“No,” said Polly. “You’ve had ninety years of being photogenic.” She called for Drake, who was out on the porch, trying to come up with the right words for the memorial. He came inside and stood patiently while Maude dithered again, and when she reached a pause, he grabbed the stack and headed to the copy shop.

Try to tell a story of a family in photographs, thought Polly. Just try. When the boards were done, the largest of a hundred photos would show Maude with her father, sitting on the same porch. You could see Dee’s shadow as she held the camera, and Maude’s legs were moving and blurred. Maude’s father was thin and the smile he was giving was all for the photographer. A second photo, probably earlier, showed the couple—had he been Dee’s husband, yet? Maude claimed they’d “lived in sin” for some time—sitting on the lawn with friends, tiny new trees staked behind them and the frame of a new building, the greenhouse that had burned before Maude was even born, the source of Helen’s broken glass and maybe Helen’s pretty rock. And a third photo, taken on a Los Angeles beach in the early twenties, Maude and her brothers splashing in the surf and Papa and Dee on either side of small Asta, swinging her above the water. They’d been in their forties then, and Dee had looked pretty good, but Papa had been a long, cool drink of water.

Maude held up a last picture, a young Papa on a sun-blasted burial mound. “He was something,” she said. “All this pretty wild hair, and brown skin from digs, and absolutely no interest in bullshit. Even later, my college friends would come home and stare at him, which I imagine he loved, but it was always all about Mother. He was certainly perfect with me, and it was only when I was older that I wondered just how imperfect he’d been before her.”

“What do you think?” asked Polly.

“Quite,” said Maude. “Quite wonderfully imperfect. The letters from the English actresses—Mama would burn them at the dinner table while he smiled. He’d say, ‘All practice for you, dear.’ ”

Everyone had a hidden life.

Being a funeral lady gave you a shield: You could always be busy, always run for a tray if your heart burst; you were less likely to say the wrong thing. Usually you needed to attain a certain age, but Polly and Josie and Nora reached this status young, after old-guard training and by repetitive effort, working on vast quantities of food, making sure other people knew what to bring, the when and where and the cleanup.