She’d never wanted to live in LA. Even as a child, this city couldn’t seem to deliver on its promise. A two-hour drive from Frazier Park and when you got there, to the tar pits or the concert hall, you could have been anywhere. The drive to Disneyland was almost twice that, and it wasn’t even Disney World. New York was the city that captured Holly’s imagination. Day or night, twinkly or gritty, there was no mistaking the place, no matter how often location scouts tried to pass off the streets of Toronto or Chicago for the Financial District. She’d been sure when she left home for art school that it would only be a matter of time before she had her own live/work space in Williamsburg or Bushwick. And yet here she was in 2019, almost forty years old, and she’d never lived anywhere but Southern California. Whenever they visited New York, she felt different, as if there were hundreds of decisions she could still make with her life—ride the subway, shave her hair off, move to Berlin, take a lover, wheatpaste her drawings on all the sidewalk sheds. She should have pressed Ted harder when Flynn was a baby. They could have bought a town house in Brooklyn Heights or maybe London. He could’ve directed plays while she worked in her studio. She’d take the kids with her to check out the galleries in Chelsea, and they wouldn’t complain. They’d understand something about their mother that they never got the chance to here in LA, something that eluded her too, what actually made her tick. But Ted was adamant. He was born and raised in Manhattan, and he was done with it. Fine to visit, but he didn’t want to make a life there.

On the Sepulveda Pass, traffic came to a standstill.

“Let’s run through the rest,” Holly said. She was still responsible for putting on a successful party tonight, and the business with the giraffe was worrying. Themes were tricky. If you didn’t push them all the way, almost to the point of madness, they fell apart under their own weight. Bump to Pump served low-income mothers—providing them with prenatal care, financial literacy workshops, donated breast pumps and gently used strollers and cribs—so a children’s nursery theme was the obvious choice. Holly couldn’t believe no one had done it yet. But it could go very wrong, very quickly.

“We’ll have bumper cars in the driveway,” Zanne said. “People will race each other around the fountain.”

“That’s the Bump. Where’s the Pump?”

“We’re setting up a train track around the pool,” Erin said. “Guests can ride a pump car around it.”

“I’m still not sure about this one. Will people know what a pump car is?” Holly asked.