Summary

Lucinda Burns makes accommodations at home so that when her husband, Zeke, returns from the rehab center after having a stroke, he will have everything he needs. She finds it difficult to prepare emotionally for her husband's new, diminished physical condition due to the stroke. Lucinda cannot help but think of caring for her son, Malachy, when he was toward the end of his life and she begins to understand why he had opted to take his own life. He had AIDS and felt there was no hope. Lucinda mourned Malachy and still does, in spite of her husband's efforts to relieve her suffering, even taking her on a trip to Italy which he had hoped would revive her spirits but did not.

Lucinda has received a phone message from someone named Jasper Noonan and, hopeful that it might...