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and I returned from work to find Bob and Karel missing. Having read
Huckleberry Finn
, she remarked that Bob had “lit out for the territory” with Karel. I don’t want to overstate the ghastly nature of our response, as we were both crying—though whether at the loss of Karel or at the feeling that we deserved to lose him and Bob deserved to have him, I couldn’t say. When I attempted to cheer Monika up by saying that when life gives you lemons you must make lemonade, she slapped my face. I almost fought back, and you can only imagine how that would have seemed under the circumstances.
    Instead, I called the police in town. Monika called Olatunde in Yugoslavia and put me on the phone. “You tell him.”
    “Good morning, Doctor. It’s afternoon there already? Well, I have news, well, not news exactly. One of our neighbors here has … kidnapped Karel.” Dr. Olatunde was understandably slow in absorbing this announcement but not in any other way,and it fell to me to pick him up at the airport a day and a half later.
    These were terrible hours. Monika stayed home as we awaited word from the police, her drawings laid out on the kitchen table. She showered me with reproaches, the recurrent one being that Karel would never have “slipped through her hand” if I hadn’t chased the babysitter away with my ogling. Pointing at the drawings, I said, “I see the loggia stays.”
    “Yes, and a pergola.”
    “I hadn’t noticed.”
    “There are none so blind as those who will not see.”
    I met Dr. Olatunde at the baggage claim though he had only a carry-on. He was the sole African among all the skiers, and he drew a bit of attention to himself for that and for the suit he wore, a nice English cut, rumpled from the long trip. He was not at all the big Mandingo glutton I had pictured but a small, precise man with a slightly receding hairline and a friendly but crisp manner. He said, “You were kind to come for me.”
    “You must be tired.”
    “Not so bad, really.”
    “Well, I have marvelous news for you. Karel has been found.”
    “Is that so?”
    “I hope you don’t feel the trip was wasted.”
    “Nothing could compare to this. Is he well?”
    Bob and Karel had not gone far, at least not far enough to give plausibility to a charge of kidnapping. They were in the first motel on the way into town. Their loud music had given them away. Bob was belligerent about what he described as thehostile atmosphere of our home, and we felt that by pressing charges we would only bring his version into the public eye. Karel responded to his father, whom he could hardly have been expected to remember, much as he responded to Bob: he was always drawn to someone who looked straight at him as though making a delightful discovery. I spell this out because it was against all odds that we allowed Bob to come back again and let ourselves be compensated by Karel’s squeals of delight. More and more, he stays over at Bob’s anyway, which Monika and I hope will give us some room to work things out.

My grandmother lost her sight about three years ago, just before she turned ninety, and because it happened gradually, and in the context of so much other debility, she adapted very well. Grandma’s love of the outdoors combined with her remarkable lucidity and optimism to keep her cheerful and realistic. And she could get on my ass about as good as she ever could. She was now greatly invested in her sense of smell, so I tried to put fresh flowers around her house, while Mrs. Devlin, her housekeeper of forty-one years, kept other things in the cottage fresh, including the flow of gossip and the newspaper under Chickie, a thirty-year-old blue-fronted parrot that had bitten me several times. When Grandma goes, Chickie is going into the disposal.
    Grandma did a remarkable job of living in the present, something I’d hoped to learn from her before going broke or even crazier than I already was. I’d been away for over a decade, first as a