She pushed her broken bike home with the police report crumpled in her shorts. If she thought at all, it was about whether the old shit would survive to buy her a new bike, and if her scraped legs—almost tan after a week of digging in the garden in the weird, balmy weather—would make a short skirt no longer an option for Josie’s wedding to Polly’s cousin Harry Swanberg that weekend. But before Polly let the bike drop in the grass in the front yard, she’d forgotten who was getting married, and she didn’t wonder at the absence of her children or her husband or her dogs, all off at a friend’s cabin at Mission Creek. She didn’t remember she had kids or Ned or pets, even though the cat was following her around the house. She climbed into bed and slept. When Ned came home at 9:00 and tried to wake her, Polly said “sick,” but she wasn’t hot, and she wasn’t fretful, and since she’d never done anything like this before he was worried but let it go. He put the children to bed and was asleep next to her within an hour. In the morning, when she wouldn’t get up, he saw some blood on the pillow and found the police report in her shorts and took her to the hospital. They sent Polly by helicopter to Billings and thought of transferring her to Seattle, but the bleeding was minor, and the swelling abated quickly, and Polly seemed like herself within a couple of days.

And so she went home with a stitched scalp and waited to feel normal after Josie buzz-cut the rest of her hair. Jane and Merle flew from Michigan the day after the accident to sit in the hospital. Polly’s three younger siblings, all in California, visited over the next few weeks. Jane and Merle talked of moving, saying they’d wanted to for years. Merle, who’d retired after thirty years of teaching high school biology, spent most of his time lulling Polly into playing card games.