Bulahdeen shook her head. “Oh, that’s just the impression she likes to give. She’s come back every year for the past thirty years. I think she comes for the rest. She’s been married seven times. I know I’d need the rest. But she only has one more to go.”

“One more what?” Kate asked.

Bulahdeen leaned forward and said, “Husband. Selma has eight charms. Eight surefire opportunities to marry the man she wants. She’s used seven of them. I’m anxious to see who she’ll use number eight on. He’s bound to be a big deal, being her last and all. He’ll have lots of money. And he’ll probably be old.”

Kate looked to Eby again. This time, Eby just smiled. Kate hesitated, then said to Bulahdeen, “You mean eight actual, physical charms?”

“That’s what she says.”

“So she thinks she has magical powers,” Kate said, her eyes going to where Selma and Devin had disappeared, probably second-guessing her decision to let her daughter go off with this woman.

That made Bulahdeen laugh, and she reached over and patted Kate’s hand. “Magic is what we invent when we want something we think we can’t have. It makes her happy to think she’s a femme fatale. We go along with it.”

A minute later Devin came running back, delighted with a single piece of chocolate wrapped in gold foil. Selma sauntered after her.

“I’ve got the best candy here,” she said, taking her seat back at the separate table, away from them.

“What did I tell you?” Bulahdeen winked at Kate. “Selma, there’s not a man for twenty miles. Don’t you ever turn it off?”

“Of course not,” Selma said.

“She really does have the best candy here,” Devin said. “I don’t want her to turn it off.”

“Out of the mouths of babes,” Selma said.

Darkness fell, and the only illumination came from the umbrella poles wrapped in strings of twinkle lights, which Eby had found in the storeroom and brought out for one last summer. They created round dots of light across the lawn. As they ate hot dogs with brown mustard and dill potato salad on paper plates, they talked about the summers they’d had here. The summer it had rained every day and all the wallpaper peeled off the walls, and a carpet of frogs took up residence on the lawn. The summer it was so dry you could see the bottom of the lake, and guests waded out and found trinkets they thought they’d lost in the water years ago—coins with wishes still attached, old barrettes, hard plastic toy soldiers. Kate didn’t say much, but she seemed to enjoy the stories. It relaxed her a little.