The lecture’s over, and Sara asks me what I want my bean mosaic to be. “A tree,” I tell her. What am I saying? I won’t be making a mosaic.

“Any particular kind?”

“Twis-ty.”

“Twisty? Right.” She shakes her head, but goes ahead and pencils in an outline of a twisty tree. I nod agreement.

“Margie, I think this is your department now.”

Good. Sara and Margie are evidently old hands at making bean mosaics. Margie squeezes glue on Sara’s lines, and then carefully lays alternating rows of coffee beans and field peas, first up the length of the tree and then over the branches.

“Now, what about leaves?”

“But-ter beans.”

The three of us hunch over the picture together. I watch and Sara directs and Margie sticks two or three butter beans at the end of each branch. It comes into being as a recognizable oak tree, a pleasing balance of irregular curves.

Perky Becky stands over us and ruffles my hair. “Hey, that’s really beautiful.” I smile; it is nice. But Sara designed it, and Margie did the work. They deserve the compliment. Becky knows that.

“You need to do one for yourselves,” she tells Sara and Margie. “Time’s almost up.”

Sara holds the glue upside down and waits. When all the glue is below all the air in the bottle, a very slight squeeze produces an even flow of white goo. Freehand, she pours out a circle of glue. Then she segments the shape with three gluelines, one long, two short. It’s a peace symbol, what my grandma calls the Devil’s Footprint. Margie starts laying a single row of red beans on the top, and Sara attacks the bottom. In no time their arcs meet, closing the shape and making it complete.

*   *   *

I have showered off the sweat from arts and crafts and the algae from swimming and am back in our cabin sitting between the oscillating fans. My goal is to keep cool for a while. We aren’t due at the lodge for almost two hours.

“Sara, when are we go-ing to start work-ing on our skit for Tal-ent Night?”

“It’s under control. Don’t worry about it.”

I’m slightly annoyed, but no one else seems concerned. They’re perfectly happy to sit around like old people on a front porch and spend the afternoon in pointless talking. It happens at some point every day: there’s nothing to do except to just be while the schedule catches up with itself.

Sara sticks stamps on two postcards. Then, with languid ease, just like my grandma dropping snapped beans into a colander and trash into a paper bag, she tosses the postcards on her cot. I think she wants me to notice them. One is addressed to her family in Charleston and the other to her mother in Madrid, Spain.

“My mom’s leading a student tour,” she explains casually.