know if I can spend two days in that town, let alone two months,’ Elise said. ‘The bloom is off the rose for this mother’s daughter, Johnny.’

‘It was a joke, that’s all. The kind the natives like to play on the tourists. They just went too far with it. They’re probably kicking themselves for that right now.’

‘They looked serious,’ she said. ‘How am I supposed to go back there and face that old man after that?’

‘I wouldn’t worry about it – judging from his cigarettes, he’s reached the stage of life where he’s meeting everyone for the first time. Even his oldest friends.’

Elise tried to control the twitching corners of her mouth, then gave up and burst out laughing.