Tried and failed. “The garden,” said Polly. This was the oldest argument, the thing that goaded Polly most: Jane refused to believe Polly remembered being with her grandfather Frank, tiny in a forest of tall, staked tomatoes. Frank blew his nose like a trumpet, and whistled, unlike Papa, who’d been a hummer. He led her down rows guarded by garter snakes and daddy longlegs. While Polly was the kind of child who’d throw up if someone forced her to eat a cooked carrot, she’d stand for hours picking raspberries, ignoring the fat buzz of bees, the potential touch of awful things.

A photo did exist of the big garden to the side of the house, and Polly and Jane both cared deeply about gardens, and Jane liked to joke that her daughter was poaching a memory from The Godfather. Did Frank put an orange in his mouth, give her a plant sprayer? But Polly could see her grandfather rip at a weed hiding on the far side of a green-painted tomato stake. He’d helped her pull at another, but she couldn’t make it budge, and he sighed and swore when he saw a tomato worm, plucking it—writhing—from the half-stripped branch, crushing it with a boot. It hissed.

“No, it didn’t,” said Jane. “Worms don’t hiss.”

They do when your ears are three years old and two feet from the ground, thought Polly, watching Helen grub for a Tootsie Pop. Nearer my God than thee. Other things Polly remembered from a low vantage point: an ant crawling over a wild strawberry, spiders in lampshades, hair in grown-up noses, the daunting height of sweet corn. How was it any different than now, this bizarre tendency to look at something until it practically melted? The oddly identical scars on Ned’s and Sam’s legs; the brown flecks in Jane’s right eye; the pale, vulnerable skull under the fluff on Helen’s head.

Helen lost interest in the parade. “We have a worm that hisses in the garden,” she said. “Near the raspberries. It guards the rabbit.”

Polly and Jane fell silent on the curb. A second marching band passed, then the rodeo queen and her court. The women wore shiny western gear—turquoise, melon, lime—with jewels on their hats and in their horses’ manes. Sam already looked sarcastic but Helen watched with awe, and Polly snatched her to her lap, just for a minute, just to remind her not to run in front of horses or clowns, just to hold Helen because she felt wonderful, and who knew what Helen would remember tomorrow, or in thirty-eight years.