Polly and Ned had both loved and been surprised by Sam’s boyness. When Helen arrived, part of Polly’s exhausted brain watched Ned react. He covered her tiny bedroom with posters of color—a Goethe wheel and a Runge ball, shades of blues and greens, yellows and peach and orange—and a beautiful print of the alphabet in ten different scripts. His daughter would not be limited to pink and purple. Her crib mobile was made of sea creatures; her stuffed animals were carnivores. Her pajamas were stripes, her flower prints were bold, her china-headed doll had an indigo dress and delicate hands. When Helen turned three, her presents were six-guns and a cowboy hat and a pirate ship and a plastic saber; for Christmas she’d gotten a tool set and a doctor’s kit. That spring, Ned perched her on a stool over the car engine while he worked on it, and let her demolish the old wind-up alarm with real tools while he cooked Easter dinner. He got Sam to teach Helen to hit a T-ball and play marbles, and he taught Sam to sew and cook. And when he felt bad for taking Sam’s future relatively for granted, he took him alone for the first week of the trip they made to Ireland.

Ned worked it. He was going to stave off both the modern girl’s and the old girl’s world as long as he could, and either as a result or by nature, Helen, though not a brat, was obedient without being obeisant, figuring out how to handle the inevitable—tasks, unpleasantnesses like doctors and swim lessons or picking up her room—without drama but without full agreement. Her lip already curled. Polly hoped to somehow make enough money to go on a world tour starting with Helen’s thirteenth birthday, some Möbius strip of distraction. Jane’s way of getting Polly through that period had been to have another three children, and Polly wasn’t going to go that route.

On a camping trip to the Sunlight Basin the year before, Vinnie had watched Helen spin around the campsite, dancing with a plastic tiger.

“She’s a doll,” said Vinnie.

“Don’t call her a doll,” snapped Ned. “Maybe a treasure, or a jewel. I don’t want her to be anyone’s fucking doll.”

It was hard to be a girl. It was hard to be anything.

Maude asked to eat at home again. She wanted to sit in the yard and study the mountains, which hadn’t changed a bit since her childhood, and she wanted to think of her mother in the garden while she watched Helen in her mud pile. It was so soothing, she said. Dee would be so happy to know this.