The way time mixed: Whenever Maude visited, she looked at Jane or Merle or Polly or Ned and said, “Amazing that you all survived.” She’d said it on her visit the fall before, during that extra week in September when all the flights in the country ceased, and she’d said it at Polly and Ned’s wedding, repeatedly. But the first time Maude gave her survival line in front of an adult Polly, it was 1987, when Maude and Polly and Jane were all in Livingston for the joint memorial for the aunts Inge and Odile, sisters-in-law and lovers for seventy years who’d died within weeks of each other.

“How dare you,” said Jane.

“Well, let’s talk about it,” said Maude, who was, after all, a psychiatrist.

This year, no one took the bait after Maude drank too much wine and tried the line. They’d lived through it, and Maude couldn’t for much longer. Merle next politely declined to discuss the dimming of his hopes as a poet while they ate salmon with green sauce, a salad, and socca before the rodeo. Ned did not wish to examine his abandoned legal career.

“We are not in a reflective mood, I gather,” said Maude.

Polly was; Polly was screaming with questions, but she knew the beginning of each trip was always about Maude. She wanted her childhood food, Dee’s food, which was different than other people’s childhood food. The list shifted with the decades—a few foreign entries from travels, posh restaurant items, favorites from previous visits—but it was an ambitious list, haute WASP Continental: soufflés and consommés, the potpie of the night before, a bourride. A potpourri of Szechuan and Spanish and Italian dishes, lapin à la moutarde, lobster thermidor, boeuf bourguignon. Maude was less precise about desserts—a plum tart? “Something” with lemon curd and meringue?

“Can you manage this?” asked Maude.

“I’ve always managed,” said Polly.

“I mean now. How is your head, anyway?” Maude leaned closer.

Ned left the room. Don’t be angry, thought Polly. “Not bad,” she said. “Helen can follow me around with a timer.”

“I won’t be asking you for this again,” said Maude.

“Are you sick, Maude?” Jane asked. “Do you think you’re dying?”

“I’m not sick, but of course I’m dying.”

Despite Ned’s resentment, despite Jane lines like “Stop and think before you say yes,” Polly resolved to cook her brain into submission, vaporize thoughts of Ariel through movement. What, Polly wondered, was the fucking point in thinking? If Polly could avoid doubt and grief and Maude’s clear sense of doom, why the hell not?