“Bye-bye,” the baby said, his voice a little bell. “Bye-bye,” he waved, as we arrived for the party at the lake.

We were stiff after driving from our house hours south in a town overrun by tourists. We put gifts on a table in the hall. The three children all had birthdays the same week.

The baby’s father showed us to the porch. He poured us drinks, said, “This’ll change your handwriting.”

The others were friends from across the lake who came up for a month every summer, tying their bull’s-eye or turnabout to a cleat and hopping out onto a dock.

Between the back porch and the lake was a well-kept lawn with a grill, coals just lit, and a large decorated paper-bag piñata strung up in a shimmering willow. The baby’s mother and a woman I didn’t know called me over to join them beside the piñata. The woman I didn’t know asked if I had a match. I didn’t see the cigarette she held, and thought she meant to light the piñata. I told her, and we all doubled over picturing melting gummy bears dripping like hot wax onto the outstretched hands of the blindfolded children beneath it.

“Some little boy’s scrotum get nailed to a tree?” asked one of the children’s fathers from the porch. “I see three women laughing like this—” he bent over, knees pressed together, and held his crotch—“I look for a scrotum nailed to a tree.”

Farther out, naked children pushed each other off a dock into the bracing lake. At the far end of the dock was a small child’s slide poised above deep water. “I just put it there to scare his mother,” said the baby’s father, chuckling diabolically: “Look—he can go in by himself!”

Tony Peebles—handsome, hearty next-door neighbor—still had not arrived.

“Heart attack,” someone said.

“Car wreck,” someone else said.

“Heart attack then car wreck,” came a chorus.

“Talking to someone at the store,” said his wife. “He went there an hour ago. I was telling Judy, he goes to pick up the steaks, there could be a stuffed effigy of the butcher behind the counter, Tony’d engage it in conversation.”

Only a couple of us knew what was taking so long. The children’s dog had been killed the month before. The children felt it would be unfair to get another dog—unfair to their former dog. The children were in pain, and I felt I knew what to say. I said to their father, quoting a lovely poem, “Tell them this: The need for the new love is faithfulness to the old.’”

He said, “That’s what I used to tell myself when I cheated on my ex-wife.”

But he had agreed, and the men were picking up the children’s new dog, a pup from a nearby camp.

“I hope none of you are allergic,” said the baby’s mother, moving aside a vase of wildflowers to make room for a cake on a plate. “It’s an allergy-fest out there.