Meanwhile, Polly and Ned needed to get on with the day. They set up the roasting box in the backyard, and Polly put the brisket for the memorial into the bottom oven to reheat. Before the box was opened and Ned carved the pig, they’d go full gout: the mixed blessing of the oysters, piles of cold shrimp from the Gulf with different sauces, gougères, fat stinky cheeses. She’d baked the tarts—apricot and plum, one gooseberry in a nod to the Swedes—early to make way for the backup pork shoulders, potato gratins, and roasted tinfoil-wrapped packages of beets to be tossed with green beans and aioli, which would offend a certain contingent. She made an especially lively chimichurri for the same reason. Sam trimmed beans and Helen looked for bugs in the flat of blackberries they’d serve with their own raspberries and the real cake Polly had ordered, a tower of vanilla and ganache with the numeral 90 in a nicely archaic font.

Chairs out, tables out, and then Polly was left with the things she’d avoided. The family tree Sam was supposed to bring to school in the fall was problematic for a number of reasons. Sam muttered about “roots,” and Polly knew his teacher probably wanted some shallow yet earnest examination of immigration, not the magpie nest that had gone into making him. She gave him a fancy notebook and printed out some prototypes, but the first loop-de-loops Sam came up with looked like a family vine in the style of Escher. Another attempt reminded her of the trees Rita splashed onto the wall in Stony Brook, before she’d been hauled off to the bin. Dryads, with vine-like limbs.

Sam expressed despair over this snarl of names, and they all trooped out to the alley house. Sam and Polly watched Jane draw a beautiful tree, a marvel of clarity and design. Contents would come from Maude, and what Maude didn’t know, the extra layers of complexity—who, why, secrets—real secrets, as opposed to garbage—would come out or not at the party.

But back in the house, Maude was still singing in the bathtub. Helen sat by the door, memorizing the words. Sam didn’t mind disappearing into his room, and Polly let the project drift away again, too. It took Drake to move things along. Maude, he said, talking through the bathroom door, the photos are all you’ve talked about for weeks, and yet you avoid looking at them. If it’s too hard, let’s leave them out.

Maude exited the bathtub, foraged for food in the refrigerator and made her way into the dining room. For the next two hours she moved back and forth from the photo pile to Polly, Jane, Merle, the children, even Ned, sliding through different lives with anyone who would listen. Eventually everyone left the dining room, leaving Maude alone with her dead.

“Is this too much?” asked Maude.