Ned and Polly decided to let the manager at Peake’s buy into the business and take on more responsibility, and Ned cut down on his own shifts. He and Polly came up with bits of the menu she could manage at home. Friends were oddly eager to stop by. Josie, who worked as a grant writer, taking the town through incremental improvements, claimed she needed help revising the local soup kitchen’s fundraising materials, and said the incomprehensible pages Polly turned in were brilliant. Polly’s cousin Harry badgered her for help researching the old Poor Farm graveyard at the county museum; Harry’s mother, Opal, wanted to learn how to use an iMac. The children were in high demand for playdates. Nora Susak, an internist who was still nursing her youngest child, said she wanted to learn how to bake; her husband, Vinnie, eloquent attorney, asked for help with a letter to the editor. Ariel Delgado, the girl now lost in the river, asked for tutoring on the GRE and claimed she needed help writing a graduate school admissions letter six months in advance.

Over the last decade, half the town had brought Polly business letters, brochures, oral histories and obituaries, short stories, and even poems, the way you’d bring the sick to a shaman. Fix it, make the story come to life, make it true. Polly felt like a sham even before she smacked her head—she could only do so much. Now she couldn’t move a paragraph. She would either wander away from a thought the way she wandered away from the stove, or she’d descend into a visual whirlpool, sometimes with an accompanying earworm melody. For an overdue mystery edit she confused character names, covered the printout with enraged comments, wrote knight for night, toe for tow, and—weirdest of all—now for gnaw. Knew instead of new, passed instead of past. Right rite, bow bough beau. When she picked up an old coworker’s cookbook project, she shredded rather than edited and put the recipes back together in a novel order, with missing steps and fresh errors on quantities.