Because she came from a family of writers, friends and family assumed Polly would write. She never wanted that—she liked to fix problems, not create them. Polly liked doing what she did. Editing recipes gave her both the anal, geometric satisfaction of quantities and process and the zen of variables. She liked the puzzle of scripts and mysteries, the who knows what when and why; she liked dreaming up solutions. The writhing, errant world was filled with good ideas that needed only a little air and discipline. Once a book or script was rolling, she stuck with it like a meth-addled Jack Russell on a large, juicy rat. She was a technician, with no interest in creating her own stories; she didn’t mind that an idea wasn’t hers in the beginning. She came from a family of special and strange, but she wasn’t special, not special at all.

Though privately, she believed that the ability to turn a turd of a manuscript into a diamond was nothing short of magic.

“I thought, Why Polly?” said her internist after her accident.

“Why not?” asked Polly. She guessed the doctor meant that they knew each other and liked each other. They were almost friends, and he would rather misfortunes happen to people he didn’t know. Polly wanted to pat his arm, but he might take it the wrong way. Just an accident, just a shame. It would be easier to bear if the damage had a plot, if she knew the point to this part of the story, or whether she’d ever make a living from her brain again.

Everyone had different acts. Montana had begun for Polly and Ned in 1987, when she talked him into driving out with her. He’d never been west of the Mississippi. They arrived in November, grimmest of months, and moved into the rundown house Jane had inherited from her great-aunts. Ned passed the Montana bar and got a job with Vinnie Susak. Polly edited freelance and tried to get catering work. They spent what they made and more fixing up the house: new plumbing, new wiring, a roof. It had four tiny bedrooms, one of which Polly used as an office. They put new countertops in the kitchen but kept the old white subway tile, so dated that it was new again, installed a commercial range and double oven, patched the plaster rather than putting in modern drywall. Ned rebuilt the battered sections of brick wall around the garden, and they pruned the surviving fruit trees and vines, fiddled with old terraced beds (peonies, rhubarb, roses) that looked out over Sacajawea Park, soccer nets and tennis courts and a playground in what had been, back when the house was first built—long before the Yellowstone had been rerouted during the Depression and the park had been created by the WPA—marshy cottonwood lowlands buffering the river.