“What did Ari say to make you angry?” screamed Harry. “‘No’?”

In the kitchen, Polly helped Josie clean and stitch and wrap Harry’s hand. Josie kept a kit in her truck; she’d been an EMT when Harry met her. Harry said he hoped Maude’s birthday wasn’t ruined. Maude, briefly joining the semicircle around Harry, said he’d made it exciting and sped off again to report on the wound, completely misunderstanding the mood of the kitchen.

“Please explain,” said Polly, cleaning the oyster knife.

“He threw the preserver into the brush, and there was blood on it. The injuries on her face—I think she was alive long enough for a bruise and a scab to form,” said Harry. “Her back, too. The lab agrees, informally. Maybe they’ll be able to say for sure with the autopsy.”

Polly thought of what she’d seen in the willows, all of the stones in the river and all the damage they could do. It stunned her, in hindsight, that anything—Ariel, a cottonwood branch—made it through the river without ripping into pieces. “No one saw her fall before they put in?”

“No,” said Harry, watching a needle going in and out of his hand. “I think he hit her. Maybe more.” He started to cry.

Ned opened Champagne and they toasted Maude, who, as everyone joked, had always been bloodthirsty. People were jolly, back to full roar; they all loved a little blood, and they loved Harry, chip off a three-generation block. He had Papa’s middle name and he’d chosen Papa’s profession.

People crowded around the photo boards and argued, birds talking at a feeder, all at once. At first, there was an annoying sameness to the conversations, braggadocio and lumpen bluster blending with mundanities: the weather then, the weather now, old affairs, unwelcome changes, their own legends. Maude made some things up, early on, which got them rolling, and she introduced everyone to Drake, who was her party trick. He was an excuse, and he embraced it. As far as Drake could tell, the whole family was simultaneously fucked up and mildly glorious. Bored old people debating a truly batshit past, getting a last word in, nattering about roadhouses in the thirties and forties, about younger drunks driving off cliffs and causing fireballs that caused conflagrations, about Italian prisoners of war and derailed trains. They’d fucked and gambled across the country, some of them across Europe, done horrible, memorable things: Polly could shut her eyes and see exploding rattlesnake dens, burning booze warehouses, a half dozen World War II stories, a gambler’s body in a borrow pit. They told these stories while giggling like teenagers, wheezing and wiping their eyes.