How to pull it off? Other famous people were tucked into pretty corners of the state. Drake was no fool, and he did everything right, simply dropped off the planet. Pick a town accepting of strangers and of the strange. Make friends, learn to row. Donate to the cops, hospital, food bank, local museum; volunteer for Search and Rescue.

Drake’s sole professional issue these days was his reluctance to return to Los Angeles for work, his reluctance to go anywhere, for love, for money, for anything. He was energetic, locally. Ned fondly called him a remora after Drake spent time dreaming up a character much like Harry, an ex-cop and current archaeologist, river searcher, private eye, Romeo. He’d sucked up Polly and Ned’s life, too, though he gave up playing a chef after two shifts at Peake’s. The fall before, during elderly Maude Swanberg’s extended 9/11 visit, Drake listened as Maude unspooled stories about Papa’s years in Hollywood under the contrail-free sky of her childhood, both of them eating a tremendous quantity of Polly’s tomatoes, and dabbled in the idea of a story set in Montana in the thirties. Now he was reading Jane’s books.

Jane tossed another stack of scripts in the box. “He pays me, Mom,” said Polly.

“He’s an infant,” said Jane.

They left for the airport.

When Maude Swanberg was a young woman, she’d been trouble, smart and wild. Her nickname was Maude Gone: she eloped with her first husband, a pretty boy from college, in 1931, but she bolted and they divorced in a friendly way the next year. These days, when no one remembered Maud Gonne, the joke fell flat.

Maude’s next husband, a childhood friend, was shot down over France in 1944, and this broke her heart. “What would you have done if your husband died when you were thirty-two?” she asked Polly once. I’d have killed myself, thought Polly. But she smiled, and she wouldn’t have, because she had children, just like Maude.

“That doesn’t mean she didn’t have a good life in other ways,” said Jane gently, as Sam blinked over a photo of the deceased hero Swanberg. Maude never remarried, though she’d survived a series of subsequent lovers.

All Polly could see in Maude’s face for the first few minutes of every visit was Dee, and now, with her new brain, Polly felt as if she could find bits of her great-grandmother, feature by feature. Everything that mattered was close to the surface these days. Maude, who had her mother’s big, soft, hooded eyes, was regal without being tall. She did sit-ups, push-ups, and walked at least a mile daily, and ideally three, in place if necessary. She wore her dense but fine hair, once red-brown, now powder-white, in a Gibson Girl cloud.