The tables were set before Maude came down again and belatedly insisted on a seating chart. Merle helped Helen and Sam collect dozens of flat rocks by the river and Sam wrote names with Sharpies. The rocks served the dual role of weighing down the tablecloths and helping Sam with the family tree. He followed Maude around, placing them where commanded, scribbling in his book and on the sticky notes Polly gave him for overflows. Polly thought the tree now looked like an image of the brain’s neural pathways, like the bee-on-acid pattern of her own daily path through the house.

Maude rattled on, linking rock names to the tree. “Who’s fallen, who’s still attached,” she said. “Look at how high I am, and yet I’m holding on.”

From the corner of her eye, Polly watched Helen look worried.

“Maude is magic,” Helen said, drawing her version of a tree. It looked like a maze and was covered by red apples, purple plums, yellow pears. She asked Polly what she wanted to be, and Polly said a plum. Helen made Sam a lemon and laughed at her own joke.

Polly gave Sam a list of helpful questions.

Ask For:

1. full name

2. birthplace and birth and death dates

3. profession

4. parents/siblings/children

Maude, with her first cocktail, added other possibilities, and the tree gradually filled with short, cryptic notes like ask about his second marriage or ask her when she was born and then say are you sure? Maude was careful to go back through and cross out suggestions that would cause suffering or trouble, like Ask about 4F status, and she told Sam that if anyone was offended, he was to blame her, and she’d blame Harry.

Polly put on a dress, tried another, ripped through the closet for a half hour while her family hid. She rarely managed to look crisp, or gauzy, for that matter, and she knew some of these people would watch her for signs and symptoms. Ned and Jane and Merle would worry that she’d forget names, and she would worry about them worrying about her, but once the party started, none of it would matter, at least as long as she was dealing with food. She could do this, dented head or no.

It began well. The surviving children of Papa’s brothers arrived early, because this was the sort of people they were. Perhaps they could help set up chairs, chop something, butter the buns, pop the wine? Maude arrayed herself in the best chair, in the right amount of shade, the least wind, for her impressive receiving line, the better to relax and judge. Or maybe it was sweeter than that: Polly saw divorces and slack bodies and a consistent pattern of noses of character. But Maude saw babies, and the beloved dead who’d been their parents and grandparents.