“Ellen’s going to art camp!” Beatrice shouted when I came in.

“Really?” I asked, looking at Ellen and then at my mother.

Ellen never got overly excited about anything, but she was brimming with happiness. “Mom signed me up. I have to stay with the Gambinos for the two weeks so I can walk back and forth each day.” She eye-rolled on “Gambinos” but couldn’t disguise her pleasure. I crossed myself as a joke. The Gambinos were the most Catholic family we knew. Their son Gabriel, who was my age, wanted to become a priest. After the Gambinos visited us, Marie and Thomas would go around the house lifting their hands and talking like Vito Corleone from The Godfather. Lorenzo and Sofia Gambino had come from Italy on the boat. They were older than my parents, but Dad had worked with Lorenzo in construction when he first came to America. Sofia worked in a soup factory.

“God, two weeks with Gabriel Gambino sounds like punishment,” I said. Gabriel was strange. He wore suits around the house, with his shirt buttoned up to the top, and he did everything with his mother. I’d never seen him in colorful clothes, always black and white. Even though his father was a laborer like ours, Gabriel had always looked at us as if we were feral beasts. He was immaculate.

“Don’t be smart, Libby,” my mother said. “They’re doing us a favor.”

“And guess what?” said Beatrice. “I’m going to a sleepover camp for two weeks.”

“What camp? Where?” Beatrice had never been away from home before, and she had never been to a camp, never mind a sleepover one.

“It’s in North Carolina. In the mountains, where you sleep in a cabin. It’s a really good one, and Mom’s coming down there too. She’ll see me on Sundays.”

“They take moms at the camp?”

“Noooo.” Beatrice laughed at me. “She’ll stay nearby.”

“Camp Arrowhead,” said Mom. “In the Blue Ridge Mountains, not far from Asheville.”

“Isn’t seven young?”

“They take campers from six. Beatrice will be absolutely fine.”

“What about us?”

“You and Thomas are going to be here on your own, unless you can stay with Sage?” She said it like a half question: Can you ask the Adamses, because you know I can’t?

“No, I can’t stay with Sage. She’s working. I’ll stay here with Thomas.” It annoyed me that she was throwing it back on me to ask. “Where are you going to be?”

“Nearby.”

“Where nearby?”

“Asheville.”

“But where exactly? A motel? Log cabin? Pig farm?”

“There’s a place that’s not far.”