They drank champagne together on the deck so Edith could smoke. She went through four of her cigarettes—long, thin menthols—in about thirty minutes, talking the whole time about nothing. Alice was just relieved that she seemed to be getting a little bit calmer, but she barely paid attention to the words her mother was saying. Instead, she stared out toward the beach. It was a warm, gusty day and there were whitecaps on the ruffled surface of the ocean. As she listened to her mother talk about how when she’d graduated high school her only option had been to go and work at the mill—a story Alice had heard countless times—Alice wondered if she’d ever loved her mother. She must have loved her when she’d been a baby, back when her very survival depended on it, but since then, and definitely since the settlement, Alice felt almost nothing when she thought about Edith. Her mother was an alcoholic who looked twenty years older than she was. She’d been pretty once, but the cigarettes and the alcohol had wrecked her looks, and now she was a boring, rotten waste of space. Just like that dry rot that Jake had found in the wooden stairs that led from the first floor down to the garage. He’d ripped it all out so it didn’t spread, and then hired someone to build new stairs. That was what Edith was. Dry rot that was never going to get better. The only good thing she’d done was marry Jake, and Alice truly didn’t know why he’d stayed with her. She didn’t like to think about it, because if she thought about it too much, she’d become convinced that Jake would disappear from their lives as fast as he had entered into them, and then it would just be her and her mother again, the dry rot spreading from mother to daughter.

When the bottle was empty—Alice had only had one glass—Edith declared that they should do final preparations for the arrival of the guest. She told Alice to light the candles and fluff up the pillows in the living room while she prepared the stuffing in the kitchen. The champagne had taken the edge off whatever pills she’d taken earlier. Alice thought her mother seemed back to normal—her voice slightly slurry, and her face slack—and she knew that before she started on the stuffing, she’d build herself one of her health drinks in the kitchen.

Jake arrived home first. He was in his navy blue suit, wearing his tie with the little anchors on it, and he had two bottles of wine in the crook of his arm. “Smells good in here, ladies,” he said loudly.