Muzzy: Polly had close-cropped hair and a scar on her scalp; Polly had thunked her head on the pavement. Polly was bouncing back, sharpening up, vigilant, and on her way to being perfectly fine. To that end, at a doctor’s suggestion, she made at least one list each day, starting with everything she hadn’t managed the day before. She’d always loved lists, and she despised the doctor, and so she now believed the tactic had been her own idea.

REMIND PEOPLE blue tape for dates on walk-in

drop off food at restaurant

clean house! hahaha!

Maude party menu

Mom’s manuscript & tribute notes

call Helga about edit on Andalusian cookbook—okay by Sept

Drake’s stuff

PHOTOS

family tree

note to the Delgados? food to the Delgados?

Polly could have combined some of these lines, but she was trying for a sense of accomplishment. She’d forgotten to include errands on the list, a lost opportunity for a satisfying deletion. When she added it to the top later, she would not realize that she’d written errants.

The new morning drill, before they’d set out in the car that morning, Jane phoning from across the yard to ask if she could come over: Did Polly want to start editing Jane’s manuscript, just for practice? They could do something fun, or Jane could help with the kids, they could simply get ready for Maude. Or Jane could help Polly sort her projects, the great slipping piles of paper in the office, so that Polly could be ready to start working when she felt better.

A dizzying welter of shit, but it was meant to be face-saving, all around. If Jane didn’t approach it this way, if she didn’t dangle herself in multiple positions, Polly might act as if she didn’t have time for her mother, or Polly might feel that Jane was making the obvious point that Polly’s brain might be too damaged for much of anything.

Polly and her husband, Ned Berrigan, had moved to Livingston, Montana, fifteen years earlier from New York, and their two children—Sam, nine, and Helen, four—were born in the hospital six blocks from their frame house. Ned worked as an attorney for five years before they bought an old restaurant in the Elite Hotel, which they named Peake’s after an old family friend, with a small inheritance. As she had in New York, Polly edited (mostly mysteries, scripts, and cookbooks) and helped on a few shifts. They acquired two dogs, a cat, and good friends. Polly had piles of second cousins in town, and now more family was visiting: her parents, Jane and Merle Schuster, had driven out from Michigan the week before, and would stay another month in the alley cottage next to Polly and Ned’s house. They wanted to help; because of the accident, they thought Polly and her family needed help.