I held out Bud’s present with my index finger, the Happy Retirement bag swaying. I’d been distracted by another mom from school who asked me if I had heard that Mrs. Brown—the second-grade teacher—was retiring because she’d met a bartender on vacation in Cancún and decided to travel the world with him, and grabbed the wrong gift bag in Target. And so, even though Bud had retired ten years before, the bag was wishing him luck in his next career adventure.

Judy went to reach for it and then stopped, her hand frozen in the air. She cocked her head to the side slightly and stared at me.

“What’s wrong?” I said nervously, shifting on my toes.

Her eyes grew wide, and her hand trembled slightly.

I quickly took a step back and repeated the question, but she was still frozen.

“Mark?” I said as I tried to see into the other room.

“Nana?” Emily said in a small voice as she moved toward her. She touched her grandmother’s arm, and Judy came back to life.

“Oh, sorry, dear. I just had a . . . spell,” she said as she shook her head. She shot me a quizzical look, her gaze moving up and down as she reached for the bag. She placed an arm around Emily and ushered her into the other room, leaving me alone in the foyer.

I felt like my feet were rooted to the bamboo-plank floor. Her expression hadn’t been just blank, like a mild seizure or a moment of spacing out. It was one of fear.

—

After Mark and his dad had grilled burgers and hot dogs outside, we sang “Happy Birthday,” and then Bud blew out his candles. He and Mark went inside to finish watching the White Sox game. Emily and Jack found glass jars in the garage and went to the front yard to catch fireflies. That left Judy and me alone outside on their patio. They had recently installed a pergola from Costco, with LED lights around the ceiling and a TV in the top corner. The strange moment earlier with Judy had passed, and she’d acted like her usual self, pulling out garnishes for the grill and fussing over arranging the hamburger buns on a platter shaped like an owl. I thought maybe I had imagined it and my paranoia really was getting worse. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that she knew something was off.

“So what else is new with you, Amy?” Judy said as she leaned back in her chair, crisscrossing her legs under her caftan as she held a stemless glass of white wine stenciled with Gatlinburg Gals ’97, a relic from one of her “hen weekends” with her friends.

I wasn’t ready to talk about the possible job. It felt like jinxing it, so I shifted to a long diatribe about occupying the kids each day of summer break.