Galisteo Street

"I have a granddaughter," Perry told his wife. He waited a moment for the shock to set in. A twitching smile appeared on Sunny's face, then disappeared completely when she saw he wasn't kidding.

"You'll excuse me if I faint now," Sunny said.

"You go first."

She went over to the front window of their house. Outside it was raining; it had been for seventeen straight days. This was Oregon after all, and though he was used to it by now-twenty-three years teaching writing at the college-he would every so often want to run amuck into the streets and scream Turn it off! Turn it off, for God's sake!

"Who told you?" Sunny asked. "Did she call?"

Perry shook his head. "Of course not. Lydia would never call. I heard through Tom. I think we should go down there and see the baby."

Sunny turned to face him. Her hair was turning gray, as gray as the rain outside; she'd stopped coloring it. They would both be fifty-five next month. "You're going to get hurt over this."

"I'm no stranger to rejection," he said, and laughed grimly. It had been ten years since his last book. The gap between success and being forgotten had widened with thoroughbred speed, and people had stopped asking about a new book.

Sunny sat down on the seat of their bay window that looked out toward the river. He bicycled to class every day along the path. He'd started teaching half time last year-transitional retirement-and had filled his days with reading, chopping wood, and yoga classes, trying to be a good and contented man. It was the slow and considered life, mundanely consecrated, finding his way by small ordinary means-building a rock wall out back, tending his tomato plants-to let go of the very thing that had driven him for years, his writing and all its manic glory (or failure). The cycle of exhilaration and despair, of inflation and deflation, of ambition and resignation was over. What he thought he could never give up had been let go with more ease than he imagined possible. He would die neither defeated nor miserable, just with his wings voluntarily clipped. He and Sunny never spoke about it anymore, like an old affair that had long ago been settled.

"So will you come with me?"

"We're just supposed to show up?" Sunny asked

"I'm sending her a letter by way of Tom. He said he'd help. He'll talk to her."

Perry sat down next to her on the window seat. He'd been standing for hours, it seemed, waiting for her to come through the door from her job at the library so he could tell her. She was retiring next year after twenty-five years of service, and they planned to travel more, visit their just-married son, Jonathan, and his wife in Seattle. And see their daughter, Alison, at Oberlin College, where she was a junior studying music, always busy busy busy. They'd go to Greece, some place he'd never been, and Africa. Travel could fill so many empty holes.

"I just wonder if you're trying to get something from her."

"Like a visit to my flesh and blood?" And as soon as he said it he knew it was the wrong choice of words. He could see Sunny wince. A sensitive point as it always had been-this aspect of his life set in motion before they'd met, his having a child at twenty-three. "I wouldn't write about any of this, if that's what you're thinking."

"It never crossed my mind," Sunny said. "Unfortunately."

He'd written a memoir about his year-long affair with Marilyn, the only child of a famous writer. He'd published it just before she died of kidney failure from years of drinking and not taking care of herself, and one reviewer had gone so far as to say Perry Klein with his "kiss and tell bore of a long-faded adventure" (he memorized...