“Look,” Seth says, pointing at the map. I glance to see his finger tapping the page, but cannot discern what he is indicating. “We’re going right by Concord.”

“Uh-huh.” I check my side mirror, signal, and change lanes.

“We could go to Walden Pond,” he suggests.

“For that matter, we could go to Louisa May Alcott’s House.”

“I’m not too into Little Women,” he says.

“It’s an interesting phenomenon that a girl will read books about boys, but boys won’t read about girls.”

“Yeah, well, blame it on the latent misogyny of our society which begins at birth. Blame it on penis envy. Whatever. My ass ain’t reading Little Women.”

It is flippant remarks like these that make me wonder if he has managed to forget what occurred. We are not two buddies out on a road trip. I am his step-mother and his father, my husband, is dead.

“Right,” I say. “We can go if you want. It’ll be a nice break.”

“A break.” He has not forgotten.

I glance over again, a longer look this time. He looks like his father. Seth’s hair is longer and a little curlier than Owen’s was, but it is the same color. Their skin tones are the same, too: dark olive. Long eyelashes, green eyes, narrow nose. Seth and Owen. The greatest difference between them wrought by age. The twenty-six year difference straddled evenly by me: thirteen years younger than the father, thirteen years older than the son. A few years later and it could have been Seth walking into my women’s literature class, not Owen.

“Have you ever been?” Seth asks.

“What? To Walden? No.”

“What kind of an English teacher are you?” he chides.

“A women’s lit professor.” I add, “I have been to Louisa May Alcott’s house.”

“So you don’t need to go again.”

“I suppose not.”

"It’s the next exit," he tells me.

I slide into the right hand lane.

Seth taps his thumb on his knee. He looks over his shoulder, looks forward, then checks the back seat again. I know what he is looking at. I do not have to turn my head.

In the back seat, on the passenger’s side, there is a box. Made of cardboard, it is slightly larger than a shoe box. It is strapped down by the seat belt. It is black, matte. Inside there is a smaller box. This one is metal, also black. Shiny. The corners are rounded. It fastens with a lock. The keys to the lock are on strings. One string is tied around my wrist. The other is in Seth’s duffel bag, I think. Inside the metal box are Owen’s ashes.

That is what we are doing, my husband’s son and I. We are going up to Maine to scatter Owen’s ashes in Skowhegan Lake. Yes we, Seth and I, are going up to the lake house that belonged to Owen’s family (where he went as a child, where he brought his first wife, where I have never been) because all have agreed this must be what he had in mind when he wrote “in the right place” in his will. First wife, mother, brothers, sisters-in-law, they had a conference. They discussed. Or maybe they did not need to discuss. I wasn’t there. I wasn’t invited.

I, the second wife, had ideas of my own. The garden behind our brownstone where Owen and I worked together to grow basil, dill, and tomatoes. The cliffs above the Pacific where we danced to music playing through the windows of the rental car on our honeymoon. The steppes of Africa that he had never seen but we had planned to visit together. But what are my seventeen months compared to the accumulation of years that opposed me? I made no suggestions. I offered to drive.

I pull the car onto the dirt drive leading up to Walden Pond. Seth reads the yellow letters on a brown sign. “You have to pay?” he demands.

“It seems that way.”

“What cruel irony,” he says.

“You know what’s really ironic is that Thoreau went into town at least once a week. He hung out with Louisa May Alcott’s dad. His own mom did his laundry.”

“Did my dad tell you that? ‘Cause sometimes he made shit up.”

Seth speaks in the right tense. I still forget sometimes. Often.

“No,” I say. “My high school English teacher.”

“You remember that stuff?” He looks at me, or rather, towards me. He has a habit of looking at my feet or above my head. Owen said that he does that with most women and that he will grow out of it.

“I was the same way,” Owen told me one night. We were in the kitchen cleaning up after a dinner with Seth.

“You? I doubt it.”

“I wasn’t always the suave, sophisticated man you see before you. I had glasses; I wore braces. And like my son I had a fondness for classic literature. My author of choice was Dickens.”

“Dickens?” I asked. “Please, anyone but Dickens. He had the subtlety of a wrecking crane. Even Hemingway would be better.”

“I like Hemingway,” Owen said. He carefully dried out the wine glasses with a soft cloth.

“I bet you do,” I told him, my hands plunged into the sink.

“And I think you mean wrecking ball, not wrecking crane.”

“No,” I smiled. “I meant the crane that holds the ball.” I flung a splash of suds towards his face. He ducked and grinned back at me. “Wise ass,” I said.

At Walden Pond, I pull the car up to the guard gate and roll down the window. There is a young woman behind the glass, about Seth’s age. She smiles because he is handsome.

“‘There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted,’” Seth pronounces.

The girl looks from Seth to me.

Seth clears his throat. “Do you think the man who wrote those words intended his home to be turned into a tourist attraction, no better than Disney Land?”

“Um.”

“What’s transcendentalism going for these days?” he asks.

“There’s a student discount,” she offers.

“I’ll bet there is.” He jerks his thumb over his shoulder, towards me. “She’s a student, too. A student of life. We’re all students in the University of Life.”

“Um,” the girl says again. She bites her lip.

I should put a stop to this. That is my role. I am the adult.

“It’s okay,” I tell her. “I’m not a student.”

“She’s a teacher. Do you have a discount for teachers?”

“When they come with a group. I don’t know about when they just come. I can go ask.”

“That’s okay. One student and one adult.” I dig my wallet out of my bag and pay for us both.

I watch Seth’s back as we walk down the path. He walks just like his father, his back perfectly straight. That’s the first thing I noticed about Owen. He walked into my classroom with such grace we all turned our heads. The room full of nineteen year old women and me, we turned to watch him walk. He seemed to grin at each of us in turn before sliding into a seat in the second row. “I hope you all weren’t waiting for me,” he said.

A few weeks into the course, I held him after class.

“This is kind of exciting for me,” he said. “I never did anything to warrant being held after when I was a kid. Never was late, never got in a fight. Never got caught passing notes. Which is not to say I wasn’t writing notes, I was just sly enough to never get caught.”

“You write more succinctly than you speak,” I told him.

“Is that why you held me after? Because of the dissonance between my writing and speaking styles? I assure you I wrote my own paper. My son offered. He wanted to see how he would do in a college class. But I said no. I didn’t want to inadvertently encourage cheating. That’s not why you held me after is it?”

“I just wanted to know why you were taking this class.”

“To meet chicks,” he replied. He raised his eyebrow. It was a trick I knew well: goad the feminist into an argument.

“I see,” I said.

“No, seriously, my son, he kept complaining about all these books he had to read for school, and I realized that all of his examples were by women authors. When I pointed out that fact, he said it made as little sense to exclude great male writers because they were male as it did to exclude women for being female. Having grown up in the days of the Dead White Male, I figured I ought to read some of the authors for myself. And then we could really argue about it. Debate, I mean.”

“That’s a much better answer,” I told him.

“It’s an added benefit that I get to meet chicks, though, I have to admit. And on that note, you want to go get a drink or something? And don’t tell me that it wouldn’t be appropriate because you know I’m just auditing. I’m not getting a grade.”

“I’m still not sure it’s appropriate.”

“Come on,” he said. He put on his jacket. He walked towards the door then stopped. “Well, come on,” he repeated. I followed.

In the bar we sat at a booth towards the back. A Tiffany-style lamp hung above the table. “I lied earlier,” he said.

“About what?”

“About why I took the class.”

“So what’s the real reason?” I asked.

Owen rocked his glass from side to side. I watched the angle of his dark beer shift. “It did start with my son and his complaints. He left one of the books out on the coffee table and I thought, ‘You know, I should see how bad this stuff really is.’”

“What was it?” I asked, afraid it might be something like The Mill on the Floss.

“To the Light House. Virginia Woolf?”

I nodded.

“It gave me goose bumps, the way she put her words together. To be fair I can see why Seth didn’t like it; I can’t imagine many highschoolers would like it. It’s like when they made him read Hamlet in seventh grade. What seventh grader is going to like that? It took five live performances of comedies before he believed that Shakespeare was not the single most overrated individual in human history. A few months ago I finally took him to see Hamlet. It meant a lot more to him.”

I understood then what it meant for someone to be honey-tongued: his voice dripped over me, wrapped around me and covered me like smooth silk honey.

“I noticed there wasn’t any Woolf on your syllabus,” he said.

I shook my head to release myself from his stupor. “Woolf? I teach a seminar on her.”

“Really? I didn’t see it in the course book.”

“It’s offered alternate years. I’ll teach it next spring.”

“Consider me signed up.” He lifted his beer to his lips. He sipped then put the glass down. “Unless you’re offering private lessons?” He arched his eyebrows at me.

“I can’t tell if you’re trying to be funny, or trying to be slick and failing miserably.”

“Somewhere in between, most likely,” he said.

Seth walks on a path through Walden Woods. He steps carefully over tree roots. “This is where he walked,” Seth says. “Henry David Thoreau walked here.”

We continue on. From the woods around us I hear acorns falling and small animals rustling in the underbrush. These are not the sounds of the city. These are the sounds from my childhood in Vermont. It should feel like home, but it does not. I want to get into the car and drive straight back to New York. Nobody looks at you in the city. And if they do, if they see sadness, they know enough to look away. Here there is nothing to do but think. There are no city distractions to keep slow gloom from overtaking you.

We reach a clearing and find the foundation for Thoreau’s cottage. Seth walks the perimeter. “He slept here. He lived here. He lived.”

I tense. I do not know what to do. I should do something, though. When I picked him up from his mother’s house in New Jersey, I waited in the car while she embraced him, kissed both cheeks, ruffled his hair. But I am, of course, not his mother. I do not know how he feels about hugging. It is with relief that I watch him sidestep me and head for a pile of stones.

Most of the rocks are about the size of my fist or smaller. They have been left by Thoreau’s fans, like roses and candles on Jim Morrison’s grave, or on the Imagine circle for John Lennon in Central Park. I wonder who started the tradition and if people bring stones from home or pick them up along the path. Before I can ask Seth’s opinion, he bends over and picks one up.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to take those,” I say. “I mean, I think you’re supposed to add to the pile.”

Seth shrugs and tucks the stone into his pocket.

The first time I met Seth I said all the wrong things, too. Seth and Owen sat at the table in a restaurant waiting for me. Their heads were turned in towards each other and Owen laughed at something Seth said. I wanted to freeze them that way with the candle light shining up on their faces.

“So,” I said, after introductions had been made. “Here’s the boy that brought us together.”

Seth grimaced. “You teach women’s stuff right?”

“Women’s literature, yes. Which I hear you don’t think is too cool?”

Seth pressed the points of his fork into the white table cloth. “It’s cool enough,” he said. “I personally think it only serves to ghettoize women further, but whatever.”

I smiled the way you should never smile at a teenager, the way some of the tenured professors smiled at me. “What might you suggest instead?”

“America is supposed to be a meritocracy.”

I forgot he was sixteen. I rose to the bait. “Is it? Well, after dinner we can take a ride up to the South Bronx and you can explain that you go to a school like Regis because you deserve it whereas they are most assuredly not the victims of poverty, overcrowded schools, and the like. They could go to a ritzy private school, too, if they would only try harder.”

Seth frowned. Owen interrupted, “You know, New York Magazine said this restaurant has the finest collection of Italian wines in the city. I read the clipping while we were waiting for a table. It’s quite a coincidence because I love Italian wine. The French are amateurs compared to the Italians.”

I did not see Seth again until the wedding when he stood beside his father as his best man.

Seth walks away from the cottage foundation. “How did Thoreau die?” he asks.

“I don't know. He was young, in his mid-forties I think, that’s all I remember. We could ask.”

“It’s not important.”

“Sure it is,” I say.

Twigs crack under our feet. I search the underbrush for snakes. Seth looks at me over his shoulder, “I can see the water up here.”

A smattering of ducks swims along the mottled surface. Across the pond we see a group of children throwing pebbles into the water.

During my marriage to Owen, Seth came to visit every other weekend. I usually made myself scarce. I got Owen twenty-six days of the month; it seemed only fair to let his son have him for four. We ate dinner together some evenings. Seth told stories of his classmates, the stupid things they said in class, the jibes he and his friends made at them. He talked and talked, never giving Owen or myself a chance to interrupt.

Owen would rub his foot along my leg under the table.

“I know what you’re doing,” Seth said once. “Under the table, I know what you’re doing.”

“Oh,” I said and pulled my leg back under my chair.

“What’s that?” Owen asked.

“It doesn’t matter,” Seth said. “I don’t mind. Mom and her boyfriend hold hands and everything in front of me. I’m used to it.”

“Sometimes it’s nice to have little secrets, Seth,” Owen said.

“Sometimes it’s nice to have private moments in the midst of a crowd. When your mother and I first got together she used to draw a circle in my palm at parties and things. She would take her index finger and draw a little circle in my palm and it was her way of letting me know she loved me. It wasn’t that we couldn’t say it out loud. It was just nice to have a special thing.”

Owen rarely spoke to me of Seth’s mother. When he did, he seemed weary, not tender. I looked down at my plate and pushed a green bean closer to the chicken.

“Whatever, Dad,” Seth said.

Later I asked Owen about it. “Do you miss the little things like the circle in the palm?”

“Sure,” he said. “But I’ve missed them for about fifteen years now.” He pulled back the bed covers and sat on the edge of the bed.

I turned to the mirror and began to rub face cream into my skin. Beyond me in the reflection I could see Owen. He was bent over with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands.

I turned around and pushed him back on the bed. “Hey you,” I said as I leaned over him.

“Hey yourself,” he replied.

“Smile,” I told him.

He did as he was told and let a smile spread across his face. I put my finger on his lips and he kissed it. “That’s better,” I said.

Seth kicks a pine cone on the path. “Do you think it’s true that the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation?”

“Oh I don’t know,” I say. “I think that’s kind of an exaggeration.”

“How much of an exaggeration?”

I look at his profile. He could be him. Time is out of joint here. Owen died and came back as this child, younger than me now.

“I mean,” he goes on, “what percentage, would you say, of men lead lives of quiet desperation? And, Ms. Women’s Lit, by men I mean people in general.”

“I’m not sure. Fifty. No, that’s too high. Twenty-five. Maybe thirty.”

“Those aren’t good odds,” he says.

“It could be less. I don’t know.”

We stand next to each other, still yards from the shore.

“How do you know if you are? I mean, do you think most people know?” he asks.

“I think that was Thoreau’s point. They don’t. And maybe he thought he was, or he was afraid he was. So he came out here.” I spread my arms to indicate the pond.

“I think we should do it here.”

“Excuse me?” I step away from him.

“My father. Here.”

“I didn’t realize he liked Thoreau,” I say.

“He didn’t. He hated American Existentialism.”

“Then I’m afraid I don’t follow.”

Seth presses both hands through his hair, leaves them there for a moment. He drops his hand to his sides then falls to a squatting position. I stand behind him. I want to sit down and curl him into my lap, his head against my stomach, as though he were our baby. And because I’m holding him, it means we are not talking.

But we are talking. Seth squats at my feet and says what I hoped he wouldn’t but knew he would: “I know. I know what happened. You all did a good job of covering up the details, but I know. And if that’s the kind of life he was leading, and he was trying to get away from that, then maybe this is the place for him.”

I sit down on the ground next to him. I put my hand on his neck — the downy hairs there prickle against my skin — and squeeze. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m sure it was my mom’s idea not to tell me. And I can see how you wouldn’t want to go against that.”

“No,” I say. “I mean I’m sorry.”

Seth sighs and leans into me. I can see his face and the tears there. He did not cry at the funeral. At the wake, he stood at the head of the receiving line, next to his mother whose eyes were red. He did not speak. I stood at the other end of the line. Some guests skipped me all together. I told myself they did not know who I was. I knew they blamed me. I stared at Seth and tried to read his tearless eyes.

Now, at the water’s edge, he cries without a sound. I want him to scream and howl like I did. I want him to scratch at his arms, drawing blood, leaving marks. I want to tell him that he has to do these things, that he has to press everything out.

“Okay,” I say. “Okay, that’s a good idea.”

“I’ll go get it. Him.”

“Okay.”

Seth jumps up, trots off. I watch his back muscles through his tee-shirt. So young. It makes me feel so old. A widow at thirty.

I turn to the water. The ducks have noticed the children and swim towards them expecting bread. Instead they are nearly pelted by the stones. The children laugh. I rise. “Hey!” I yell. The ducks turn and swim back to me. “Hey!” I yell again. The kids don’t hear me, I don’t think, but they disperse all the same, still laughing.

Seth returns, hugging the inner box to his chest. The metal catches the sun and reflects up so I can’t see his face. Where his eyes, nose, lips should be there is just a patch of white.

“Seth!” I cry.

He stops. “What?” He lowers the box and his face appears.

"It’s nothing. Just — nothing.”

He keeps walking towards me.

“So,” he says. “I guess we just. I don’t know.”

I pull the string at my wrist. I’ve tied it tightly and I have to struggle to get it over my hand. My skin turns white then red. Seth watches me. He holds out the box. I reach out with the key. It clinks against the lock. I giggle. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t really know what I’m doing here.”

“I know, but…”

I shake my head.

The box still locked, I hold Seth by the wrist and pull him to the shore. I take the box from him and place it on a moss-encrusted boulder. With the key gripped between my fingers, squeezing it so its impression is left in my fingers, I unlock the box. Seth steps closer to me. I can hear his breathing, uneven.

“So,” I begin. “Do we just dump it?”

“I don’t think so.”

“I don’t think I can touch them. Him. The ashes.”

“No,” he says. “I suppose not.”

I pull my hands away from the box and press my palms into my temples.

“We’re too young for this,” I say.

“I don’t think you’re ever old enough.” He has stopped crying now, but his eyes are still blood-shot and smudged. “It’s like, with a normal funeral, you have it when you have to have it, and then it’s over and you get on with things. But with this, here, we have to make the choice. We have to say when it’s over. And I feel like I should wait until I’m ready. Only I have no idea when that will be. And as long as we’re holding onto them, I might not ever be.”

I flip open the box and there they are, the ashes. Eyes closed, I dip my hands into the box. I expect them to be hot, still burning, but they are cool, smooth. They pass through my fingers like silt. Seth reaches around me and takes a handful of his own. I open my eyes. The water appears to be covered with thousands of grey and black rose petals.

Seth begins to speak in a tone as low as his father’s voice. His voice is so quiet I can barely make out the words. I think he is praying and then I realize he is reciting Thoreau, garbling passages together: “The grand necessity, then, for our bodies is to keep warm, to keep the vital heat in us. The better part of man is soon plowed over for compost and everywhere, the inhabitants have appeared to me to be doing penance in a thousand remarkable ways. I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately. Still, we live meanly, like ants. I wanted to live deep and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

I take both of his hands in mine. I want to promise him, I want to say, “That won’t happen to us.” But Owen won’t let me. Because there he was, living deeply, sucking the marrow out of life, and that was not enough. I was not enough. Seth was not enough.

Seth pulls his hands away from mine. “I guess we’re done then,” he says. He stands up and looks down at me.

“I guess so,” I reply.

He bends over to take my hand. He tugs me to my feet.

My eyes burn. “You know,” I say. “If we’re not going to Maine, we probably have time to go to Louisa May Alcott’s house or something.”

“I think I should read the book first,” he says.

I wipe my wrist across my eyes. “Sure.”

“Maybe next summer.”

“Right,” I say. I link my arm through his and we walk back to the car. “Next summer.”