“I had to twist his arm, but Joe finally agreed to step in.” There was another tap at the door. “Good. That’s him now.”

“How’s Harry?” Letty asked. She was setting up the folding chairs around the perimeter of the Ping-Pong table.

“Better than he deserves to be,” Joe said. “The docs said the aspirin you made him take probably saved his life. Sheila asked me to let you know how grateful she is.”

He gestured toward the Ping-Pong table and handed her a paddle. “How about you warm me up? Ava guilt-tripped me into filling in for Harry, and I haven’t played in ages.”

“Me? I don’t think I’ve played Ping-Pong since I was twelve.”

“It’ll come back to you. We’ll just volley a couple minutes. Those oldsters are gonna break down the doors to get at the pigs in blankets if we don’t let ’em in pretty soon.”

He held the ball in his left hand and the paddle in his right and gave it a thwack. The ball bounced once on Joe’s side of the table, then skipped over the net and caromed off Letty’s side. She swung but missed.

But the “pong” sound of the ball hitting the table took her instantly back to Camp WeLoJe, the sleepaway camp where she’d spent two weeks the summer she was twelve. Somehow, Terri had wangled a “scholarship” for both her and Tanya to the camp, which was a moldering collection of cabins sprinkled around the edge of a dank-smelling lake in the mountains of North Carolina. WeLoJe stood for We Love Jesus, and it was run by an ultraconservative Christian church that forbade watching television, wearing makeup, and chewing gum, the three activities that were twelve-year-old Letty’s personal Holy Trinity.

Tanya had cleverly faked a case of stomach flu on the day of departure and had stayed home, much to Terri’s annoyance.

The campers had mandatory Bible study every morning and afternoon, campfire “sing-alongs,” archery, arts and crafts, and the only thing Letty remotely enjoyed, a Ping-Pong table. She was an outcast from the beginning, because all the other girls in her cabin attended the same church together. At the end of the two most miserable weeks of her childhood, when the church bus dropped her off at home, the only thing Letty had to show for her stay was a leather belt stamped with WeLoJe and her initials, and a wicked case of poison ivy. But she knew how to play Ping-Pong.

Letty retrieved the ball and lobbed it over the net. Joe hit it back, she managed to return his serve, whiffed the next two serves, then, to her amazement, managed to sustain a volley for four or five exchanges.

Someone was pounding on the plate-glass door. “Open up! We need to practice too.” Merwin Maples and Oscar Jensen had their faces pressed to the glass.