Polly watched Sam listen and work the crowd. He wanted the strangest thing each person could remember—easier as people continued to drink—and he wrote these down as if he were taking orders, moving down the line of picnic tables. Helen followed Sam with colored pens for a while before she disappeared under the tables with the other children. When Ned carved the pig, Polly saw her dart away with some skin.

Polly hid twice during the party. The first time, she wound up in the garden, looking for aphids on the new tips of the plum tree, sliding back into green privacy. She was peering at the party like a child, like a bird from a bush, when Ned found her. “If you climb it, try not to fall,” he said. “It’s almost over. You don’t need to run.”

Half an hour later, Polly was laughing with long-suffering Merle, snickering over misbehavior during previous parties, when her glitchy peripheral vision caught Ned moving toward the house, as if on some important task. She found him upstairs, lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Ned had more levels of exhaustion than anyone she knew. He was a mille-feuille, a layered pastry; maybe she’d try baking one for him. Grief, resentment, the isolation of being alone within this large extended family. She took off her dress.

Later, she watched him roll a joint. Polly thought about how good the air felt moving over her body, how lucky she was to be alive and lying naked in a bed next to someone she liked. He was so dark from the days on the river, and his fingers were brown against pink nails. She thought of Papa rolling a cigarette faster than whatever Merle’s friends could roll, everyone laughing at his dexterity, his amusement at their shock.

“I love you,” said Ned. “What are they doing now?”

Polly sidled up to the window and peered down. “They’re all fine.”

“How’s Jane?”

“Listening. Bemused.”

“Harry says the wound on Ari’s head could have been made by a paddle,” said Ned.

“Another rock in the river,” she said. She put her dress back on and headed down.

But an hour later, she’d mostly stopped noticing what people were doing—drinking, throwing napkins at each other, looking for canes—and began to deflate again, wind down like a drunken toddler.

“Slow down on the wine,” said Ned, setting up the badminton net.

Saint Ned. You could watch his face change from a soulful, listening Irishman into a WASP autocrat, a shift in eyebrows and attention and jaw.

“They aren’t thinking of her,” said Polly. “Everyone’s forgetting Ariel.”

“No,” he said. “But we haven’t, and it’s almost over.”