At her wedding—which was not supposed to be a wedding, which was supposed to be a small party because they were moving to the city and they wanted all their friends to come together one more time in Maine before they left—Alice and her mother had fought. Sophie had gotten caterers and had a cake delivered; Helen put the cake that she had baked away. Later, after Sophie flew back out west with Alice’s father, when they were all out by the fire talking, Alice sitting next to Henry, his arm across her back, Helen had made fun of Sophie: Does she know we don’t think she’s special because her husband’s rich? She wasn’t wrong—but also, fuck Helen and that particular barb, her husband, when, had Sophie not pissed her off with the cake and some offhanded comment about Helen’s homemade dress, had she not, in other words, felt like a threat, Helen would have been the first to say that calling the money only Alice’s dad’s was shitty and unfair. Had Alice not been so desperate for Helen to like her, she might have been less likely to hear Helen’s derision as somehow also about her. She thought now that she’d thought then that she might shift, in all that time with Helen, that whatever alchemy her own mother had enacted on her in the years that she spent forming—fix your face, please; not that shirt, please; could you please let your mother fix your hair; you cannot leave the house without at least some studs covering your ear holes; the fingers tight around her upper arm, reminding her to smile—might be countered by the years she spent with Helen afterward. But then she had continued to feel separate, had not found a way of becoming any more or other than what she’d always been. It had not helped that she continued not to be a mother, when a mother was the thing that Helen had perhaps most fully been. It did not help that her reaction to the attempts that Kate or Helen made to call or visit, to get to know her better, often made her want to hide or disappear.

“We should teach the kids this game tomorrow,” Kate says.

“They’re too little,” Tess says.

“When did you guys learn?” asks Josh.

“Young,” Kate says. “It was the Christmas Henry ran away.”

Henry sits up straighter. “‘Ran away’ seems strong.”

“You ran away?” asks Alice.

“Not really.” He sets his beer down, holds a hand up to his chin.

“You packed a bag,” Kate says.

“What could you possibly have to run away from?” Tess pulls her sweater tight around her, puts her phone in the slat between the chair’s cushion and the arm.

“I was asserting my autonomy.”

“You were a spoiled brat,” Kate says.

Martin takes one of the cookies. “Mom threw out his collection.”

“I kept things under my bed.”

“There were bird carcasses and dead lizards,” Kate says. “It freaked her out. It smelled.”