“Sure, I’ve surfed before,” she said, having coasted onto the beach still on her feet and with both earbuds in place. “But I don’t remember anything about it.” She’d shrugged. “Mind you, I don’t remember anything between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, so maybe I picked it up then.”

Laura, on the other hand, had waded into the waves feeling smug and overconfident and had to be rescued twice by the lifeguard, who may have been a little too quick off the mark, honestly. Both times Laura had been rolling around under the waves for fewer than ten seconds, wondering if this was drowning and if she was ever going to see dry land again, when the lifeguard appeared, towing her to shore in a passable impersonation of a helpful dolphin. Not that she wasn’t grateful, but his lack of faith in her ability to bob to the surface was a little embarrassing.

A second discovery was that Laura enjoyed pottery, a craft she’d never tried before. The introductory class had an inauspicious start, as the first thing that happened when the three women walked into the studio was that Polly leaned nonchalantly on a rack of drying pots and started a chain reaction of falling and crashing that resulted in a very tall, very fragile vase getting knocked off a table halfway around the room. As everyone in the studio had stopped to watch the disaster parade of momentum and gravity move its way through space and time, the vase had a moment of complete silence in which to gracefully topple to the floor and shatter into a billion jagged pieces.

Polly, being Polly, waited until the last tinkle had died away and then said, “Oops, we’re here for the pot throwing class—I guess I started early,” which no one found funny except for the three of them, and the teacher didn’t really warm up to them until the second class. However, at that point she realized Laura was a bit of a ceramics savant and forgave them everything.