I scrape my teeth with my little finger, capturing roast beef under my nail. I suck at the nail. The kid is looking at me grinning. Barbecue rouge dots her jaws. You could glean roast beef from her front teeth.

Gillette glances around Hardee’s, glances at me, swallows beef, pats Tatum’s jaws with her napkin. Tatum wriggles, uses her own napkin.

“It’s sort of hard to realize that now it’s your generation that sucks. I left Tatum with a babysitter and went to this club the other night. I haven’t been to a club in ages. All the people were so young. They were just so young. I was so out of place. But they were us, though; they really were us.” She looks intensely at Catherine. Catherine watches Tatum. “I can imagine them us. But of course none of them could ever imagine they were me. Do you sort of know what I mean? I wouldn’t even dance. The music was too fast. It’s still rock, but it zooms. Or maybe I’ve just slowed up.” She laughs a bit. “They couldn’t even imagine they were us.”

“I can,” says Tatum.

“Tatum, you don’t even know what I mean.”

Tatum pouts, then she sings Billy Joel’s tune, her mouth full of masticated beef, “It’s still rock ‘n’ roll to me.”

Gillette puts Tatum to bed, and we grownups go back into the kitchen. As Catherine and I sit down at the table, Gillette reaches behind the refrigerator and pulls out a canvas and a pile of sticks. She arranges the sticks into an easel, places the canvas on it, and begins to work. On top of the refrigerator is her paintbox.

“I hope you girls don’t mind,” she says, “but this is the only time I have to paint.”

“We understand,” says Catherine. “Anyway, it’ll be good to watch you again. I remember watching you work at the colony.”

“Eh, I hate to remember those days.”

She makes light brushstrokes on the canvas, a half-done painting that looks like two eyes peeking through trees, growing out of a woman’s broad back. Except the back looks like both a woman’s back and her cunt, and one of the trees a man’s privates, the tree’s crown his balls.

“That’s great,” says Catherine.

“Oh, it used to be simple as pie,” says Gillette, “but now it’s like I have to strain, you know . . . Eh, can one of you get that bowl of mushrooms out of the refrigerator—the one with ‘no’ tacked on it?”

Catherine gets it out. “Saving this for us? Something to nibble on while you work?”