“Who did?”

“I don’t know.” Katie shrugged. “People in the olden days.”

“What olden days?”

“Not sure.”

“Who told you?”

“Google. Or maybe Morgan. I can’t remember which.”

“I’m not sure what to do from here,” said Sherri. She held up her lobster and looked at its creepy, incomprehensible eyes.

Katie said, “I got you,” and took out her phone and loaded up a YouTube video on how to crack a lobster. Normally Sherri would not have allowed the phone at dinner, but she needed the help. Katie moved the phone to the center of the table and they both watched, trying to be surreptitious about it so that the other restaurantgoers wouldn’t know what novices they were. Apparently you were supposed to twist the tail off before you did anything else, then the claws. You could use a small fork to reach up into the shell and pull the meat out of the claws; the meat in the tail normally came out in one big piece, and was firmer than the meat in the claws. They dunked the lobster meat in butter and stuffed it into their mouths like it was the first meal they’d had in weeks. They ate corn on the cob and coleslaw and onion rings. They ate all of it.

Katie hadn’t even finished the last of her lobster when she said, “After dinner can we get ice cream? There’s a place right across the street, Dunlap’s? It’s supposed to be good. Morgan told me it’s good.”

Sherri hesitated. Now that fall was here, she’d have to cut back on her spending, cook healthy food for her and Katie, maybe find some way to exercise regularly. (Definitely not barre class.) “I don’t know—”

“Please? It’s the second to last day of summer! It’s the last night of summer, because tomorrow is technically a school night.”

“Okay,” said Sherri. “Of course we can, sure.”

The day after tomorrow Katie would walk up Olive Street to High Street, where she would meet up with Morgan and a few other girls from the group to walk to the middle school, and Sherri would clean up from breakfast and take a shower and get in her car and drive to her job, where she would do all of her usual job things, which were boring but not mind-numbingly so, and she would try not to think about the fact that Katie was out of her sight and out of her control, and that, sure, the school had some sort of intercom system or whatever, but was it really safe, was it really secure?

Would anything ever be secure enough to satisfy Sherri?