Polly and Edmund picked freezing, but Merle said he’d rather burn. He made hot dogs and canned beans for lunch. He used his left elbow to hold things against his body, to make up for the weaker arm. He told Edmund and Polly to find something to do, so that he could get some work done: He tried to write every day at a desk in the corner of the living room. He was teaching biology, but he wanted to be a poet; back then, he still thought he would be both. They heard him pour liquid in a glass as they left the room. He kept a bottle in one of the desk drawers, like a detective.

It was raining hard enough to make the stiff green clusters of Concord grapes swing. After the movies, though Tarzan triumphed and not everyone on the island died, it was hard not to see treacherous sucking mud and grasping killer vines lurking everywhere, beaks and tentacles and poison darts, whirlpools and hairy tarantula legs. Polly and Edmund stood on the back porch watching a little river run down the sandy dirt path toward the Sound, listening to the sound of the typewriter behind them, and when the rain stopped, they walked down to the water, forgetting to close the door though they did bring the dog and didn’t quite lose her. Lemon pranced in the waves and ate the mussels they smashed open, Merle having forgotten to feed her.

When Jane got home in the late afternoon, she saw Edmund and Polly and Lemon walking up the lane without shoes and without a leash. Merle was asleep on the couch. Jane was upset, and they waited under the grapes. At some point, without really hearing the words of the argument inside, a phone ringing and ignored, they crawled under the porch, wary of spiders but distracted by the coins that had fallen through the floorboards. Lemon was down there with them. All this cool freshly dug dirt was her doing, and they lay together and watched the street through a screen of grass. A couple passed on Christian Avenue, and kissed, and Polly and Edmund didn’t comment but they didn’t look away. Sometimes during these plangent moments they almost understood it all, almost felt awkward with each other.

Jane and Merle stopped screaming at each other, and when the phone rang again, Polly and Edmund heard Jane’s normal voice. A few minutes later she hurried them into the turquoise Ford and took them out for fried scallops and corn and told them that Dee and Papa were spending the night in the city so that they could see a doctor a second time in the morning. Jane started crying, and Polly crawled onto her lap and pushed her face into the tears on her mother’s neck, while Edmund stacked sugar envelopes on the restaurant table.