Jessica Packard lifted her head and followed the retreating figure, her eyes resting nearly closed on the unself-conscious rise and fall of the rounded hips. For a moment she held her face to the empty doorway; then she snorted and groped for her fork.

There's no greater catastrophe in the universe, she reflected dourly, impaling tender green beans on the silver fork, than the dwindling away of a family. Procreation, expansion, proliferation -- these are the laws of living things, with the penalty for not obeying them the ultimate in punishments: oblivion. When the fate of the individual is visited on the group, then (the warm sweet butter dripped from her raised trembling fork and she pushed her head forward belligerently), ah, then the true bitterness of existence could be tasted. And indeed the young garden beans were brackish in her mouth.

She was the last living of the older generation. What had once been a widespread family -- at one time, she knew, there were enough Packards to populate an entire county -- had now narrowed down to the two boys, Abel and Mark. She swung her eyes up to the blue of the window, her jaws gently mashing the bitter beans. What hope lay in the nephews, she asked the intensifying light out there, with one married to a barren woman and the other divorced, having sired two girl children, with none to bear on the Packard name?

She ate. It seemed to her, as it seemed each night, that the gloom drew itself in and became densest at the table's empty chairs, giving her the frequent illusion that she dined with shadows. Here, too, she talked low, quirking her head at one or another of the places, most often at Izaak's armchair which faced her across the long table. Or it might have been the absent nephews she addressed, consciously playing with the notion that this was one of the summers of their early years.