One morning in late June—a steamy, midwestern kind of morning, not uncommon for a town on Long Island Sound—Dee took Edmund and Polly on errands to Brooklyn in the old car, a big blue 1944 Ford, because Papa had the Volvo. At the Italian market, where they’d stopped for veal cutlet and fontina, the three of them stared down into a full bucket of live squid. The owner had brought them from the Fulton Market; it was the feast day of John the Baptist, and the squid would be stuffed for one dish and sautéed for another. Dee listened to the Italians squabble over recipes, while Polly and Edmund backed away from the bucket.

“You can’t possibly use all of them,” Dee said, touching the moving water with a finger. “I’ll take three pounds.”

Everyone always did what Dee wanted. Her hands shook when she took out her money, but you wouldn’t pity her. The shop owner scooped the creatures out, some listless, some wriggling.

Dee needed a pillow to see over the dash of the Ford. She was not much bigger than the children, an eighty-year age difference but none of them over one hundred pounds.

“I used to be taller and curvy,” said Dee. “But you can’t keep everything.”

The children were alone in the house with Papa and Dee for the week: Merle and Jane were off visiting Rita at a hospital upstate and would stay for a few nights in the city. To be silly, said Dee. To be young. She wiggled her hand in the air as if she were a conductor, as if the knotted fingers were dancers, and talked about John the Baptist, beheaded by a beautiful woman, as saints were, back in the day. There’d always been a festival at this time of the year in most of Europe, because of the solstice, but these days you needed to go all the way up to East Harlem to find a parade. They were better off at home, anyway, getting the house cleaned up in Rita’s absence.

Salomé, squid, saints. At stop signs, they could hear the lidded container slosh behind their heads. Edmund acted as though he hadn’t heard Dee say his mother’s name.

“She won’t be out of the hospital for a few weeks,” said Dee, who noticed everything. She stared at the windshield with huge eyes, and her papery eyelids seemed to take up most of her face. “She needs her rest.”

But they knew Dee was happy—they were all happy—to have Rita gone.