But it was too cramped for Jane and Merle, who’d retired the year before. They wouldn’t last another week without a major fight, and needed to see a realtor. They’d been kinder to each other for a year now, with Merle not so resentful about life, Jane no longer telling him to exercise, drink less, mute his self-pity. It didn’t seem fair that you’d start life with polio and end with cancer, but, as Merle pointed out, he hadn’t ended yet. He was in remission, and in Michigan, he would still swim every day, either in a pool or a lake. In Livingston, there was no pool within thirty miles, and the river wouldn’t do for laps, ever. He was an obsessive man, prone, when nervous, to bouts of overeating followed by bouts of exercise. He was going to lose his mind over the course of the summer, and take them all down with him, especially Ned.

Polly tasted the glossy meat and tried to concentrate on how delicious it was, how fucking perfect, rather than the next batch of dialogue warbling across the yard, Merle talking Jane through the nitty-gritty of drowning: how long it took, what it probably felt like, why a body stayed down, how a body came up, how far Ariel might have traveled, how little was known about river morphology.

Polly slammed a door to make him stop.

They ate outside at a picnic table shaded by the willows that ran along the property line. From Polly and Ned’s yard you could see mountains to the south; from the upstairs you could see the Crazy Mountains to the northeast, and the slow rise of the Bozeman Pass to the west. During this kindest time of year, the wind rarely got over forty miles an hour, though it tended to hit that mark often during the fire season in late July and August. Tonight it was still clear, and in the garden, the roses were still blooming, and the tomatoes were surging out of a chilly June, not yet battered by bugs or heat waves or hail.

After dinner, they dispersed. Helen dragged a hose around the yard, Sam read in the hammock. Polly started a card to Ariel’s parents, then gave up and wandered in the garden. On a normal day, in a normal week, she’d crawl around for hours, ignoring her children, watching things branch and bud, killing flea beetles by hand, one by one. She hilled potatoes, weeded, pulled out a row of bolted lettuce. She no longer heard the helicopter, out for a last evening run, but she noticed when it passed in front of the low sun.