“I think he’s off. Sociopathic.”

“Well,” said Polly. “You’re the expert. I’ve only recently become a textbook case.”

“That’s beneath you,” snapped Maude. “I’m serious.”

She was right, which made Polly slam the car door and walk inside her house without looking back at her passengers or at the garden. She was staring into her open refrigerator, wondering what to do next, when she realized she’d lost Josie and Maude and her children at the gate. She ran out expecting someone’s tears, or a broken body, but she found Maude talking to Helen and Sam by the brick wall that ran along the alley.

“When I was little,” said Maude, “I used to climb this wall with my father. When he first met my mother, he’d sneak over it so that the neighbors wouldn’t see that he was spending time with her alone. He’d chiseled these recesses into it, and he showed me how to climb it so that I could sneak in when I felt like being naughty. Which I did do, when I was older, apologizing to him in my head.”

Sam and Helen waited. “Shall I show you where to put your feet?” said Maude.

“Let me,” said Polly hurriedly.

This was the oldest, strongest part of the wall, and she could see four slight recesses. It was kind of wonderful, thinking of a young man sliding his foot in the same shallow slots a hundred years earlier, all for lust and love. Polly hoisted her generous body up to the top of the cold wet bricks and loitered, looking at her hail-blasted yard, imagining Dee at twenty-five, waiting on the porch for a visitor. Why hadn’t Maude brought this up on any earlier trip?

Polly lost her lettuce and basil and approximately a thousand rose and clematis blossoms. Otherwise the damage was cosmetic, though cosmetic just as dozens of judgmental relatives landed in her yard. When Sam and Helen grew bored of ice piles, Polly gave them a triple allowance to pick up the tattered leaves and branches that covered the grass, the gouged, underripe fruit. The children ate smashed raspberries and strawberries and flopped around, pretending they were drunk. Polly helped Maude up the stairs for her nap, and every place she touched, the bone was clear to fingertips: ulna, scapula, humerus. Polly could remember the same sense with Dee, leaning in for a kiss with fat child hands on old shoulders. Though not with Papa, who never seemed fragile.

She eased Maude into the bed in the office, then plucked a photograph from her bulletin board, one she hadn’t bothered to take downstairs.