Gail looks out of her window and sees someone labouring towards the house. ‘Max, for God’s sake’, she thinks. Once they were a pair of young teachers intending to ‘grow old side by side’. They have been divorced for twenty years, but are reunited on the occasion of their daughter’s wedding in Baltimore for – as the title of Anne Tyler’s sprightly new novel states – three days in June. The causes of their estrangement are as evident as ever. When they set out on walks together, Max suggests they ‘just wander any old which way’. Gail doesn’t think so. Max seeks the most bizarre combination of items on a restaurant menu, while Gail looks for dishes familiar from childhood. Max believes in cutting people some slack; Gail tells him it’s not that simple. But as time passes, Gail begins to remember ‘how cozy it felt sometimes, hanging out with Max’.

The day before her wedding, Gail and Max’s daughter comes to them with doubts about her fiancé and reveals that she does not know why her parents divorced. Not only did Gail and Max never discuss the separation with their child; they never discussed it with each other either. And, as we see in the novel’s most delicate and artful passages, Gail has never discussed it with herself. Silence became ‘something I could almost touch, like a curtain’. Not talking is sometimes blissful and sometimes crushing. She is torn between wanting peace and wanting perfection, between staying at home and seeking a better life. Now, at sixty-one, an age at which ‘some days your face will be netted with wrinkles and other days almost smooth’, she feels ‘not too old, as you might expect, but too young, too inept, too uninformed’. ‘Why’, she asks, ‘did everyone just assume I knew what I was doing?’

Soon after introducing herself to us, Gail defensively concedes, ‘I’m a worrier; I admit it. I’m always jumping to the worst-case scenario.’ Max proves no salve. She storms out the house after he responds to the news that she was passed over for promotion by suggesting she open a greengrocer’s.