We set off down the trail toward the stop just after nine. Ellen was wearing a white short-sleeved top that Sage had given to me. “Broderie anglaise,” she’d said, a fabric Charlotte loved, with cut-out patterns and eyelets. It was the first time Ellen had shown her arms since that night. There were still raw spots, flat pink areas of new skin, but she had healed. Beatrice was wearing a pair of Ellen’s shorts and a striped T-shirt. Her hair was pulled back in a braid, and her pocketbook had a strap that went over her shoulder and across her chest. She held it with both hands anyway. As we walked down the trail, Beatrice chatted about the Fourth of July parade that was coming up and how she wanted to decorate her bike. Ellen was quiet while Beatrice talked about getting crêpe paper and streamers.

“We’ll do something better than that,” Ellen said eventually. “Let’s try to make something completely different. Something good.”

There was still a week to go, enough time to pull an idea together. Beatrice was our last chance. By next year even she wouldn’t want to do it. Every Fourth of July, a fire engine led a procession of kids on decorated bikes around the mountain. There was a competition for best bike. Last year a girl dressed in a sequined red, white, and blue leotard, nude stockings, and white cowgirl boots on a bike with training wheels had won. Every few hundred yards she’d hopped off her bike, smiled and spun her baton and done cartwheels. Marie had said it was disturbing for a group of middle-aged men to award highest points to a little girl made up and dressed like she was in a Junior Miss beauty pageant in Texas or some place and call her “cute.”

Along the trail the early sun broke through in flecked light, the saplings, weeds, and wildflowers luminous green and almost as tall as us. The trail narrowed as we neared the bottling factory, and even from the ridge, high above the gorge, I could smell the locust.

As we came back out of the woods and started down the hill to the main road, a motorcycle passed. Wilson. And behind him a passenger holding a pair of white waitressing shoes in her right hand, blond hair blowing from beneath the helmet. Ellen was waving absurdly and started running after them. I shouted at her to stop.

“What?” she said.

“We have to stay with Beatrice. I don’t want her to run down the hill—there’s gravel everywhere.”

“But it’s Sage and Wilson.” Ellen looked at me.

“Just slow down!”

She must have heard something in my tone. “Are you fighting?” she asked.

“No,” I lied. “Not really.”

“What happened?”