Olivia was in the kitchen, slicing cucumbers for lunch. She couldn’t think of a cooler thing to do on such a hot day. The windows were open, but there was no breeze; the white, lacy curtains, which had been put up before she was born, hung undisturbed. The large kitchen, with its blue-green walls, the pearly dinette table and matching Naugahyde chairs, the black-and-white linoleum floor, seemed frozen in time. Nothing had been changed, not really, in decades. Olivia’s brother, Hull, wandered in. His thin, naked torso was spattered with light green paint. There were flecks of it in his silver chest hair. He wore a blue bandanna tied rakishly to the side of his skinny neck.

“What the hell have you been doing?” asked Olivia.

“Painting your fence with Bukowski,” said Hull pointedly. “He found three half-empty cans of Arsenic Green in the shed. We couldn’t resist.” Jed Bukowski was the seventy-year-old handyman, the last relic of a staff that had been gradually pared away as all the Van Camp money was cooked off. Originating in a nineteenth-century lead mine in Colorado, the story of the Van Camp family had been one of steady downward mobility for about a hundred years.

“Have you been drinking?” asked Olivia.

“Not particularly,” said Hull. “That child of yours is splat in the middle of the driveway.”

“What do you mean, ‘splat’?” said Olivia, with a hint of alarm.

“What’s the word? Anyway, she’s blocking the way in. She’s lying on the driveway, behind a table with a huge cake on it.”

“She’s trying to sell it, isn’t she?” said Olivia. “She made it herself. You ought to buy a piece. Any normal uncle would have done so already.”

“I’m going to,” said Hull. “I just need a glass of water.” He filled a glass from the tap as Olivia walked outside and stood on the splintered porch, surveying the newly green fence. It was a pretty, old-fashioned color. The hunchbacked and tremulous Bukowski was painting the last of the posts with extreme concentration. Olivia took a cigarette from the pack in her shirt pocket and lit up. Lara was lying on the driveway, staring at the sky. An enormous yellow cake melted on a rickety pine table inches from her splayed feet in their cheap blue sneakers, chosen from a barrel of shoes in a store that also sold turkeys and enormous jars of mayonnaise.

“Honey?” called Olivia.

The girl shifted her head.

“Would you care for a glass of cool lemonade?”

Lara turned back to see her slender, elegant mother standing on the broken-down porch cluttered with an old mattress, a broken dryer, and a blue tricycle.

“We should sell lemonade!” the girl bellowed back.