Mary chased a monarch butterfly with orange-and-black wings. The fluttering insect dotted up and down, and Mary held out a finger, hoping it would land there. She ran back and forth, following the butterfly until it disappeared over the water.

“Come sit by me, sweetheart,” Donna told her.

Mary plopped down heavily on the bench. Donna wrapped an arm around her big girl’s shoulder and pulled Mary’s head into the crook of her neck. She kissed the girl’s blond curls and poked a finger into her cheek. Mary giggled. They were an odd mismatch of mother and daughter. Mary got all her tall, heavy genes from Clark. Donna was small, at least six inches shorter than Mary and fifty pounds lighter. She knew it looked strange, this oversized teenager clinging to the tiny hand of her mother. Mary was still a child. Donna was the one who had gotten older and more conscious of the burden of being a parent. It was one thing to care for a child when you were twenty-five and something else altogether when you were almost forty.

Donna was still dressed for the office. She worked as a legal secretary in a small Wisconsin law firm, where they insisted she wear business suits and keep her sandy hair fashionably styled. The salary and benefits were good, though, and the firm gave her flexibility when Mary needed special care. She had worked there for five years, ever since she and Clark split up. Security was a trade-off for the long hours and loneliness in her life.

“Did you see that?” Donna asked, pointing at a splash in the water and the widening ripples. “That was a fish.”

“Fish!” Mary said.

“Would you like to be a fish?” Donna asked. “You could swim underwater and make friends with turtles. Maybe you could even be a mermaid with a big fish tail. Wouldn’t that be funny?”

“Fish!” Mary said again.

Donna smiled. She held Mary’s hand, and they sat watching the hawks circle above them and the boats come and go lazily on the river. They counted birds in the trees. Donna picked a wildflower and let Mary pluck the petals. Half an hour passed as easily as the water at their feet, and the sun eased below the trees. Golden sparkles on the water became shadows.

It was time to go. Clark was waiting, and it wasn’t fair to be so late. He missed Mary.

Donna missed Clark, too. She kept waiting for her love for him to die out completely, but instead, it was the bitterness of their breakup that had begun to seem distant and unimportant. They had both been desperate, unable to cope with Mary together. When she saw him now, she found herself drawn all over again to his courage and his solemn manner. She had even allowed herself to stay over a few weeks ago, to climb back into their bed. They hadn’t talked about it. She had slipped away in the morning before Clark awoke, not because it felt like a mistake, but because she was scared that Clark didn’t feel the same way.