Thea couldn’t buy anything for the baby until after the birth, for fear of attracting the evil eye, but she could buy the doll for Georgia. Georgia would find it touching, or she’d be hurt. Thea wasn’t sure which reaction she hoped for. She knew her maternal love would always be edged with meanness, so as to matter: sometimes you needed a blade to get results.

Of Orly, Florence said, “Frankly, I worship that boy.” Thea thought it was a funny way to feel about your own child. You worried about your kid; you loved her; you wondered what her existence said about you. Florence’s adoration of Orly would have been intolerable had she not genuinely loved all children.

“I worship him,” said Florence, “and you worship Georgia. Geor-jah,” Florence called, and then said it again, the syllables distinct, cherry-dark and cherry-sweet.

“Hello,” said Georgia.

Florence said, as though just remembering, “I think there might be cake.”

They were sitting in Florence’s kitchen, the children cross-legged on the floor eating canned spaghetti, the mothers at the table eating pumpernickel bread and salted butter. The amiable Loren had baked the bread himself. At the mention of cake, Orly shut his eyes and rubbed his stomach. “Cake,” he said. “Cake, cake, cake, cake.” “Cake,” Georgia agreed, though she regarded Orly with caution: he kept saying it like a toy machine gun—“Cakecakecakecakecake.” She turned to her mother with a worried expression, a flutter of a smile, a private joke. No, thought Thea, I do not worship her. That would be immodest and unlucky. She worshipped no human being, except Florence herself, a little.

Every Saturday for two years, except summers, Thea and Georgia had lunch after dance with Florence and Orly in their house in Southeast Portland. The house had brown unpainted vertical siding, and looked like a hearty sport-related building somewhere in Europe: a sauna or ski chalet or the place where you strapped and unstrapped your ice skates at the edge of a frozen lake. It was the year that Thea’s husband was finishing his dissertation, followed by the year that their marriage was breaking up.

After lunch, in the piney backyard, Orly would cartwheel or walk on his hands or spin until he fell down, and Georgia would somersault knock-kneed and askew, and they both ended up on their backs, laughing at the sky.

Then kindergarten, and Georgia was off to Meriwether Lewis and Orly to Woodstock, where he lasted a week.

“He bit his teacher,” said Florence. “Mrs. Pietsch. I would have bit her, too.”