When Maude walked into the house, she did the same thing with her hand that Papa did when Polly was little, smushing Helen and Sam from the head down, pushing them joyful and squirming into the ground. Papa raised Maude after her father, Dee’s first husband, died in 1918. Both lovely men, said Maude. She believed her mother had understood her luck.

Luck, thought Polly, flashing there and back.

Usually Maude stayed with her widowed daughter-in-law Opal, Harry’s mother, but this time she wanted to stay in the house she’d been born in, on July 5, 1912—before the millions of dead boys in World War I, before antibiotics, before her mother could vote—and she insisted on taking her old bedroom, now Polly’s office. Maude, whose surviving children were in their sixties and seventies, said she loved the idea of hearing young children when she woke up. And she never minded a mess, because her mother was a horrible housekeeper. She thought it sweet that Jane and Polly kept up the tradition.

Polly followed Maude upstairs with the suitcase, taking in her spindly legs, the crumpled silk skirt, and tiny black heels. Polly could feel the fatigue in those shins, the effort of almost a century of movement.

“I worry all your good clothes will be covered with dog hair,” she said.

“I brought some easy things, dear. And sneakers. I know how it is.”

Maude needed a nap before dinner, but first she toured the garden, though she said she hated gardens, because they were the reason she’d been neglected as a child.

A joke? Polly found it close to home. Nevertheless, having Maude compliment her roses and clematis, her campanulas and the number of tiny plums on the oldest tree, the one Dee tree they’d been able to save, made Polly happy.

Maude wanted to nap outside, though she knew she’d never manage to get out of a hammock. The children dragged the most comfortable lawn chair under the old trees at the bottom of the garden and ran back up for a quilt, because Maude said she was thin-skinned.

“You can see right through it,” whispered Helen, while Maude slept.

Polly, who had spent her childhood with old people, said Maude looked fine.

Maude, to be honest, was difficult. Before every visit, Polly constructed rosy scenarios—the things they would do for Maude, the way Maude would enjoy those efforts—but things inevitably went awry. Polly chose to forget this in another spastic push for happiness, a kind of Groundhog Day of hope over experience.