Josh shuffles the cards, and Martin scrolls through his phone, and Alice gets up to get a box of cookies from the pantry and takes three for herself and passes them around.

“What are we playing?” asks Henry.

“Canasta?” says Martin.

“Gin?” says Kate.

“We need a second deck for canasta,” Tess says, hoping to dissuade them.

“Your lucky night,” says Alice, reaching in the drawer under the table to find more cards.

“I’ll deal,” says Martin.

“What are the teams?”

“Couples?” Kate says.

“Sure,” Tess says.

“You have to promise not to divorce me if we lose,” Martin says to Tess.

“Or,” says Tess, “we could just not lose.”

Martin deals, Josh counts his cards three separate times, and Henry draws from the stock first, Alice after; they both discard and make their first meld of queens, and then it’s Josh and Kate’s turn and they each draw. Josh sets down three cards, a four, a five, and a six.

“They have to be the same,” Martin says.

“They don’t,” Josh says.

“It has to be four cards,” says Tess.

Josh gets out his phone, as do Alice and Martin. Tess gets up to grab the box of cookies and sits back in her chair and writes an email to a client.

“I was taught the European version,” Josh says, holding up his phone screen.

“Of course,” Tess mutters.

“We’re playing the American one,” says Henry.

“Maybe we shouldn’t,” Alice says.

“It’s easier to play the rules we know,” Martin says.

Josh reaches over Kate’s shoulder and makes a meld of three kings and slaps them down and picks up his other cards, and they both discard.

“American it is,” he says.

Kate and Josh win, and Alice watches Tess, but everybody seems to be having a good enough time, and Alice is glad that they’re all here. She remembers how hopeful she was all those years ago when she and Henry got together. The way that he said the word “family”: so different from that large, mostly silent house that she shared with her mom, and, less often, with her dad. Family was like religion to Henry, even when he didn’t see them often. Even when they all annoyed him, when he complained about them each time after they left. Right up until she died, he talked to his mother on the phone more often than any grown-up Alice knew.

Alice grabs hold of her phone to check again for texts from Maddie, but instead there’s an email from her mom confirming flights, a final plea to have the privilege of seeing Henry too.

She has what she figures is a much more normal relationship with her mother: she calls her once a month; they text. They send cards on birthdays, ask the same boring questions about their jobs. Mostly they resent each other from a comfortable enough distance that they might call it love.