“My father promised.”

“What, if you stayed out of trouble?”

He shrugged; he wanted her to speed up.

“In Seattle, you knew the girl you hit, didn’t you?” said Polly. “People said you were upset, that it was traumatic.”

“I didn’t know her very well,” said Graham. He was wary. “Of course it was traumatic.”

“It’s strange that you happened to hit someone you knew at all,” said Polly. “Maybe she turned you down, too?”

“No one’s ever turned me down,” said Graham.

Polly found the check and put it down on the counter rather than handing it to him. “You killed a girl with a car, you killed a girl on the water. I’m hoping you’ll be hit by a fucking train.”

“That’s not true. And you’re crazy. Everyone knows you can’t think straight.”

Polly watched him, waiting him out, while a deep flush covered his face, darkened the marks.

“It’s not true,” he said again.

“I don’t believe you,” said Polly.

Graham lifted a stool and smashed it onto the floor, picked up the check, and walked out. Polly told the pastry chef not to worry about it.

Polly took the dogs to the river, climbed down the bank, and stayed there by the water, in the sunlight, while the dogs splashed and sniffed and her heart slowed. She looked around for a place to lie down, but it wasn’t that kind of stretch. She flipped a rock, Helen style, and stared down at some sort of larva, gray and shiny and wriggling.

The dogs shot by after a small furred animal, and a smell of musk floated past. Maybe a mink, but not a skunk, thank god. Invisible animals scrabbling around her, all the things she didn’t usually notice screaming to be seen, when all she could see were dead girls leaving their swing sets, ponies, dance floors, velvet chairs or dirt-poor houses for twirling cars, for spinning rivers, for appointments with shitty humans. If you were a girl, so much of life was down to luck, walking home at the wrong time, with the wrong man behind you. It came down to your mother picking the wrong second husband, to errors of trust, to bad timing.

None of it had happened to Polly. One man in the hallway of the Thompson Street apartment building when she was four, the Porter girl at the beach estate, one time when she almost didn’t lie to get out of a strange-eyed date’s car in high school. His eyes reminded her of veering away from Rita’s eyes, and maybe she’d veered away from crazy all her life afterward, maybe knowing Rita had made her just wary enough.