The next day, a Sunday, the relatives said goodbye. Maude was virtually liquid, her eyes coursing with tears. Everyone took to a corner. Polly read all of The Horse and His Boy and Edmund read two new Hardy Boys mysteries from Maude. Papa stayed in his study but with the door open, pacing about, so that he was framed against the window at the end of the hall whenever Polly came out of her room. Dee managed to get out of bed and wrote letters in the kitchen, warm in the sunlight, letter after letter. She said her treatment always made her feel ill for a few days.

Monday was a blur, the first day of school. It was better going with Edmund, but Polly still worried about her clothes, about pencils, notebooks, which door to enter. Dee was up and cooking when they got off the bus—chicken and biscuits, because she said a full potpie was beyond her. Edmund chopped carrots and parsley and Dee applauded his precision. Polly chopped an onion, complaining, and set the timer for batches of biscuits. Papa spent the day cleaning out his office at Columbia and gave them each gifts: Roman coins, a bone whistle and beads, glass bowls. When Jane and Merle came home and they ate dinner, the world was almost normal.

Papa carried Dee up to bed that night. He wouldn’t let Merle help, though he was nice about it. On Tuesday, Papa and Dee went to the city for a doctor’s appointment and brought back Chinese duck and sauce and thin pancakes. After Papa carried Dee back upstairs, she sent Polly and Edmund to find boxes in the attic, things she wanted to see again. They forgot what they were doing while sorting through compasses and photographs and rock specimens, pricking their fingers on the spinning wheel and pretending to change into one of Papa’s statues. Then they heard the thumping cane, and hurried down, and spent the rest of the evening with Dee, Polly sitting in bed next to her while Edmund played solitaire on the floor, May sometimes knocking cards into the wrong pile. Polly helped sort through jewelry cases and photos while Dee fretted that she should have gotten this chore done when Maude and the aunts were in town. There was not enough time in the world, Dee said while they tried to match earrings, find every pearl from a broken string. Try to never be bored. She told them stories, wandering in time and between people, about all the places she’d been and they should visit, cities and oceans she’d seen with her father, Walton—unbalanced but in a different way than Rita—and others with Maude’s sweet father Lewis before he died young, of malaria. She’d had two great loves; she’d had such luck.