The sweet, strangely old-fashioned scent of marijuana mingled with the tangy sea air. A cloud of smoke darted between them and disappeared.

“You are totally bogarting the joint,” Tully said, and they both laughed again. Just that word—bogart—sent them spiraling back to the seventies.

They passed it back and forth and kept talking, giggling. They were so caught up in then that neither of them heard footsteps coming up behind them.

“I turn my back on you girls for ten minutes and you’re smoking pot.” Mrs. Mularkey stood there, dressed in faded jeans and a sweatshirt from the nineties—maybe even the eighties—her snow-white hair in a lopsided, scrunchied ponytail. “You know that leads to worse things, don’t you? Like the crack or LSD.”

Tully tried not to laugh; she really did. “Just say no to crack.”

“That’s a lesson I tried to teach Marah in choosing her pants,” Kate said, giggling.

Mrs. M. pulled up another Adirondack chair and positioned it beside Kate. Then she sat down and angled toward her.

For a moment they all sat there, staring at one another while smoke drifted into the air.

“Well?” Mrs. M. finally said. “I taught you to share, didn’t I?”

“Mom!”

Mrs. M. waved her hand. “You girls from the seventies think you’re so cool. Let me tell you, I was around for the sixties, and you’ve got nothing on me.” She took the joint and put it in her mouth, taking a long, deep drag, holding it, and blowing it out. “Hell, Katie, how do you think I got through the teen years when my two girls were sneaking out of the house at night and riding their bikes in the dark?”

“You knew about that?” Tully said.

Kate laughed. “You said it was booze that got you through.”

“Oh,” Mrs. M. said. “That, too.”

At one o’clock in the morning they were in the kitchen raiding the refrigerator when Johnny walked in and noticed the pile of junk food on the counter. “Someone has been smoking pot.”

“Don’t tell my mom,” Kate said.

At that, her mom and Tully burst out laughing.

Kate leaned back in her wheelchair, grinning loopily up at her husband. Cast in the pale and distant light from the hallway, wearing his drugstore bifocals and an old Rolling Stones T-shirt, he looked like a hip professor. “I hope you’ve come to join the party.”

He moved toward her, bent down, and whispered, “How about a private party?”

She put her arms around his neck. “You read my mind.”

He scooped her into his arms, said goodnight to everyone, and carried her to their new room. She hung on tightly, her face buried in the crook of his neck, and smelled the last hint of aftershave he’d put on this morning. It was the cheap stuff the kids gave him every Christmas.