Another trip with Dee, to Arnold’s cottage in Port Jefferson, to climb his apricot tree with baskets, because Dee’s greengages wouldn’t be ready until September. They took the highway back to the Italian market and on to a Syrian market in Brooklyn. It was Jane’s birthday, and Jane wanted a meal from North Africa, where they’d spent a winter when she was young.

“When you fell,” said Edmund, who paid attention to all stories involving travel.

“Yes,” said Dee. “It was a nice place to get over a broken leg.” She bought shrimp and clams and tiny fish, a hard salami that Edmund swung like a baton, strange objects: pomegranates, long mulberry strands, dough as thin as silk. Back at the quiet house, Dee cut open the small fish and showed them the roe. When she found a magnifying glass Polly saw tiny fish inside the eggs, a skeleton seed inside the wet kernels of the split pomegranate, a tiny hair on each jewel of a mulberry. Years later, when she tried to sort her current life from the blooming past, Polly guessed Dee had found fresh anchovies, and was sure that one of the pomegranates was pale, like the ones Polly would see twenty years later in Seville on her honeymoon. Dee used a razor to slice a seed in half, but when she wanted to do the same things with the roe, Edmund screamed at her to stop.

They were breaking the pomegranates apart in a bowl of water when Rita came down and announced that she needed food. Dee told her to look in the refrigerator and the pantry, and eventually Rita retreated upstairs, where they could hear her voice from Papa’s study. When he came downstairs, he said Rita wanted bread and cheese. Dee, goosing the children through what felt like hours of pitting apricots, ignored him, and he marched off, annoyed.

They all knew Rita’s habit of picking a favorite for the day, the person forced to help her, but she’d never before picked Papa. As Dee basted the thin strips of dough with butter, she told them stories about times Papa had been truly angry, though not whole stories, not even full reasons. But he came down in the middle of it.

“Why would you not be generous to her?” he said. “No one is ever always at their best.”

“Because she’ll be happier when she starts doing things for herself,” said Dee.

“If I said please?”

Dee finally put a bowl of leftover shepherd’s pie in the oven to heat, and Papa climbed the stairs again, slower each time up. An hour later, Merle found the bowl untouched in the hall outside of Rita’s door and put it on the kitchen counter. Dee hurled Rita’s full, uneaten portion at Lemon, who was for once too scared to eat. May swept in while the crows gabbled insults, a conversation Polly almost understood.