“Except in this case, you’re Big Brother.” Occasionally Arthur will speak to Cate as if he needs to give her a boost up the learning curve. Everything about him is aimed at the greater good, but in matters of personal kindness, he often comes up short. This gives Cate permission to look a little too long at his abundance of protruding ear hair. Both he and Rose, who are a few years younger than Cate’s parents, look a decade older. Probably because they have been working for the good of others since their youth, thereby pretty much skipping their youth. Their brows have permanent furrows, their gaits are arthritic from years of marching and shuffling at demos and on picket lines. They’ve never had a citrus peel or microdermabrasion, or, like Cate’s father, an eye lift.

Cate has brought three excellent bagels from a deli on Seventh Avenue. For her and Neale and Joe. Three is definitely the wrong number of bagels for five people. She leaves them in her messenger bag.

“Joe-Hill is at his friend Kiera’s house.” This is the name Neale, in a weak moment, promised her parents she would name her baby, but in practice, only Rose and Arthur use it. Joe himself shrugged it off years ago. “Nealy’s upstairs resting,” Rose tells Cate. She hasn’t heard Neale’s mother refer to her daughter as Nealy since junior high. While she’s thinking she’ll have to ask Neale about this new level of parental attentiveness, she senses over her shoulder that Rose is following her upstairs. What’s this about?

“Hey,” Neale says from her bed. She’s not in any sort of invalid mode. She’s in jeans and a sweater, reading a new novel by Elizabeth Strout. She loves Elizabeth Strout.

She looks better than Cate expected, or at least no worse.

“Little titanium plates,” she says, tapping her bandaged cheek. “My first step toward becoming bionic.”

“Now you can go to Bionic Hair.”

“I need to go somewhere. I’m stir-crazy.”

Rose says, “I think you’re supposed to get bed rest just now.”

Cate knows that Neale will not respond well to this directive cloaked as a suggestion, and indeed she is grabbing her jacket off the bedroom doorknob before her mother has a chance to try again. Instead, Rose turns to Cate and clears her throat, which means she is about to deliver a preformed message. “We’re so lucky you were here to help that day.”