Polly went back to her garden, picking up dog toys and shovels and everything that took away from the new blast of color, this moment of perfection. Despair was a default setting in this climate, but this time of year was the best Polly could hope for. Nine-tenths of the year it was too hot, too dry, too high, too cold. Spring brought floods, high summer brought fire and smoke. Dee’s ratty green taped-together garden notebook said the same thing: flea beetles, HAIL, wind flattened corn. Polly wrapped it in scrap silk they’d found in the attic, and she took it out once a year or so, usually in the dead of winter.

Polly wanted to hear certain voices. She wished, ferociously, that Dee could see this new world in her old yard, even Helen covered with mud from the neck down. Polly was tempted to use a hose but splashed her clean with a bowl of warm water. “Did you remember what you wanted to show me?”

Helen handed her two pieces of greenhouse glass and a rock, a gouged marble. “See how pretty it is?”

Polly rolled it around in her muddy fingers. She hadn’t seen one of these since she was eight, and Dee allowed her to paw through her jewelry box. They carried the stone inside, and Polly scratched the side of a canning jar, then the side of the stainless sink. She explained the hardness scale—Merle would have been proud—and put it in a bowl in the window, trying to imagine Dee dropping rough diamonds around the property like so many bread crumbs.

Polly’s drifty afternoon ended when Ned, marooned at the restaurant, called needing grocery items. Polly threw the kids in the car and shopped for Peake’s, for the memorial, for what she remembered of Maude’s party. The phrase “threw the kids in the car”—what percentage of most post–World War II childhoods was taken up by inexplicable errands? Polly was treating Helen like a sack, Sam like a dog. The actual dogs hid in the corners of the yard as she pushed her children toward the Civic.

At the liquor store, the owner couldn’t look at her directly. At the grocery store, the clerk, who had gone to school with Ariel, burst into tears when she saw Polly. A moment of confusion when she got back in the car—where was the clutch and the gear shift?—and as she felt her children watching her, she broke into a sweat, and turned around to buy time, looked at her bags, and realized she’d forgotten to buy the brisket for the memorial, the primary reason for going to the fucking store to begin with.