In Exton we passed the Guernsey Cow, famous for the gigantic billboard that was supposed to be the largest cow sign in the world. We’d been there before. You could get your homemade ice cream in a cone and then walk through the barns where they milked the cows. We’d all watched as the tubes attached to the cows’ teats flowed white with milk. I concentrated on their faces, the bored, impassive expressions looking back at me, then wondered aloud whether it hurt and cringed when my mother answered that it felt beautiful to breastfeed. We’d all looked away or at the ground. Marie said our mother liked having babies, the first part, giving birth and stuff and being embarrassing about it, but not the other part, like raising them.

I looked out across the cornfields as we drove farther west, pastures and acres of wheat starting to brighten to gold. I was trying to push what Sage had done out of my mind. If Grady had said nothing so far, he probably wasn’t going to. But she’d told. The fields outside were patterned and neat, the wheat spikes, farmyards, and silos illuminated by the setting sun. We saw Amish buggies and clothes tacked to lines like paintings: blues, blacks, purples, and grays. Marie and Thomas argued about whether the closed carriage meant they were married or not married.

“Do Amish horses get married?” Beatrice asked, and we all burst into laughter.

“The couple in the buggy, you idiot!” Ellen shouted. Beatrice laughed too. My mother laughed so hard, she struggled to see the road. The sun shone gold on Ellen’s face, and it hit me that she’d hardly left the house this summer. She was afraid.

“I hope we sit with a family that has kids,” said Ellen. “We never get a table where there are other kids. It’s always retired old people.”

“I’ve told you before,” said Thomas, “this is a creepy world without children.”

“Well, they let us in,” said Beatrice from the back of the car.

Marie was sitting in the front. The dinner wasn’t just for her birthday, it was because she was leaving. She was moving in with Rae the following morning and starting her job. I’d thought my mother might resist a little, or tell Marie she wasn’t allowed to go work in some punk record store in the city. I wanted her to do those things, but instead she acted as if this was the most natural thing in the world for Marie to do.

We drove past barns with stars and hexes, Pennsylvania Dutch folk art. Many of the designs had tulips and trees. We laughed at the place names along the route: Paradise, Intercourse, Fertility, Bird-in-Hand. We passed two boys on scooter bikes. They looked like regular bicycles but with no pedals.