Dee put down her fork. She started to laugh—tears. “Oh, the vision,” she said.

“We don’t need to tell them everything, dear,” he said. “The phrase will do.”

The next afternoon, while Polly played solitaire on the dining room table and Dee and Jane cut Edmund’s hair in the greenhouse and Merle, still short of wood to finish the fence, wrestled with the television, trying to get a boxing match to tune in, Papa lifted a book on Merle’s desk and found a framed photo of Rita. “Why is this here?”

Merle said, “I didn’t think it would help Eddie to see it.”

Rita was the only other person who said Eddie, and Edmund hated her for this, too.

“And yet you needed to?” Papa watched Merle. “A boy should see his mother, even if the distance must be safe. And a man shouldn’t keep his best friend’s wife on his desk.”

“I have my best friend on the desk, too,” said Merle, pointing. Merle was in the photo next to Tommy, both of them wearing tuxedos at one of their weddings.

Papa ignored him and propped Rita’s photo up on the mantel, next to the silver-framed photo of Asta. What was similar beyond the image of two women, one a redhead, one much darker? As an adult, Polly would have said a cloud of hair, soft eyes, full lips, and a big dose of doom, the frozen straying expression in the dead girl’s photograph and Rita’s eyes. Mad, mad, mad as a hatter, mad as some of the people who’d smelled the air inside the splinters of stained glass before it was contained.

Merle left the house, slamming the door, slamming the car door. Hours later Polly heard the car return, but instead of coming in, Merle lay down on the grass just inside the half-finished fence. When she went to bed she looked from Dee’s window, and in the light from the porch she saw him still under the honeysuckle bush, petals falling on his face. But in the morning, when Polly went out with coffee, Merle said he was fine, just fucking fine, like he’d claimed the summer before with Tommy. Polly and Edmund giggled off and on for hours, and eventually both moments became funny in Polly’s memory.

Rita moved between the greenhouse and her room. She didn’t have dinner with them, a standing joke with the rest of the house, given the quality of Dee’s cooking. Rita barely talked to Edmund, but it wasn’t so much that she rejected her child as that she rejected everyone. She would sit on the couch at the end of the night, eating leftovers while they tried to talk, weighing all of them down.