Maureen tries hard. Cate feels gratitude for someone making such an effort to win her. She wants to insinuate herself into the narrowest crevices of Cate’s life. A piece of this insinuation is getting Neale to like her, and her strategy is getting to Neale through Joe. “I have a way with twelve-year-olds.”

“Knock yourself out,” Cate tells her.

Maureen sets up an outing for the four of them, a Sunday afternoon screening downtown at the Siskel Center. Last Year at Marienbad—black-and-white, enigmatic, French. Joe is a sucker for old movies that are inscrutable, doubly for anything French, like his father. His own French, after three years of it at school, is good enough that he almost doesn’t have to read the subtitles. He and Maureen are riveted to the film’s long silences and impenetrable dialog. Neale naps, sputtering awake from time to time. Cate uses this lazy stretch of time to think about the way Dana kisses, the way her lips soften two or three kisses in. She knows she should probably be daydreaming about kissing Maureen. She would like to feel less about Dana, so she imagines her home decor. She conjures up a random hodgepodge. A sofa in a trite color from a decade ago. The living room walls a pale blue from a Cape Cod cottage line of low-end paints. A couple of ill-considered chairs with high arms. A credenza made of pressboard covered with a mahogany veneer. This holds books, DVDs, also VHS tapes that lost their last player ten years ago. A Navajo-ish rug. Southwestern posters. A scented candle in a jar on an end table. Cate adds to this secular crèche piece by piece. Mental redecoration is her main form of snobbery.

On the drive back from the Loop, Maureen is perfect. Curious about Neale’s work, offering a self-deprecating anecdote about how terrible she was at yoga the one time she tried it. Falling smack onto her head in her first and last attempt at crow pose. She agrees to listen to a clip on Joe’s phone of his favorite noise musician, Merzbow, performing “Smelly Brain.” After maybe thirty seconds, Neale makes him shut it down, leaving Maureen with an appreciative smile hanging in the middle of nothing.

She tells them about her new assignment, a whole new area for her. She is designing uniforms for staff at an indoor theme park going up in a repurposed indoor mall in Gurnee, a featureless exurb near the Wisconsin border. The theme park will be intergalactic.