Beatrice came back from camp with braids all over her head and wristbands made for her by new friends. She had a bag of embroidery thread and was busy designing us all anklets and bracelets. She’d canoed, been white-water rafting, had campouts with ghost stories, hiked a mountain, seen rattlesnakes and water moccasins, and started to say “y’all.” She was taller and tanned. She said it was the best time she’d ever had.

“I was practically the only Yankee there,” she said.

“Did they actually call you that?” asked Thomas. “Yankee?”

“Yeah. There was just me and a girl from New York City.”

“I hope you did us proud,” said Thomas.

“They got me to say the word water over and over. And they’d all repeat it, ‘Wudder, wudder.’”

“Yep, you definitely showed them what we’re made of,” said Thomas.

“That’s totally a Philadelphia thing, the way we say it,” I said. Sage had told me a thousand times it was a word we’d destroyed.

Ellen came back from the Gambinos’ and art camp saying that if she never saw ravioli, cannoli, panna cotta, or prosciutto again, it would be too soon.

“Stop bragging,” said Thomas. We salivated at her descriptions of what they ate. Gabriel had taught her how to make tiramisu, soaking the ladyfingers in coffee and amaretto, making the mascarpone mixture, finishing it with chocolate shavings using a potato peeler. She and Gabriel had made us potpourri. We each got a sachet. Ellen said he used rose petals, lavender, orange peel, mint, sweet woodruff, and rose oil.

Ellen had gotten attention at art camp. One of the teachers there taught in a private school in Maryland that had one of the best art departments on the East Coast. The teacher had spoken to the school, and a week or two after Ellen came home, they called my mother, offering Ellen a full scholarship. It never occurred to me that she would actually go.

In the mornings the rest of that summer after Mom had gone to the hospital, Thomas and I listened to the radio in the kitchen before Beatrice or Ellen woke up. The royal wedding was at the end of July, and it seemed every station had nothing else to talk about. In the days after the wedding, three hunger strikers died in Northern Ireland. I listened to the radio and thought how much it would have upset Dad that there was more talk about Princess Diana’s wedding dress than there was about the three young men who died.