In any event, there was no warning. A door slammed and Rita’s voice floated upstairs. Dee, stricken, finished rinsing Polly’s hair so quickly that she left bubbles in her ears. Polly and Edmund hurried into their clothes. They could hear Rita’s agent, a big blond pile of a man, explaining that he couldn’t bear Rita’s imprisonment, he couldn’t bear to see beauty smothered. He’d freed her, but she wouldn’t do well in the city. And so here she was, clean in a miniskirt, pretty bangles on her wrists that mostly covered the scars.

“I’m so tired,” said Rita. “But I’m fine.”

Everyone said things about that being good. Merle started to offer wine and stopped, and the agent finally left. Rita didn’t move toward Edmund, and he stayed next to Jane.

When they all walked upstairs, Rita turned her whole body to see the new canvases, the children’s unfinished squiggles. The last bit of paint visible from her rampage was a droopy tree to the left of the window at the head of the stairs. Papa insisted on not scrubbing it off the wall.

“These are for you,” said Papa, pointing to the canvases. They all knew he was angry. “If you’d like to stay, you must keep your mind busy. You can cover what the children started.”

“At least I managed one tree,” said Rita.

“The tree is shit,” he said. “Take a moment or two to plan.”

The tree was shit—the effort of having to watch Rita’s face while Papa insulted her, very calmly, sprang their brains.

Lemon the pointer was largely uncontrollable, or at least uncontrolled. No one ever trained her to a leash, and the first time Polly tried to walk her, she was dragged down the sidewalk, shredding her leotard and the skin on her elbows and knees. Merle sometimes said she was Edmund’s dog, though Edmund resented the way Lemon had gone so willingly to the Schusters the summer before. He’d wanted to be given away, too, so how could he fault Lemon for taking advantage of the offer?

Lemon was Jane and Merle’s problem, and they didn’t do enough. They took her to the beach on a lunge line, and once Papa rowed out to a long sandbar and let her range. Dee let Lemon free in the greenhouse, where she would race the cat in loops around the old potting benches, somehow not breaking anything. Lemon shouldn’t have been in a town or chained in a yard.