The lesson was over, and Helen trotted up, dripping. While Polly dressed her—the drill involved sheltering a toddler’s body with a towel while you pulled up pants, avoiding the funky locker room—Drake went to the pool edge and gestured to Connie, who was pretending that she was having a deep thought on the far side. She crossed with as much of her body submerged as possible. Polly watched them talk. Drake touched the side of Connie’s face and kissed the top of her head.

All this while the teenagers gaped. Back in the car—a wet child, slavering dogs; it didn’t matter to Drake, who’d grown up poor in a shitty part of Spokane—Drake said, “I wanted to tell her I was sorry. She lost her best friend.”

Polly only then realized she had not thought to do something that simple.

That afternoon, while Maude and Drake drank mimosas and toured the county in the Porsche he usually kept hidden in his Mission Creek barn, Polly tossed chunks of butter around like playing cards. She steamed the chard, warmed the Bolognese, bickered with Jane about the proportion of butter and flour in the béchamel. She started batches of gingery molasses cookies, the easiest dessert option. She checked the clock, doomed to forget what she’d seen with each tray, but Helen followed her with an old alarm clock, one with a beating paddle that Ned had helped her take apart and put back together. When Maude was delivered back to them, Polly asked her to grate some cheese, just out of curiosity, but Maude wandered away to play cards with Sam. She would cheat, and then she would sneak upstairs.

They made the pasta dough and wrapped it to rest, put water on to boil, and cleared the counter again to set up the Atlas machine. They let Helen crank until it bored her, and the house was soon draped with handkerchiefs of pasta, Tibetan flags, drying white stockings. An hour later they were done. Merle took the pans to the restaurant to bake off.

“Easy peasy,” said Jane. She’d been on a rant about the idea that Merle wanted to look at property outside of town, the better to have chickens and goats and other character-building animals for their grandchildren. “Maybe the problem will melt away.”

They were sitting outside, and they could hear Maude snore through the upstairs window. Jane kicked into the inadvisability of drinking when elderly while Polly doled out the small harmless fireworks, coiled snakes and pooping chickens, cheap-ass tiny tanks and expanding pagodas. She wanted to purchase bottle rockets, smoke grenades, sixteen-chamber cakes that would vibrate the town.