2 Episode Two. Tuesday.

Three Days Before the Wedding.

Midmorning finds Bennie in the breakfast nook, a scum of cream on what remains of her now-cold third cup of coffee (a blunder, is her stomach’s verdict, but then these days her stomach is supremely finicky), an assortment of to-do lists on blue notepaper fanned out before her. There’s something she needs to add to the shopping list, only she can’t come up with the word. Pregnancy brain. Her hair is still slightly damp from the shower; she likes letting it dry slowly in the luxury of sun now shining in again after so many days of rain. All the windows are flung wide—she did the flinging herself first thing this morning, going from room to room to let the leaping breezes whisk away the fungal mustiness that had built up over the past few days—and the new air is so buttery and blue she could weep for joy. If it weren’t for feeling she could weep from despair, that is.

Rein in those hormones, she scolds herself. No need to be melodramatic. Groan from exasperation, more like.

It’s all very well for Clem to declare that she and her friends are in charge of everything, Mom, you won’t have to worry about a thing! They’re too inexperienced to understand all the backstage work involved in hosting a wedding. They wouldn’t know to think about things like do they have enough seating for all the older people, and who’s going to clean the bathrooms and make sure there are fresh hand towels. And although they’ve promised they have all the food under control, what could that mean, really? Have they any idea about things like quantities? And food poisoning? How to keep cold things cold and hot things hot? Have they given thought to coolers and chafing dishes, ice and—what is that chemical jelly stuff called?

Sterno. She adds it to the list.

From where she’s sitting she can see chocolate smudges on the freezer door, a rubble of bread crumbs under the toaster oven, a pileup of Matchbox cars wedged behind the radiator. A glance heavenward only reminds her of the disaster of the ceiling, where some hidden source of moisture has caused an interesting work in progress: what started a year ago as a spreading pointillism of discoloration began to be punctuated this winter by dark, fringed craters where the plaster is bulging loose; in recent weeks a few chunks have actually broken off. In fact—What is that?—she leans over and peers at the butter dish and, yes, extricates from it another ceiling flake. The most overwhelming part is that all these flaws are merely the ones visible from where she’s sitting: multiply them by a hundred, at least.

Ah well. Soon these problems won’t be theirs. Assuming they can get a buyer. We know we can get a buyer, Stalwart said. Meaningfully. Meaning the Haredim. But shouldn’t we at least try to sell to someone . . . you know, just regular? she said. It’s not that she doesn’t acknowledge the strangeness of her position. She, who’s never lifted a finger for the village, who’s never expressed any particular allegiance to it, siding with those who hope to keep its character intact. She’s not sure why she feels this pull. Some latent sentimentality she never knew she possessed, some crumb of pre-nostalgia shaken loose by the decision to move? Or is it a biological imperative, heightened by the fact that she is, once again, with child—a primal desire to root for the continuation of Our Kind?

Could such primal desire, come to think of it, be the cause of her husband’s equally surprising position: his blanket defensiveness in the face of concerns about the newcomers? For even though he was the one to initiate the talk of moving, he won’t brook a negative word about the Haredim. She is puzzled, troubled, by the lump of resentment he seems to have been nursing since last night. Stalwart, ordinarily so open to engaging the many sides of a complex problem, seems in this instance reluctant to grant that a person could oppose the new housing development for any reason other than knee-jerk bigotry. She thinks of all the evidence—information he has shared with her—about what the Haredim really might do if they reach critical mass in Rundle Junction: vote as a bloc to change zoning laws; slash public school budgets while sending their own children to yeshivas that prepare them not to become productive members of the workforce but to devote themselves full-time to religious studies; decimate public coffers with all those large families living below the poverty line. Generalizations, yes. Stereotypes, admittedly. But generalizations and stereotypes based on what is actually happening in other villages and towns where they have established strongholds. Based, as Mantha would say, on Real Life.

Funny—no, not funny: awful—to think of him thinking of her as his adversary. She recalls the story Walter told her years ago about an old couple. Were they people he’d known or was it a fable or a midrash or something? Anyway, the wife has something wrong with her foot, and together they go see the doctor. The doctor says, What brings you today? And the husband says, Our foot hurts us.

Our foot.

Bennie would very much like to ask Walter if she’s hurt him. Ask him, How’s our foot?

Oh well, she can’t, not now. Stalwart, that cad, has deserted her. Absconded as usual on the 6:54 to Grand Central. He is—big breath here for the official title—Chief Information Officer at the Ujima Collaborative, a Nonprofit Social Research Organization Specializing in Developmental Programs for Underserved Youth. Or as Bennie likes to say: Other people do important work and Walter talks about it.

Joking, of course.

So Walter’s gone—he’s taken off the rest of the week for the wedding but had to go in for a board meeting today—leaving her to hold the fort. (You mean rule the roost, he said when she grumbled about it earlier this morning, an amendment she’d accepted with an if-the-shoe-fits grin.) Bennie taps the eraser end of the pencil against her teeth and frowns at the top of the door frame, which seems to have grown a furry gray coat of dust. Maybe she can put Lloyd to work when he gets here. Can one do that? Greet the brother you haven’t laid eyes on in nearly two years, not since his wife abandoned him in a foreign country, taking their then-nine-year-old child, by saying: Hey Lloyd, long time no see, sorry about your marriage, then sticking a feather duster in his hand? Better yet: Hey Lloyd, you don’t mind helping clean house, do you? By the way, this might be the last time you ever set foot in it. Of course she won’t say anything like that last part. She feels a twinge of guilt at withholding the fact that they’re putting the house on the market. But why should she? Her brother’s never shown any affection for the place. Couldn’t wait to leave it behind, and hardly ever comes back to visit.

Poor old Lloyd, always just a little morose, just a little inert even on the best of days. Somehow her imagination has him wearing Walter’s pinstriped apron, the strings long and droopy in back. Eeyore’s tail. Oh dear. If Carrie were here they’d be cackling. Or working to suppress cackles. Meticulously avoiding each other’s eyes. They are well practiced, the sisters, in the alternate arts of making sport of their younger brother and leaping righteously to his defense. Poor Lloydie.

But why poor? More to the point, why should it be Carrie’s and her job to cosset him? Hadn’t he grown up with the same advantages as his two sisters, there for the having, if only he’d accepted them? It had been his choice to reject them—them the advantages and them the family. He’s the one who turned his back, went off of his own volition and squandered—not their love, perhaps, but their bequest. Refusing all that would have been provided for him if only he’d expressed the desire, if only he’d deigned to hunger for the things they’d all been raised to expect: an education, a good job, a reasonable place to live, a network of helpful contacts. The support of a community that cared about him—indeed, had a vested interest in him, having poured resources into him in order to create him as one of their own.

Even after their parents died, especially after their parents died (dramatically, you might say: two cancers in three years—first Dad, at age forty-seven, after months of feeling run-down and ascribing it to not getting enough exercise, had gone in for the routine physical he’d long put off and came home with a death sentence: stage four colon cancer—only to be outdone by Mom three months later, diagnosis: pancreatic cancer; she was dead within seven months; he wound up trailing her by two years), they did not lack for support, emotional, social, or financial—all were offered in quantities frankly too great to manage from family, friends, even from the village itself. The local chapters of the Elks and Rotary clubs established scholarship funds for the kids, all of whom were still in high school when their mother died. Lloyd, the youngest, was the only kid still living at home, a senior in high school, when their father followed suit. The sisters kept in touch as best they could manage from college, and of course they saw him on holidays, but it had been Aunt Glad, moving back into her childhood home, who provided Lloyd with daily companionship through the last bit of his childhood.

During the worst of it the siblings used sports terminology. With the reckless bravado of adolescence they relied on morbid jokes about the “rivalry” between their parents, their “race toward the finish,” the way Mom “came up the backstretch to beat the odds,” the way Dad “almost scored a hat trick” when, after his initial debulking surgery, he coded twice in one day. Other people—neighbors, aunts, and uncles—looked askance, but it gave the kids a carapace they could retreat inside and it drew them together in a way that kept others out, which felt necessary, sustaining. And it had worked, after a fashion. At least Bennie and Carrie had done all right, but somewhere along the line Lloyd had fallen off course. Or not fallen—if that were the case they might’ve turned back and propped him on his feet and kept him on the team. What he’d done was something more like turn and traipse off the field midplay. A thing he used to do, come to think of it, as a little boy, during informal games of baseball or soccer. At some point he’d just plunk down in the grass to pick dandelions, or wander away without telling anyone. When people would yell at him, But you’re on second base! or You can’t just leave the goal untended! he would only grimace—the famous, squinting, equivocal smile part of his MO even back in his towheaded boyhood—with a look of something like commiseration. As if to say, Sorry, I know it’s bad manners, but it’s how I am.

And after their parents died, it had been more of the same genteel abnegation: No thank you he’d said to college. No thank you to culinary school and forestry school and even to a funded gap year abroad. No thank you to first and last month’s rent plus security deposit on a studio apartment near the commuter rail. No thank you to meeting with any of their parents’ friends who would have been more than happy, truly delighted, to put him in touch with other offers and help him find his way.

Never: Leave me alone, quit bothering me. Always: No thank you. Delivered with unfailing sweetness and regret. That was the thing about Lloyd, the thing that made him at once irremediably lovable and irremediably infuriating: the graciousness of his demurrals, which made you always yearn to offer him more, or offer him something different, always in hopes that you’d come up at last with the elusive thing he might actually accept, so you’d keep striving for this, failing to acknowledge its certain futility.

Well—but he had accepted the invitation to Clem’s wedding. Managed to RSVP and everything. They’ll be here today, he and Ellerby—another thing to prepare for. Even if she does wind up roping them into lending a hand with the scullery work later this week, she does at the very least need to have beds made up for them when they get here. Not to mention have dinner to serve. And, asterisk to that: her brother’s ever-changing dietary preferences to cater to.

Fake butter, she adds to one of her lists. Soy/almond milk.

Speaking of brothers: “Where’s your brother?” she demands of Mantha, who’s wandered into the kitchen and is poking around the fruit bowl. “What are you looking for?”

“A plum that isn’t squishy.”

“Well stop that. Just take one. You’re making them all squishy. Where’s your brother?”

Mantha takes a plum and gives it a distrustful, millimeter-long lick.

“Wash it first.”

Mantha takes it to the sink.

Bennie sighs. “Samantha Rachel Erlend Blumenthal. I’m not going to ask you a third—”

“There.” Pointing.

Bennie looks over her shoulder through the screen door. Pim, in purple bathing trunks and the jacket of Tom’s old judogi, is busily arranging his toy soldiers along the porch railing. From the steady movements of his lips he’s either narrating or doing their voices. Aunt Glad’s out there, too, dozing in the cane chair.

“Not that one,” says Bennie.

Mantha bites into the plum and it gushes all down the front of her. “Tom? I don’t know. Still in bed.”

“Libel!” As of recently, Tom’s first-thing-in-the-morning voice is pretty much basso profundo. Its unfamiliar depth stirs in Bennie an inappreciable flutter. He appears in the doorway sporting boxer shorts and a jaw-cracking yawn.

“I think you mean slander,” says Bennie.

“Blasphemy!” he barks in Mantha’s ear. “Sacré bleu!”

She elbows him with her fiberglass cast.

“Dude!” he yelps, suddenly a tenor.

Simultaneously Bennie cries, “Not with the broken arm!”

“That thing’s a weapon.” Tom, rubbing the injured rib, strolls fridgeward.

“That thing,” says Bennie, “cost two hundred dollars out of pocket.”

Tom glugs milk directly from the container. “It’s almost empty,” he breaks off gulping to gasp, thereby forestalling Bennie’s rebuke.

And then he goes on standing there, draining the carton, one hand resting carelessly on the still-open door of the fridge, his bare torso ridiculously lean, his sternum tufted with toffee-colored floss that continues in a line vanishing down inside his waistband. The muscles on his raised arm stand out in crisp definition, biceps smooth as river rocks. And the spread of his shoulders, the swell of his neck: When did he become this splendid, hulking other? His very body a kind of eloquent repudiation. Of what? Of the little boy he no longer is. But also it’s a repudiation of her, no? The body that bore him, the younger softer greener woman she once was.

CLEM WAKES TODAY, three days before her wedding, much as she does every morning: impatient for her life. Impatient to make her entrance in it. Standing on the threshold of what Mantha would call Future Life. The Main Act. She feels the impatience as a physical sensation. In her fingers, mostly, a kind of distant throbbing, as if she had a buildup of sap in her veins and it needed to flow. Once when she was younger, maybe twelve—and still believed, just automatically, never having taken the time to consider otherwise, that her mother, simply by virtue of being her mother, was like her: a native of the same landscape, familiar with all the same sensations and perspectives—she’d said, You know that thing where your fingers hurt and you try to stretch them?

Arthritis?

No, I mean the thing you get where it’s like an ache deep inside and it’s kind of psychological because it’s connected to like a homesick feeling but it’s not that because it can happen even when you’re home?

No. I don’t know that thing.

A slap that stung the more for having no malice in it; Clem didn’t doubt that Bennie was telling the truth, that she really had no idea what Clem meant.

Now she starfishes her hands open and shut, wrings them softly to ease the ache. She looks around. Hannah and Chana are both still burrowed, only their heads—razored raven chop and tangerine frizz, respectively—sticking out of the tops of their sleeping bags. It had been raining much too hard last night to even consider setting up their tent; they’d camped instead in one of the attic rooms, their sleeping bags sardined horizontally across a mouse-chewed futon, one wobbly standing fan and one ancient box fan stuck into the window no match for the marshy atmosphere.

Who knows, maybe she does have arthritis, or some rare bone marrow condition confined only to her hands. When she wakes beside Diggs she often kneads her awake, pressing her fingers against the muscles of her beloved’s warm, smooth, pudding arms and the wing-nubs of her scapulae, until Diggs mumbles, “Still sleeping here,” although on some mornings, given the right sort of provocation, she’ll deign to roll over and pounce. To sit astride, looking down with regal curiosity, and lace her own strong fingers through Clem’s.

Their differences are legion. Beginning, most obviously, with the black-and-whiteness. “Pudding?” Diggs repeated the first time Clem used the word, and arched one eyebrow suspiciously. “As in chocolate pudding? As in some Kozy Shack? You my little race-fixated cracker-girl?”

But “No, no!” Clem protested. “Don’t call me that, Chat. As in pudding-smooth, creamy, and custardy. As in delicious and yummy and good and . . .”

A few seconds later, more honestly: “All right, maybe I was thinking of chocolate pudding. But not in a fetishy, exoticizing way.”

And after a few seconds more: “. . . and anyway certainly not Kozy Shack. If anything, Swiss Miss.”

A mighty roar from her beloved then, hot breath in her ear, claws on her thighs, wild laughter erupting from both as they tumbled and scratched and got each other off.

This is what’s so great about them, what makes it work and keeps it strong: when race comes up they talk about it, address it head-on. Anyway, that’s not even what Clem thinks of as their biggest difference. The main thing is how practical Diggs is, how logical and well-equipped to navigate worldly matters, to believe in worldly matters as navigable (even now, she’s at her summer job with the ACLU’s Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief, a paid internship between her first and second years of law school), while Clem is more disposed to see life as ambiguous and absurd, a sort of indistinct mush, one gigantic, swirling, unpredictable concoction the point of which is to surrender to it all your heart and all your might, not knowing—not even presuming to ask—where it’s headed. To surrender, as Clem put it in the introduction to her senior thesis, the ego’s designs to the eternal truth of uncertainty. Diggs says this difference is actually related to race, says Clem’s loosey-goosey approach to career is at least in part a function of her privilege and not everyone has the option to major in an artsy-fartsy field.

Which Clem gets. Totally. Which is part of what she’d like to help change. Through art. Art is not frivolous, she tells Diggs, quoting her thesis adviser. Ignazio Leopardi: about a million years old and still crazily rakish, with a tiny yin-and-yang stud in his ear, purple eyeglass frames, a frankly libidinous laugh. Art is not an accoutrement, she tells Diggs, not an indulgence, but a societal expedient, a tool of social change! It’s like the leopards in the temple.

The whose in the what?

The leopards. In the temple. Kafka. She says it as if she has known it forever, but in truth she never read a speck of Kafka beyond Gregor Samsa until this past spring.

Theater is like the leopards, Clem told Diggs. It disrupts the status quo, she tried. Until its ideas bring about lasting change by getting incorporated in society.

Maybe. Diggs lubricated her skepticism with diplomacy. She’s good at that. But if we’re talking expedience, law has it all over art, bambina.

Okay, Grandmaw. Diggs, who’d been a year ahead of Clem in the same small liberal arts school where they met, is older by all of thirteen months. If that’s what they’re training you to believe.

Clem’s not altogether impervious to the reality of daily life outside the bubble of college. Her dream is eventually to be involved in some kind of Theater of the Oppressed–type work, maybe work with incarcerated youth—but she’s not all moony about it; she knows that when she first moves to DC, into Diggs’s apartment—or rather (she’s got to practice thinking this way!) into the place Diggs found but which will soon be their shared abode—she’ll likely wind up waiting tables or temping first.

They’ve had some of their best (read: thorniest) conversations about this very issue: How do you balance dreams and reality, ambition and uncertainty, the exercise of free will with the willingness to be swept along by the current?

“Here’s the new rule,” Clem proposed one day last winter when they were trying to figure out in practical terms what their lives would look like post-wedding. “Break the wineglass and fall toward the glassblower’s breath.”

Diggs did her single-eyebrow thing.

“That’s Rumi,” said Clem. “Pretty good, no?”

“So are we falling toward marriage”—Diggs embroidered her skepticism with air quotes—“or choosing it?”

“We might feel like we’re choosing . . . ”

“Nuh-uh. Feel, nothing. Fall, nothing. I have agency. I do things by choice.”

“You do, huh. Everything?”

“Yup. Free will, baby.”

“It’s all about intention.”

“You got it.”

“Very romantic. So are you saying you chose to fall in love with me?”

“Never said I fell in love with you.”

Tears sprang to Clem’s eyes.

Diggs watched in astonishment as they welled and overflowed before she moved in to stroke them away with her thumbs. “Lord, girl, you are sensitive. I rose in love with you.”

More tears, hot and copious. These Diggs drank. Murmured, “That’s Toni.”

Little beat. “. . . Orlando and Dawn?”

“Morrison, white girl. Pretty good, no?”

Now in the little attic room longing shoots bodily through Clem, painful and lovely. Oh hurry up, she thinks, a bossy little prayer: please let these last few days hurry by. It isn’t even precisely Diggs she’s impatient for. Or at least, not only. It’s herself—the fully formed self she’s waiting to discover, waiting to become. At the end of the aisle, under the chuppah, after the vows. In the act of becoming—choosing—her adult role.

“When”—she actually put this question to Diggs the last time they were together, right after graduation; she had thought she might feel it that day, the sense of becoming finally evident to herself, fully assembled, not hypothetical, but no—“when do you get to the part of your life that’s really real, the part when you know you’ve arrived?”

“What do you mean, bambina? Arrived professionally?” Cocked head, a single, prolifically expressive eyebrow arched.

They’d been sitting under a tree, Clem still in her commencement gown but unzipped, revealing a Jiffy Lube T-shirt and cutoffs underneath. Diggs had put Clem’s mortarboard on her own head, where it looked ridiculously stylish in an outré sort of way, wilted tea roses and all. “No. Oh—is that what it is for you, though? You think? Like once you’ve gotten your law degree? Or passed the bar?”

“Depends what you mean by arrived. I mean”—and here Diggs had done that lovely shimmy thing she does with her shoulders and neck—“I arrived the day I came out my momma.”

Clem believes it. Diggs would have arrived in the world whole and intact, united already with the root of who she was and would forever be. Even as an infant she would have been in full possession of herself. It’s a cinch to imagine newborn Diggs serene, even dignified, in her swaddling clothes.

Her fingers, she furls and unfurls. The sap, the sap.

“Quit pokin’,” grumbles Hannah beside her.

“Morning, Glory.”

“’S not morning.”

But it is. Something has changed in the night; the rain moved on and the air being pushed through the fan’s blades now is dry and fresh, the light diamantine, and the great expanse of the backyard, with its sagging barn and unmown grass and jungly, vine-choked copse beyond, all gleam golden-green.

Clem unplugs the fan, wrests it from its spot, and thrusts her own head and shoulders into the space between sash and sill. “It’s clean!” she trills. “Everything’s clean and new.” And spinning around she claps her hands, stamps a barefoot flamenco around the sleeping bags. “Get up, get up, you sleepyheads! The rain has stopped—we can set up the tent!”

NOW WHOEVER CAN THIS BE, Glad wonders, this fellow coming up the front walkway (which nobody ever uses)—and what is that object under his arm?

Lester Vilno, by the lopsided gait—but Lester has a beard and all that wiry hair, while this man is clean-shaven and bald. He ought to be wearing a hat, whoever he is, that much is certain. He’s shining pink on top. Daddy’d never be out without his Panama on a day like this. Mother’d never let him.

Her view is partially obstructed by the petunias and begonias trailing from hanging baskets and the sweet peas twining up around their strings (the one like stalactites and the other like stalagmites; she’s taught legions of pupils to remember which is which by using the mnemonic c is for ceiling and g is for ground), and she has to bob her head around to keep track of his progress. As he gets nearer the front of the house he slips right out of sight. Aunt Glad rises from the cane chair, using the porch railing to steady herself, and—land sakes! The little boy’s soldiers. Half of Charlie Company goes skittering into the spirea. Ah well. They’re only poor things, plastic, not like her and Joy’s Coldstream Guards, so dashing in their glossy bearskin caps and scarlet tunics, each one painted painstakingly by hand. Confounding how ugly today’s toys are.

She peers over the railing into the bushes. Doesn’t spot a one. Good camouflage; she’ll grant them that.

From out of sight comes a knocking, then a “Hello?”

She makes her way toward the end of the porch, replies through the azaleas: “Hello!”

“Oh. Hello there!” Rather a nice-looking man, lean, crinkle-eyed, in a peach shirt and tan slacks. Now she sees he does have some hair, but what little there is has been shaved to a whisper of velvet, the kind of elective baldness men sometimes choose to diminish evidence of the real thing. Shading his eyes with one hand, he waves with the other. “I rang a couple of times . . .”

“Well the bell doesn’t work at all!” With an edge of exasperation, as though she’s reminded him before. “No one uses that door!”

He laughs.

It occurs to her who this must be—one of Joy’s suitors. No wonder he’s so bumbling and confused. He’s probably nervous about meeting Mother and Daddy. “She’s just getting ready!” Glad assures him. “You’d better come round to the side!”

She makes her way back along the porch, hidden by the screen of foliage, which hides him, too, as he cuts a parallel route across the lawn. She reaches the side entrance just as he comes bounding up the porch steps. Not a young man, but something springy in his step. And that shirt. Peach-and-aqua plaid. Rather festive.

“Jeff Greenberg.” Extending his hand.

She hopes he won’t have one of those painful grips. Hearty men so often miscalculate how much of their enthusiasm to channel into physical expression. “Glad Erlend.”

“Delighted to make your acquaintance.” Oh he just drips manners, doesn’t he? If he were wearing a hat, he’d have tipped it. “And you must be visiting from . . . ?”

“But I live here,” she corrects him, and a great breeze blows then through the trees, the tall pines that line the drive, rustling their branches, and the departure board makes its rattling sound as all the wooden slats turn over and a whole new set of trains is listed, a whole new set of platform numbers. “Hardly what you’d call a visitor. I do stay over in Fishkill now . . .” She trails off, momentarily absorbed by the image of a room with a cot and a white trapunto coverlet, dinosaurs on the windowsill—where in her life, when in her life is such a room located? “. . . and again. Very hospitable place. But Rundle Junction is my home. In fact, this”—fluttering her hand at the structure behind her—“is my home. Of course all homes are no more than temporary. Of course”—she leans forward confidingly, suddenly and inexplicably full of warmth toward this stranger—“life itself is temporal!”

He looks surprised, then laughs again.

She isn’t normally this chatty but there’s something so solicitous, so inviting about his manner. Or is it his shirt?

“Are you from around here?” she inquires. Perhaps she knows his people. Greenberg doesn’t ring a bell, but. Perhaps she should ask how long his people have lived here. Perhaps—should she ask him to sit? Offer him a glass of punch?

“I am.” He doesn’t elaborate. His eyes linger on the side of her face. She has grown less self-conscious over the years but on occasion, often when meeting a stranger, she is reminded of how her appearance makes others uneasy. There’s a shift in his manner now, as if he’s eager to get on with the business of why he’s come. Of course: Joy—perhaps she ought to run inside and fetch her sister.

“I was hoping to catch Walter—is he around?”

“Oh! No, no . . . I believe he’s gone to work.”

“In that case I guess I’ll . . . or maybe”—the way he pauses, frowning, then brightens as if with a sudden inspiration, ruffles her feathers a bit, although she’d be hard-pressed to say why; perhaps it all seems a bit contrived?—“maybe you’ll let me leave this with you?” He takes the object he’s been toting from under his arm: a plastic lawn sign on wire stakes, dark green with gold lettering. “Or better yet, right here?” Propping it against the railing. “And would you be so kind as to let Walter know I’ll give him a call?”

She casts a doubtful eye at the sign, which is triggering, or rather falling just short of triggering, something, a memory of the conversation last night when everyone had been sitting around the living room and there’d been a kind of breach, a vague imprint of displeasure. What had it been about? Stripes. Who was wearing stripes and who was not. And . . . Lester Vilno. He had been part of it, too. Blamed for something, wasn’t he? Hated and vanished, Lester Vilno, whom she has not seen in years.

“You can try,” she tells him doubtfully. “Of course it’s awfully busy here this week, what with my grand-nephew coming in this afternoon, and his little girl, and then my grandniece and the twins . . .”

“A real family reunion!”

“Isn’t that the way with weddings.”

“Ho! Someone getting married?”

Could he be a little dense? Or has she made a gaffe? Misread the train schedule? What made her assume he’d have known about the wedding? It’s his air of familiarity, of convivial ease. Feeling duped, she allows tersely, “Their eldest.”

Now a whole pack of young people come banging out the screen door and Glad, relieved to extricate herself from what has become an increasingly laborious encounter, heads back toward the cane chair, into whose sweetly mildewed cushions she sinks. The man in the festive shirt is trying to make small talk with the young people, pumping hands like a politician, explaining about his sign and giving them messages to pass on to Walter. Good, the young people know how to handle the situation. There’s Clementine, and her heavyset friend the checkers girl, and the little curly-topped one who’d made such an impression last night—running into the kitchen proclaiming her urgent need for the powder room—oh and there’s her friend Tom, too, although he seems to be going the other way, coming from the direction of the barn and passing that Greenberg fellow on his way up the steps. Peals of laughter, Mazel tov! footsteps crunching on gravel, the distant rumble of a tractor, voices high and low interweaving like the colored ribbons on the maypoles as the children dance round and round at the shore of Ida Pond . . .

“Aunt Glad?”

“I wasn’t sleeping.” She opens her eyes. She’d let them close for just a second. It’s Clementine, kneeling before her. How lovely this great-grandniece is. That thing in her nose is really very tiny. It could be mistaken for a piece of glitter. Goodness knows, she’s had her own fair share of errant glitter stuck to her. Around the holidays she’s always coming home from a project with her kindergartners to find the shiny specks attached to her person.

“Aunt Glad?” Clem says again, soft as the first time. What a great, gleaming girl she is. And so young. Not much more than twenty, surely. To think—just think!; it’s barely imaginable—to get one’s mind around all the things a young person doesn’t yet know. All the suffering. All the hopes and dreams that never come to pass. The sudden losses, the sudden swerves. The forks in the road. Looking back over your shoulder at the roads you never explored. The choices you make and the chance events you never get to choose. Clementine. Darling Clementine, like the song. Oh my darling, oh my darling. Glad looks upon her as through a sudden mist, a viscous light full of dust motes, silver notes, you are lost and gone forever.

“Your parents,” Glad tells her, “will miss you . . . a great deal.”

Clem gives a tinselly laugh, charmed and uncertain. “Lucky for them they’ve got three more. Aunt Glad, are you all right out here? Would you be more comfortable lying down inside?”

“Oh no. Thank you. I’m comfortable right here.”

“Can I get you anything? Something cool?”

She spies her tumbler on the wicker table and replies triumphantly, “I see I’ve still got some tea!” Iced tea, this time, or sun tea, as the girl who delivered it earlier—the curly-topped one—had called it. “You go ahead, dear.”

Of course it’s only the way of things. Of course they’re not meant to know everything so young, everything all at once.

“It’s all right,” Glad assures her. “You go be with your people.”

MANTHA IS SUPPOSED to be cleaning her room. Ellerby is being plunked on her in an hour’s time without anyone’s having thought to ask her opinion, never mind her permission.

“Oh Mantha, for heaven’s sake. I don’t have time to discuss this with you,” is what her mother said just moments ago while wrestling a fitted sheet over the mattress. “You have the trundle bed, you’re a girl, you’re practically the same age, end of story.”

“But my arm!”

She’s been milking the broken arm for five weeks now to great effect; it seemed worth a try.

But no. Bennie’d swept out of the room without another word and now Mantha lies on her own unmade bed, dangling one leg over the side and letting it swing in such a way that her big toe, with each extension, messes up by increments the blanket on the freshly made trundle.

Through the window she hears Clem and the Ch/Hannahs doing something with an aluminum ladder on the front lawn. Earlier they’d set up their tent out back, an orangey dome with windows that zipper open to reveal screens and a jaunty tarp sort of thing lipping up over the doorway in case it decides to rain some more. She’d asked if she could help and they’d said, “We got it.” She’d asked if she could be part of whatever they were doing next and Clem said it wasn’t really a kid thing and besides it involved use of a ladder and she didn’t want to get in trouble for Mantha breaking any more bones.

Ellerby is eleven, three years older than Mantha. Her mother claims they’ve met but Mantha has no memory of it. Her mother says the reason they haven’t seen Ellerby in so long is because she lives with her mother, Tía Violeta, an immigration lawyer. Now they live in Yuma, Arizona, but Tía Violeta was born in Nicaragua. Which means she is an immigrant herself. According to the world map on the wall beside the stove, Nicaragua is a violet-colored piece of pie between North and South America.

“Is her mom coming, too?” Mantha’d asked in the kitchen this morning.

“No. You know Lloyd and Violeta are divorced. Ellerby is just spending a few weeks with her dad.”

“Where does Lloyd live again?” Mantha asked, braceleting one of Bennie’s sturdy wrists with both of her own hands, measuring the circumference, marveling at the difference in size between her wrists and her mother’s.

“Don’t hang on me, Mantha.” Bennie shook herself free. She wasn’t the biggest cuddler in the world to begin with, but lately she seemed even more averse to being touched.

“But where?”

Bennie sighed. “We’ve been through this before. New Mexico. At the moment. Uncle Lloyd gets around a lot.”

“Why does he get around a lot?” Mantha wanted to know.

“That,” said Bennie, “is what we call the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.”

PIM’S GOT HIS BUGLE on a ribbon around his neck. The judogi came off hours ago, when the afternoon heated up; now he wears just plastic jelly sandals, his purple bathing trunks, and on his head a cap of blue felt stuck through with a feather. He’s slinking around out back in the unmown grass, tall enough to hide him when he crouches on all fours. The tops, gone to seed, tickle his bare chest.

His quarry: that alien orange creature in the clearing by the barn. It hadn’t been there when the sergeant called him in to lunch (and kept him under strict surveillance while he ate every bit of it: a hunk of cheese, an apple, and a piece of hardtack spread with raspberry jam). It simply materialized during his absence, assaulting his eyes when he headed back out on an important solo mission for which he will need not only his bugle but also his dagger. He feels his waistband to make sure it’s still there where he tucked it. Check.

He advances cautiously, trying to decide what nature of beast the orange thing is. Whatever it is, a brightly colored thing like a cockscomb or crest rises evilly from its head. The danger is increasing. He pauses to transfer the dagger from trunks to teeth, then slinks along several yards more before freezing—what was that noise? Sniper? Rock python? Fokker Triplane with mounted machine guns buzzing overhead? He scans the land, scans the sky. Sweat trickles with gratifying authenticity past his ears. All clear, men. Follow me, he commands. Steady on, men. Watch the rear, men. An excellent word: men. Sometimes his internal patter consists just of the single word Men! Men! He crawls along to the euphonious silent chant, biting down on the gray plastic blade, until he reaches the verge of the tall grass, the boundary line between neutral and enemy territory. Here he halts. Hold up, men! Through the curtain of bearded spikelets he scowls at the orange hump. A breeze skitters through the poplars, flips all the leaves around to silvery paleness. A damselfly stitches its way toward him, carrying silent warning.

The thing is breathing.

He crawls into the open. Stay back, men.

Rising, transferring dagger from mouth to hand, wiping the drool from it, he advances toward the thing, which abruptly inhales, fills its lungs, balloons ominously, and lunges at him. Hi-yaa! He leaps, stabs it in the throat.

Quelled, the creature collapses back into its earlier shape. He steps closer, peers inside its belly. Sleeping bags, knapsacks, a welter of boots, flashlights, towels, books, provisions . . . What a clever disguise! He shakes his head in grudging admiration: not beast but bastion. The crest on its head a kind of banner, a pennant. The enemy’s ensign, no doubt. Over his shoulder he hollers: We’ve found it, men! Their secret headquarters. Cover me, I’m going in.

He undoes the zipper and slips through the flap as if into a giant pair of pants. Inside it turns out to have creaturely aspects after all, its walls made fleshy with the sun shining through, its atmosphere muggy as breath. All right, men, the coast is clear. Hurry, before they get back: let’s porridge. This is what Vikings do upon reaching a foreign enclave, go porridging for food or weapons or treasure. He pokes his dagger into pillows and packs, then fishes around in the guts of them with his bare hands. Nothing of value . . . hold, what’s this? Object of interest: a sneaky little weapon, flat, no longer than his palm, sandpapery on both sides with a mean little point on one end. He sticks it in the waistband of his trunks. In the next he finds—Zounds! Poison! Poison tablets in neat pink rows, crackling evilly in their individual plastic compartments. And lo—three are missing! We must alert the king! These, too, he shoves into his trunks.

But it’s porridging the last sack that yields the most important find: a black thing like a velvet lump of coal. He pries it apart on its hidden hinges and there—Men! Men!—sits the crown jewel, stolen from the palace last night. It’s real all right, a golden band supporting a milky stone shot through with circus colors. The whole kingdom has been out looking for it all day and now Pim and his loyal band have found it. Good work, men. They grunt modestly, trying not to show how much they love it when he praises them. Now—let us hie from here. Stashing the jewel, too, inside his waistband, he slices at the door flap with his dagger and hurtles back into the fresh air. Quick, like the wind, he orders, and his men, heeding his wisdom as always, stay close at his heels; together they pound across the meadow with its tall grasses once more like lashes tearing at their flesh, the enemy in hot pursuit. Only when the last of his own has crossed the drawbridge does he bring the portcullis down and raise the bugle to his lips.

GLADDY! GLAD!

Glad’s head jerks up. All around her a muzzy scrim of green. Clatter of hoofbeats. The iron horse. Urgent and distant, still a long way off.

But what is this green? An emerald opacity she knows she knows . . . the nameless lake. Garvey’s Puddle, Daddy calls it for a joke. You cut through McElroy’s and then across Garvey’s farm, find your way along the swampy bit where the skunk cabbage wilts to slime in summer, scramble over the old stone wall—being careful not to drop your bundle (an old towel Mother doesn’t care about wrapped around a book and a bottle of Nehi)–and there it is: patch of pebbly beach where she and Joy stretch out and read until it gets too hot to stand.

Then Joy wades in, wincing, always mincing over the sharp pebbles, but Glad takes the swashbuckler’s route, walks the gangplank of toppled spruce that points its majestic finger toward the center of the lake. At its tip she bounces until the dead tree groans and then she jumps, her body slicing the glossy surface. And plunges down until her toes stir the cold silt soft as a pelt; then rises slowly through the green murk and sees, with eyes wide open, an underwater orchard, rows of bubbles like apple blossoms scattering on currents of wind. When the water parts open the other way, divulging her once more to the air’s slippery whisk, she rolls on her back and floats, lung-dazzled and deaf, a blanket of water lapping up over her ears. Her closed lids make fireworks of the sun.

Here in Garvey’s Puddle she is not the burns, not the scars, not the shiny, puckered, pink-and-white congealings of ruined skin. No more does she swim at Ida Pond. No more will she bare herself before so many people, no more be that poor child over whom people cluck their tongues. The girl who reminds them of their own grief. Here in Garvey’s Puddle she is barely even a girl, barely even a human. Here she is little more than breath, spangled lungs and fiery eyelids. She is her soul, just.

Gladdy! Glad!

There it is again, but who could be calling her out here in the woods, out here in Garvey’s Puddle with her ears underwater? She blinks her eyes open. Bit by bit she is returned to herself, here in the present (to what Mantha would surely call Waking Life). To now. The solidity of the cane chair, the arid weave of the June air. Oh. The waving tendrils of green all around her are not pond water after all, but the cascading curtain of hanging plants and climbing vines that enclose the porch.

Toot toot! The whistle blows.

But it’s not a train whistle, it’s the little boy blowing his horn. A searing grip squeezes her chest, her neck. The side of her face curls, at once melty and taut. Come here, she struggles to say. He is her responsibility. She wants to clutch him by the hand, pull him toward her, but she cannot make her fingers work, cannot lift her arm. Make sure to stay together. The boy is wearing a cap stuck through with a feather. Around his neck a ribbon, attached to a toy horn. Whatever is his name?

“Pim,” her bearings supply.

(He is a different child, then. Not little boy blue.

But we mustn’t speak of that.)

At the sound of his name he looks at her sharply, sideways, head cocked. Not quite with a smile but with something canny, something half-expectant at the corner of his mouth. As if alert to possible advantage.

“No,” she tells him. He has the snapping brown eyes of the child who will line up first for recess, the same child who will not hear the bell when she rings it for them to come back in again. “I have nothing for you, young man.”

But he has such a lively face. And does not run away.

“Come over here.”

She does not presume he will obey. Yet he does, comes to stand coolly before her, the horn dangling from its ribbon around his neck, a plastic dagger thrust in the waistband of his trunks.

“Can you recite?”

He stares at her, lips parted. She can smell his lunch.

“Young man, do you know any poems?”

He blinks.

What on earth are they teaching in kindergarten these days? “Do you know how to make a rhyme?”

“Eeny meeny miny moe.”

“That is not—”

But he cuts her off to crescendo cocksure, “Catch a tiger by the TOE!”

Well then. She closes her eyes and pronounces in a fine, formal voice, “The Cow.” Then, clearing her throat, fixing upon him her deep-set eyes:

“The friendly cow all red and white,

I love with all my heart:

She gives me cream with all her might,

To eat with apple-tart.”

Pim, drawing the dagger from the waistband of his trunks, responds, “Onepotato twopotato threepotato four, fivepotato sixpotato sevenpotatomore!”

Aunt Glad:

“She wanders lowing here and there,

And yet she cannot stray,

All in the pleasant open air,

The pleasant light of day.”

Here she gives a little nod as if to say it’s his turn.

Lofting his dagger heavenward, Pim cries, “Fuzzy wuzzy wuz a BEAR! Fuzzy wuzzy had no HAIR! Fuzzy wuzzy wuzn’t fuzzy WUZ HE!”

Undergirded by a blossoming grin, surpassing him in dash if not in decibel, Aunt Glad rounds the bend into her final verse:

“And blown by all the winds that pass

And wet with all the showers,

She walks among the meadow grass

And eats the meadow flowers.”

“DUDE, YOUR AUNT AND BROTHER are having a total poetry slam.” Hannah, returning from the Buick, which is parked up near the barn, is weighed down with a quantity of eco-friendly shopping bags.

Clem and Chana loll on their backs at the foot of the ladder, which leans against the black walnut tree that holds dominion over the front lawn. If it can be called a lawn: really more of an alopecic quarter acre of dirt and crabgrass.

“Up on the porch. They’re like, taking turns reciting at each other.”

“What, Glad and Tom?”

“No, the little guy.” Hannah unbracelets herself, allowing all the bag handles to slide off her wrists, then settles her own body beside them with a grunt. “I’m telling you, the atmosphere’s infuckingtense. Pim’s got his dagger out.”

Clem laughs.

“I love Aunt Glad,” effuses Chana. In her adorable squeaky way.

Hannah looks to catch Clem’s eye, but it’s not happening. Clem either isn’t attuned or is actively declining to acknowledge that the two of them have spent hours privately dissecting Chana’s too-readily tendered declarations of love. She’s like one of those crazy lawn sprinklers, broadcasting identical drops of affection in every direction: she “loves” this eighties movie, that psych professor, the guy who makes the omelets in the cafeteria, your purple Danskos, her horoscope, your tweet, your status update, your Snapchat, your hashtag, Ashtanga, quinoa, chia, acai, chai, Gaga, raga, crab Rangoon, the harvest moon, how you rearranged your room. What is she seeking with her affections, her affectations; what is she hoping to gain?

“It’s not real,” Hannah has judged.

“It is real,” Clem has countered. “Just naive.”

“It’s facile. Glib.”

“It’s a little glib.”

“It’s manipulative.”

“What makes you say that?”

But here Hannah has sidestepped. What she doesn’t say: that it’s a kind of performance, a way of demanding Love ME, love ME. Funny, batty, sprite-like Chana twirls about spreading her fairy dust of loving everybody and everything, and doesn’t it work, doesn’t it goddamn work, isn’t she appealing? (Right down to her conspicuous magnanimity with the Buick, handing over the keys to any and all with that giddy, self-deprecating laugh: Please, I suck behind the wheel!) Coating herself with blithe iridescence. Making herself lovable at every turn. In a way the more stolid Hannah (stolid in spirit, stolid in body) could never be. Even for tell-it-like-it-is Hannah, putting all this into words would cut too close to the bone. To the big-boned bone.

Which is why, when Chana squeaks, “I love Aunt Glad,” Hannah replies, “Really? What do you ‘love’ about her?”

If Chana detects the quotes she doesn’t let on. Instead, sitting up, wrapping her arms around her knees, she answers wonderingly, “I don’t know. She seems like such a free spirit. I mean—obviously she’s old but she seems youngish, or ageless, or something. Unhobbled. Unfettered by age.”

A gust pushes through the canopy of the black walnut, showering them with a windfall of drops. Hannah lifts her face and lets them land there, plump and cool. She opens her eyes. The tree is an astounding specimen—according to Clem’s mom over a hundred years old, probably closer to two—with profuse, spreading, muscular limbs. They’ve spent the past hour binding its limbs with strings of tiny amber lights, then hanging great paper lanterns from its lower branches. Clem and Chana scampered about up high, fleet-footed and sinuous, even simian, while Hannah, built for ballast, anchored the ladder and handed up supplies. The tree’s natural ornamentations, the golden catkins it puts out in early summer, were dashed by the rain; they festoon the ground around them now like furry caterpillars. Hannah picks one up and shreds it.

“Do you know,” says Clem, still lying on her back, “I’ve sometimes wondered if she’s gay.”

“Chana?” asks Hannah, lying down beside her. She adds a footnote just in case, “Yuk-yuk,” to clarify it’s a joke. A mean-ish joke. Chana has been ardently, unequivocally out as a lesbian since the middle of her sophomore year, when she joined the staff of the Womyn’s Center, got a half shave, and began wearing her magenta equals-sign sweatshirt every single (at least that’s how Hannah tells the story) mofo day. Never mind that any actual sexual encounter has yet to occur in the life of Chana Naomi Metzger. Hannah knows this because she’s grilled her little Ch-inflected counterpart. And why has she grilled her? And taken such pleasure in it, persisting until Chana, flustered and abashed, confessed to being inviolate, still pure—as Hannah insisted on putting it, as if astonished, as if needing to make sure she was indeed understanding correctly—as the driven snow? Uh, technically. Did it make Hannah feel better to establish this fact? Did it comfort her in some way? Is she just a rotten person? Perhaps. Perhaps just torched with loneliness. And the secret that she has pined for Clem since their freshman year.

But, “No, Aunt Glad,” answers Clem. “You know she’s really my great-great-aunt, right? She’s never been married, which obviously doesn’t mean anything in itself. But back then, I mean I think basically everybody got married. Unless they were a nun. And it’s not just no husband—I’ve never heard mention of any man in her life. Ever.”

“Imagine being a gay woman in her time,” says Chana. “I literally can’t.” She, too, lies back down again. She follows everything Clem does. Well, to be fair, she follows everything anyone else does. They are spokes on a wheel, the three of them: heads close, feet distant, all gazing up into the immense fretwork of branches. “Can I ask, what are all her scars from?”

Clem sighs. “So, she was in a fire when she was little. A famous fire, here in Rundle Junction. Eighteen people died, all kids.”

“Jeez—it happened at school?”

“No, it was some kind of outdoor performance at the lake. Actually a pageant. Like the whole town was in it, and those who weren’t in it were at it, and supposedly on the final day there was an explosion and all these little kids in the audience got trapped under the bleachers.”

“And she was one of them?”

“Yes. Her sister, too. Her big sister, Joy, is the one who pulled her out.”

“Glad and Joy? That’s awesome.”

“But what did you mean ‘supposedly’?”

“I don’t know, I think they never proved for sure what caused the fire. Some people said there was a bomb.”

“Like—terrorists?”

“Maybe. Maybe anarchists? Whatever they had back in the twenties.”

“That was Prohibition.”

“Bootleggers, then.”

“Whatever, I don’t know. They never even proved it was a bomb.”

“What does Aunt Glad say?”

“Oh, we don’t talk about it. I mean! We never—I actually don’t remember anyone anytime in my life ever mentioning it in front of her. Or even when she’s not around, it’s not something that ever gets discussed. Like, by my mom or anything. It’s weird, I suppose.”

“What?”

“Well. I guess the fact I never thought of it as weird before. We just grew up knowing this big tragic thing had occurred. And that it was something we don’t talk about.”

“Can you imagine, though?” says Chana. “Living through a tragedy like that? I literally can’t.”

The repetition of this phrase causes a new twinge of irritation in Hannah. “Life is tragedy,” she says.

“Life is a cabaret,” corrects Clem.

“I thought it was a bowl of cherries?” ventures Chana.

“You guys, you guys.” Hannah slaps her forehead. “How many times I gotta tell you? It’s a cereal.”

“This is terrible,” says Clem, “but when I was a kid I always figured the reason she never had a husband was because of her face. How shallow am I?”

“But maybe there was a woman,” says Hannah. “She could have had a Boston marriage—any domestic companions? Any Sapphic suspects in her life?”

“Not that I know of.”

“What a lonely life,” says Chana.

“She could be a ghost bride,” says Clem.

“What’s that?”

“Like in China. Didn’t you—they cover this in Intro to Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, no?”

Chana shakes her head.

“Well I’ve been reading up on marriage customs recently, maybe that’s where I learned it. It’s this practice of marrying a living person to a dead person, originally to appease the dead person’s spirit, but it also became a way for a woman who didn’t want a husband to avoid getting married and still be like, honorable.”

“Dude—think she’s a virgin?” Hannah’s question prompts a contemplative silence, which she ends with a low, trailing whistle. “Now that’s a lonely life.”

Clem says, “Maybe it’s linked to her longevity.”

“Like Darwinistically?” Hannah wrinkles her nose.

“I was thinking more spiritually. Like forever youngly.”

“As in Carl?”

“Say what?”

“Because you said Jung. Never mind.”

“No, no, no!” Chana cuts in. “I totally get what you mean. She’s like literally ageless. She’s like an older lesbian Peter Pan.”

Hannah makes a great farting sound with her mouth. “Okay, first of all get your facts straight. Peter Pan is a lesbian.”

This gets a big laugh. Damn right. If there’s one thing Hannah’s (relatively) secure about, it’s her drollery. Too, her command of authority. Which she exercises now, sitting up, brushing bits of catkin from her hair. “A’ight, bitches. Let’s get this show on the road.” To Clem: “When are you going to fill us in on the plan here, anyway—I mean beyond just the lanterns and chuppah, all the Martha Stewart stuff? What’s the actual ceremony going to look like?”

But Clem clamps her lips together and bats her lashes. “All in due time, my pretties.”

BENNIE, HAVING JUST COME IN from the backyard where she’d been taking laundry from the line, dumps her load onto the bed. Her marital bed, as they say. A quite nice bed, actually, she’s always liked it, cherrywood, a splurge back then. It had been their first major purchase together. Well—if you didn’t count the juicer. Which had felt major at the time, the juicer they’d bought jointly even before they were sharing an apartment. The joke—tentacled with meaning, for a formal proposal of marriage never passed between them, never issued from either of their mouths, so if anything it was the slapping down of both their credit cards at once at the Sears checkout counter on that fateful rain-soaked morning in the kitchen appliance department that signaled the seriousness of their intentions to join their lives not just for the moment but for the future as well, in fiscal, nutritional, and all respects—the joke had been that they would split custody of the appliance, one month at her place, one at his, until they eventually merged households. In reality, once they’d lugged it up five flights, unpacked it from its cardboard-and-Styrofoam housing, and assembled it on her butcher block island (she had the crummier apartment but the bigger kitchen), inertia set in and the juicer stayed put.

How insufferable they must have been! She extracts a pair of bedraggled pajama bottoms from the pile—Pim’s, the elastic fairly shot and a hole in the crotch—and briefly considers relegating them to her rag bag before deciding they have not quite outlived their utility as apparel. How insufferable she and Walter both, first with the overscrupulosity of their research on the health benefits of fresh juice, then with their proselytizing to friends, family, anyone who would listen. She recalls all too well the strident tone with which she’d rhapsodized about its merits, spreading the good word, aiming for converts. Thank goodness that phase had been cut short. A few months into it, morning sickness arrived with a flourish.

What d’you want to do today? Walter had asked one bright spring morning as they lounged in her bed. He had the paper open to movie listings.

Anything worth seeing? She’d been up twice already to vomit.

He mentioned the Spike Lee and the Woody Allen before casually adding, We could just get married.

She considered a moment, then responded with equal economy of affect: ’kay. It wasn’t utterly spur of the moment. A couple of weeks earlier they’d gotten the license. Good for sixty days. They weren’t planning anything fancy. They weren’t planning anything at all. Their only plan: to forgo planning. We’ll just do it when the time’s right, they’d told each other, stashing the document in the silverware drawer (to this day the spot where they toss important scraps of paper: behind forks, spoons, and knives).

When the mood strikes, added Walter.

When the fat lady sings.

When the iron’s hot.

When Niagara falls.

When the stars align.

When pigs fly.

Hey!

Kidding, she said, and kissed his ear.

It was as if they were trusting something to fate. Something so large it could be apprehended only out of the corner of their eye. As if their method of selecting a date needed to acknowledge that the act itself was a gamble, marriage so preposterous a proposition there could be no logical, no direct way to enter into it. You had to stagger in obliquely, roll in randomly, like the ball on a roulette wheel. Their method of picking had the charm of a children’s game. That one where you spin the globe and blindly stick out your finger to stop it, then open your eyes to see where you’ll end up living out your days. Usually somewhere in the ocean, oh well.

So they’d headed downtown and gotten married. Clem was born six months later. One day, when Clem was old enough to contemplate the implications of the gap between the date of her parents’ anniversary and her birthday, she inquired whether she’d been a mistake. “Of course not,” Bennie told her. “Unplanned is not the same as a mistake.” She’d been twenty-two when she had Clem, twenty-eight when she had Tom, thirty-six when she had Mantha, and thirty-nine when she had Pim. She’ll be forty-five by the time this next one is born.

“For a practical lady, you don’t bring a whole lot of rhyme or reason to the way you space your kids, huh?” Carrie had said over the phone upon learning Bennie was once again with child.

If there was a critical edge in Carrie’s comment, Bennie elected to overlook it. A touch of jealousy, maybe. Such a leaky emotion, jealousy, it always showed through, like grease on a paper bag. It wasn’t hard for Bennie to summon compassion in this case. Where she enjoyed such an embarrassment of riches, Carrie had long suffered deprivation. She and Graham had endured a lot of travails—not to mention laid out a lot of cash—to have the twins. Anyway, she wasn’t wrong: Bennie is a “practical lady,” generally prone to exercise control over as many aspects of life as she can get her hands on. Except one.

Her own wedding day had begun with Stalwart holding her hair back while she threw up. Then on the way downtown they’d ducked into the Korean grocery by the subway to buy a bunch of gerbera daisies. She’d stuck one in his buttonhole and one in her ponytail. Then they’d gotten lost looking for the City Clerk’s Office, and then they’d gotten the giggles and the clerk had rolled his eyes at them, and then they’d gone to the movies after all, where they gave the daisies she was tired of carrying to the ticket seller and sat through both the Spike Lee and the Woody Allen, and then back in their own neighborhood had gone for Reubens at the Last Bite Diner, where she’d nodded off over her egg cream. Back at the apartment Stalwart had run a bath for her and while she was in the tub he rescued the limp flower from her ponytail holder and put it in a shot glass on the bedside table. And what strikes her now, as she folds the laundry, what hits her about this string of snapshot memories (the closest thing she has to a wedding album) is their childlike quality.

Perhaps it isn’t unusual for a young couple to feel young, to feel like children on their wedding day. But Bennie and Walter hadn’t simply been young; they’d been orphans. In choosing to make each other kin in the manner they had, absent any family members or even proxies from their community of friends, in joining themselves together in a manner that underscored, that proclaimed their aloneness, they’d brought into the ceremony the experience of having been abandoned, set prematurely adrift.

Perhaps this is why, if it gives Bennie satisfaction to manage matter-of-factly the quotidian aspects of life, it gives her another kind of pleasure to reserve this one area for relinquishing the illusion of control: for once not to feel competent! For once to let herself be scooped up, overruled, held by something larger. In the realm of creating life, of letting herself be bound repeatedly, even cyclically, but unpredictably, to a baby, she takes her deepest pleasure in surrender.

Now, folding a pair of Tom’s gym shorts, she finds his plastic mouth guard fused to the pocket. Oh joy. No way that union’s being sundered without scissors. She sets the shorts aside, then goes to the window, drawn by a burst of laughter. On the lawn Clem and her friends are playing with a big aluminum ladder they must have gotten from the barn, a mass of paper lanterns, and a daunting tangle of extension cords. She can’t help thinking of it as play. Some kind of elaborate make-believe. She still hasn’t drawn a bead on what this wedding means to Clem, let alone to Diggs, whom she’s met only twice but who strikes her as much more serious and adult, frankly more rooted in reality, than Clem. Truth be told it’s Diggs’s involvement in the whole escapade that lends it any gravitas at all. Clem and the Ch/Hannahs seem to be treating it as a lark. Even as they set up decorations for the event, their antics seem to indicate the event’s underlying unseriousness.

Look at them now, shambling around the lawn, letting the ladder tear up clumps of grass for heaven’s sake (oh lawn, ever-unthriving: they’ve tried sod and seed, bluegrass and ryegrass, chemical fertilizer and white clover—nothing works and she’s almost given up on caring except that she just put down seed in what—she swears—was her final attempt to fill in the bald spots expressly for the wedding—forget about ever achieving what real estate agents call curb appeal; maybe they’d be better off waiting to put it on the market until winter when there’s a picturesque—not to say obfuscating—blanket of snow), she’s reminded of the made-up chores of childhood, the über-important trundling from room to room of chairs and blankets from which to fashion forts, and into which would disappear—oh, all manner of thing: books and dolls and bedside lamps, a mug of pencils, the tape dispenser. What else? A telephone (clunky, rotary-dial, missing its cord). Parcheesi. Band-Aids. Bag of marshmallows, can of navy beans. An entire loaf of sandwich bread and—what is that? The cooking sherry? (But I need those things! Clem, age five, had howled when Bennie confiscated these last several items. Excuse me, you do not. You can’t just raid the pantry, Clementine.)

Clem had liked playing wedding, too. Or not so much wedding as bride. In Bennie’s old smocked nightgown, hemmed with a couple of safety pins, and a pair of Bennie’s high heels—a bridal essential, to judge from the protestations when Bennie balked, putting to Clem the prospect that she might trip and break her neck. (Mamaaaa! I’ll be careful!!) And careful she would be, treading slowly, even grimly, the length of the living room. Her face tilted slightly upward, as if the object or force summoning her hovered around where the wall of mailboxes met the ceiling.

That was the extent of the game. She’d reach the end of the room, drop a curtsy, and be done. You’d see it, the visible shedding of the role, the dissolution of the imaginary world. Never did she incorporate into the ritual any kind of make-believe ceremony. No recitation of vows. No pretend officiant, no ring, no kiss, no bouquet toss, no dancing—no joyousness, even. It was all about the walk, the long, solemn, solitary walk down the ersatz aisle. Yet for all its minimalism, its lack of evident drama, the game held inscrutable allure. Clem played it again and again, with a kind of ferocious dedication, almost a frightening intensity.

Once while Bennie stood watching, not so much indulgent as bemused, from the kitchen doorway, Stalwart had come up behind her and slipped his arms around her waist. In the cadences of an old filmstrip narrator, he’d intoned, In primitive cultures young girls were offered as human sacrifices to the gods in hopes of ensuring a plentiful harves—oof!

That would be her elbow in his ribs.

Though she had to admit he’d nailed it. That was exactly what it made you think of: submission, surrender.

Walter. Good old Stalwart. A nickname more aspirational, she sees in retrospect, than descriptive. Although back in the day—on the day they first met!—how beautifully firm he had seemed to her then, how resolute, ethical, and brave. She’d been twenty-one. He twenty-five. She in her last year of undergrad, majoring (for lack of real interest in anything else) in English. He a grad student in Mass Communication, one of the leaders of the campus antiapartheid movement. She all lip gloss, mousse, and bobby-socks-with-Birkenstocks. He all scruff and stubble, exuding the rank appeal of the honorably unwashed. Literally honorably unwashed, for she met him outside the tent he’d been headquartered in, from which he’d conducted all his work—scholarly and political—ever since fall break, when the shantytown was erected on the plaza in front of the administration building. On the November morning when they met he had not showered (she later learned) in four days. The shantytown comprised a single plywood-and-cardboard shack that looked like a child’s playhouse, along with five or six tents pitched hither and thither around it.

Walter had been sitting cross-legged in front of the foremost tent—the black, green, and gold flag of the African National Congress flying from its peak—brewing coffee on the most perfectly diminutive camp stove Bennie had ever seen. She smelled the coffee before she spotted the one brewing it. She’d been heading to her early-morning Tuesday-Thursday seminar, The Woman Question: Gender, Class, and Rights in Victorian England. By this point in the semester it was still more night than day when she set out for class—streetlights on, a few faint stars loitering overhead—and she enjoyed taking the opportunity to pretend she was in Victorian England. In her head she substituted cobblestones for concrete sidewalks; suffrage petitions for the books she clutched to her chest; gaslights for incandescent bulbs; the clatter of wagon wheels for the wheezing brakes of the campus shuttle bus.

Then she smelled the coffee, looked round, looked down, and there he was—looking up at her. With a kind of ease, a familiarity, as if well-accustomed to the sight of her, as if he’d been regarding her for ages. Upon seeing her notice him, he broke into a grin that was sheepish yet not.

“’lo.” Even with that first utterance, frogged with sleep and kept to a single syllable, his voice did something to her, resonated, rang. He had a large head of scraggly curls and wore a colorful Andean serape.

“You’re up early,” she retorted, and blushed. How inane! As if she were claiming to know his personal habits, when he ordinarily rose. Of course all she’d meant was that at this hour she’d assumed the shantytown would be dormant. Indeed, vacant: she hadn’t realized anyone actually stayed there overnight. In the afternoons and evenings she had seen it swarming with activity, scores of students sitting around with their backpacks and hand-painted signs, smoking and talking, strumming guitars and playing djembes, striding around the plaza handing out flyers full of unwieldy combinations of letters: ANC, UDF, COSATU, or else massed on their feet, facing the flak-jacketed student leaders on the steps of the admin building, raising their voices in call-and-response: Stop Blood Money, Divest Now!, and Amandla! Awethu!

Yet here was this man by himself, the plaza deserted except for a few isolated figures trudging stiffly to class at this unpopular hour. Such a big man he was to sit with his legs crossed like a child’s, tending with casual propriety to the littlest camp stove imaginable. It was darling. It belonged in a dollhouse. During the day, with its acronym-strewn signage and staticky bursts of megaphone, the shantytown had an ugly utilitarian air. But in the half-light of the streetlamps and the predawn celestial glimmer, it appeared whimsical and ambiguous, a setting from a dream. The cold stung her nostrils and heightened the fragrance of the coffee in its aluminum pot. A cowboyish odor, beany and thick. She didn’t even drink coffee in those days—stuck to cocoa or tea—but in that shivery violet hour it smelled good to her.

She fell for the coffee, she fell for the stove: this was what she liked to say later, when retelling the story of how they met. She fell for the tent. It was true in a way, although there wasn’t a thing special about it, the tent. Only that she wanted in.

“Do you live here?”

He laughed. Creases like parentheses appeared on either side of his mouth.

“I mean—but you stay out here all night?”

He shrugged assent. “Admin’s been threatening to bulldoze it. Kind of need someone here around the clock.”

“They won’t bulldoze with you in it?”

“Here’s hoping.”

“But isn’t it freezing?”

“The sleeping bag’s good for twenty below. The tent holds in a lot of body heat.”

She felt a temperature surge in her own body then, despite the fact that her teeth had begun to chatter in the morning’s raw damp.

“But yeah,” he went on, and there was the grin again, sudden and crease-framed, “it is getting pretty fucking cold. Witness all my hearty comrades.” An arm came out from under the serape; he gestured at his invisible cohort.

“So it’s just you out here?”

A little bow. It had a bit of the showman in it and a bit of the monk.

“You’re the stalwart, then.”

Thus she pronounced him. Gave him what would become his lifelong nickname even before she’d learned his name.

A cacophony of shrieks yanks her out of the memory and directs her attention back out the bedroom window onto the lawn, where the aluminum ladder wobbles, then topples, tossing a passenger to the ground—this mishap the result of Hannah and Clem attempting to “walk” it across the lawn with Chana hitching a ride on top. Is anyone hurt? Chana’s prostrated; Bennie can see her full gypsy skirt arrayed all around her like a mushroom’s multicolored gills, but no: she’s a dancerly little thing and tumbles up fluidly, like a film run backward, unscathed, arms wide, triumphant. Laughter peals across the yard.

What’s the matter with them? They’re clowns, she thinks, with irritation. But what’s the matter with her? The better question, perhaps. What is this about, her own sourness? Why can’t she love their effervescence, let herself enjoy it? She and Stalwart, after all, had made of their own wedding a private idyll, following in the footsteps of no venerable tradition. But its playfulness had been hard-won, even deliberate—a kind of refutation of sorrow—and it had been birthed in the shadow of overmuch suffering, overmuch loss.

Whereas Clem and the Ch/Hannahs (frankly at this moment even the decision to have homophonic bridesmaids rubs her the wrong way, as if it’s just a bit of cleverness, another jokey gimmick) are going about this as if none of it counts, as if it’s all a lark, gauzy, make-believe. As if it isn’t a matter of lives at stake. As if no long and serious story is about to take root. As if they lack all sensible fear of the future.

THE MUSTANG COMING UP the drive is asymmetrically two-tone—rusty maroon and gold—though it surely did not start life this way. In dire need of a muffler job, it knocks along at a pace that would be too fast for the gravel even if not for the groaning struts, before lurching to a halt up near the barn. Its open windows a referendum on the state of its AC. The late-day sun streams across McElroy’s fields, backlighting tall swaying wands of grass. The engine cuts out and in the sudden quiet a black-capped chickadee proclaims the arrival of these pilgrims with its short, piercing song: fee bee!

From the driver’s side: bare feet. Frayed jeans. Lloyd unfolds. He is tall and too lean, always has been, with a concave chest and sugary stubble and pale eyebrows that somehow incline toward the center of his brow in a perpetual wince. Or perpetual thought. Or as if the difficult, intricate, ceaseless involutions of his mind cause him a kind of delicate, desirable pain. There is a kind of woman who finds this irresistible. Lloyd does a yoga-type thing, stretching out his back, then an un-yoga-type thing, reaching across his narrow chest and scratching his armpit.

From the passenger’s side: green imitation-snakeskin cowboy boots. Brown legs, stained pink shorts. Ellerby slides out. Frumpy and grumpy. Messy obsidian hair. Looks like she’s been scissoring bubble gum out of it. She plucks her sweaty underwear out of her crack.

Lloyd opens the trunk. They each heave out a bag, start toward the house. Halfway there Ellerby stops, runs back to the car, opens the door, grabs a turtle-shaped knapsack, slams the door, opens it again, grabs a cowboy hat, slams the door, runs back to where her father is waiting. They resume walking.

Porch: vacant.

Kitchen door: open.

Lloyd peers through the screen. “Hello?” Looks around at Ellerby, who raises her eyebrows as if to say, I’m just the kid, remember? He pushes it open, enters. “Hellooo?”

Thieves could not creep more stealthily through the kitchen. They peer around the door frame into the empty living room. The famous preserved wall of brass mailboxes, each rectangle of glass glowing rose-gold with the sun’s slow-sinking light. Lloyd circles the room as if casing the joint, Ellerby close behind him. Together they come to a stop before the geometry of boxes. Lloyd puts a hand to his chin and Ellerby follows suit. He tilts his head to the side; she does the same. A pair of after-hours prowlers in a secret gallery.

“Freeze!”

They swivel. They have been addressed by some kind of warrior. Fugitive from a portrait by Hokusai. He stands on the bottom tread of the stairs, pointing at them a wooden sword. Bare-chested, ski-masked, clad in purple bathing trunks.

“Lay down your weapons,” he commands.

Lloyd and Ellerby lower their suitcases.

The warrior: “State your business.”

Lloyd bows. “We come in peace.”

Ellerby raises her empty hands, positions them as if holding a camera to her face, and with a motion of her index finger and a click of her tongue, snaps a picture.

The warrior glares at her. A tense interval. Then he sheathes his sword. Austerely he announces: “You are welcome here.”

“Much obliged.” Lloyd hazards a guess. “Ninja?”

He is remonstrated. “Samurai.”

Lloyd bows again, and the samurai bows back.

Bennie comes down the stairs behind a full basket of dirty laundry. Fugitive from a Pissarro. “Lloyd!” She sounds at once welcoming and miffed. “I didn’t hear you! For heaven’s sake! How long have you been here?” Skirting the samurai, she comes all the way into the room, sets down her basket, hugs her brother, hugs her niece, then steps back, uncommonly flustered, brushing nonexistent crumbs from her skirt.

“Hope it’s okay,” says Lloyd in that vexing, hangdog way of his, sliding his hands into his pockets, “we let ourselves in.”

Bennie’s face pinks. She emits a short, pained laugh. Oh, Lloyd. Why must he—after all, he grew up here! She says it aloud, “Don’t be silly, it’s your house!” The family manse. It’s not as if she’s the gatekeeper. She’s his sister. His big sister. She laughs—makes herself laugh—again and puts a hand on his shoulder (But he’s all wire! All wooden dowel and wire underneath his shirt), declaring in a way meant to sound funny and hospitable, “The prodigal returns!”

He shrugs. A small movement of his shoulder, and she can’t tell whether he’s conceding his own ridiculousness or flinching at her touch.

“How are you, Lloyd? What’s”—she tries to think of the way he might phrase it—“your passion these days?” And knows instantly she’s bungled it.

Now he laughs, barely. Sound of a dry leaf falling. He understands the question as an effort to probe tactfully into his livelihood, to ascertain without seeming to grill him how he’s paying the rent. Importing Nicaraguan coffee, he says. Fair trade, Rainforest Alliance certified. From Matagalpa and Jinotega, mainly. Might begin working with a women’s farming collective in Estelí.

“That’s great,” says Bennie, with a jot too much enthusiasm. “Good for you.” What does that even mean, “importing coffee”? Is he actually hauling beans into the country himself? Distributing them to warehouses, retailers? Is he employed by someone else (please yes), sitting behind a desk all day in some leased commercial space, taking orders, managing accounts? Or is he winging it, is this some solo Lloyd venture, some far-fetched half-baked dream being presented as a fait accompli but in fact just-hatched and bound to fail within a few months?

She doesn’t ask follow-up questions. It’s too pointless, too frustrating, he’s only just arrived, why spoil things immediately? He’ll get defensive, think she’s putting him down, being defeatist. Accuse her of lacking imagination, lacking faith. Or else she’ll get defensive, see his enigmatic smile as a mask of superiority, a form of condescension. Of mocking her, ridiculing her stable (read: stodgy) life. Little does he know.

Anyway Lloyd manages. Somehow. Always has. She glances down: there are his long, narrow, for some reason unshod feet, coated with yellowish driveway dust. Next to them: Ellerby’s fake-snakeskin cowboy boots, cheap green plastic-looking things with pointed toes, surely bad for her feet.

“You must be exhausted. What do you need, guys, cool drink? Food? Shower? How long have you been on the road?”

“Left Albuquerque Saturday.”

“And today?”

Lloyd consults Ellerby, who perhaps transmits a telepathic response, for he nods and says, “Yeah, about ten hours. Started out from the motel in Columbus around eight. Stopped once for lunch, once for gas.”

Ellerby jabs her index finger in his direction.

“What?”

She makes a face: You know!

“Oh yeah. We stopped for ice cream, too.”

The samurai, abruptly reanimated, yanks off his ski mask. Sweaty hair spikes out around a hectic red face. He pulls a handful of his mother’s skirt. “Can I have some ice cream?”

Bennie looks down, takes unhurried stock of his avid expression, all the while exploring a back molar with her tongue. “After dinner.”

He gives a whoop and bolts upstairs.

“Excuse me!” At her cry he halts as if javelined in the back. “Get back here and pick that hat up, please.” He clatters down, swipes the ski mask off the stairs, clatters up again, vanishes. They can all but see the cartoon speed lines in his wake.

Bennie, with comic dignity: “Pim, meet Lloyd and Ellerby. Lloyd and Ellerby, Pim.”

IS SUPPER THIS EVENING a festive affair?

Mantha ponders. Undeniably it’s beginning to feel momentous, with each subsequent night more people gathered around the table (this afternoon she’d put the leaves in herself; she’d been supposed to do it with Tom—the leaves are solid oak and heavy—but he was nowhere to be found and Pim was too little and Aunt Glad too old and Clem too selfish; in the end Chana had helped), and lots of chatter—endless, it seems—about the wedding, from symbolism to brass tacks, all the supposedly millions of chores still to be done. There’s certainly something in the air—but is it festivity? That’s the question.

Tom got to the table late and disorganized-looking, his T-shirt ripped at the shoulder, his cheeks ruddy the way they get whenever he’s exerted himself physically or emotionally. He’s said nothing since an initial mumbled “Hi,” and is just sitting there now shoving absurdly big hunks of baguette into his mouth. “Pretty,” commented Clem a moment ago. He’d rewarded her by opening his mouth and displaying the masticated mess inside.

Beside him Aunt Glad also eats bread, but at the opposite end of the manners scale. She tears off flakes and crumbs, which she places at slow intervals on her tongue. Each time she inserts a new piece her whisky-colored eyes gleam like embers flaring up before a draft.

In addition to the freshly warmed baguettes they are having sausages and peppers Bennie did on the grill, along with tomato and feta salad, roasted cauliflower and peas, and tofu and pineapple kebabs for the people who don’t eat meat, namely Lloyd, Clem, and Chana. Mantha, having decided tonight that she doesn’t eat sausages, tofu, tomatoes, feta, cauliflower, or peas, is making a supper of grilled pineapple chunks, which she dips into the large puddle of ketchup squirted in the center of her plate.

Down at the end of the table, the three young ladies (already Aunt Glad’s term for them has been absorbed and put to use, albeit with a glaze of irony, by everyone else) show evidence of their unladylike afternoon, all that dragging around of the ladder and scrambling through the trees and falling down and laughing so honkingly that every time they erupted anew Mantha imagined a V of geese. They look messy and sunburned, Clem’s hair stuck with catkins, Hannah’s eyeliner gone racoonish, Chana’s fat braid wisped apart like smoke. All their antics have left them far from tired, though, to judge by the way they are dominating the conversation, with great animation and an unsortable pidgin of academic-ese mixed with hipster jargon. Syllables fall on Mantha like glittering geodes, enticing and sharply excluding. Sentences rush by studded with odd phrases: dialectic of function, court-involved youth, reverse appropriation. Mantha tries out a few for herself, mumbling under her breath: Optically white. Body shaming. Microaggression. The syllables unyielding in her mouth, like Grape-Nuts.

Pim, beside her in his junior chair, is wholly absorbed in his cauliflower and peas, which he’s segregated into squadrons and now—humming “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”—arranges into battle lines.

“Take a bite, now,” directs Bennie every so often, each time leading to a reduction in the ranks of one or the other fighting force.

Directly across from her sits Lloyd. Each bite he inserts in his mouth gets chewed an exorbitant number of times, during which time his fork rests on the plate, and his hands rest in his lap. Oddest of all, he chews with his eyes closed. When, swallowing, he opens his eyes to find Mantha staring, he gives her a small smile, as if granting her permission to be amused. She looks away. Beside him Ellerby is his opposite: she rivals Tom, pounding away at great wads of sausage and bread, shifting them from one bulging cheek to the other while pineapple juice oozes down her chin, which she swipes every now and then with her paper napkin.

Walter’s chair remains empty. He called a little while ago to say he missed his train and will catch the next. Poor Dad. Always working so hard. Never mind that Poor Dad, always working so hard is a phrase she learned from Bennie herself; she compares the two now unfavorably in her head. Her mother’s baseline is grumpy. Her father’s is jolly. Even when he’s not being all stalwart like his nickname, all noisily singing in the kitchen and everything, he rarely gets mad. When he is mad, he just gets quiet and serious. The way he got last night, come to think of it. What had been the deal with that—the silent weirdness between her parents, all because of—what? Fundamentalists in stripes?

She leans across the table toward Ellerby. “Are you Jewish?”

Ellerby looks inquiringly up at her father, who shakes his head no.

Mantha hoots. “You don’t even know?!”

“Samantha,” says Bennie.

“How could she not know that?”

“Why’d you even ask her, stupid?” says Tom. “Dad’s the one who’s Jewish.”

“So?”

“Lloyd’s Mom’s brother.”

“So? Her mother could be Jewish.”

“Her mother’s from Nicaragua.”

“So?”

“In my day,” interjects Aunt Glad, with her old kindergarten teacher’s knack for being amiably censorious, “it was considered impolite to talk about religion at social gatherings.”

“Where is your mother?” Mantha leans again toward Ellerby, as if the answer might be whispered in confidence.

For a moment Ellerby appears frozen. Then she sets down her fork, picks up her invisible camera, and snaps a “photo” of Mantha, who blinks just as if a real flash had gone off.

“In my day,” continues Aunt Glad, “it was considered impolite to ask any questions of a personal nature at the dinner table.”

“What?” Mantha appeals to the table at large. “I just wanted to know where her mother is.”

“Mantha.” Bennie’s voice is a shot fired across the bow.

“What?! What’s personal about that?”

“Your shirt,” Bennie says, her voice dangerously stripped of inflection, “is in your ketchup.”

Snorts of laughter from Tom.

Mantha whacks him with her cast.

“Hey!” Tom massages his shoulder extravagantly. “Did you see what she did?”

“Mantha, leave the table.”

“Me?! Why me?!”

Tom sticks a finger in each ear. “Duuude. You trying to torture the entire canine population of Rundle Junction?”

Mantha scrapes her chair back violently. “Why don’t you ask him what he’s been doing all afternoon!”

The pause that follows is interesting. Mantha’s outcry had been a wild shot, but from the ruddy splotches reestablishing themselves on Tom’s cheeks, it seems she might have struck upon something. All three young ladies stop their gabbing. Lloyd, for the first time all evening, attends with curiosity to the conversation. Ellerby angles her invisible camera at Tom. Pim looks up from his battle of vegetables. Aunt Glad, like the last person to realize the others have stopped passing cards in a game of spoons, looks around the table and emits a little sound, something between a cough and an oh! And Bennie—for it all comes down to the materfamilias here; what will she do, in which direction will she steer the action?—takes temporary cover behind one of her trademark unfathomable stares.

What ultimately breaks the silence, however, is the bang of the screen door followed by the appearance of Walter: sports jacket slung over an arm, tie loosened, brow pleated, hot, tired, and—despite Mantha’s recent ode to his never getting mad—visibly angry.

With one hand he’s still clutching his briefcase. With the other he holds up a green-and-yellow lawn sign. “Anyone know anything about this?”

“That guy dropped it off earlier today,” offers Clem.

“What guy?”

Bennie has set down her fork and knife and placed her forearms and palms flat on the table. The tiniest vertical showing between her eyebrows. She glances toward Lloyd and Ellerby, then back at Walter with an in-sip of breath, poised to interrupt if only she can catch his attention, but he stands glaring—really, there is no other word for it—at Clem.

Who, shrugging, says, “You know. That guy you don’t like. Tall, thin. You once called him a sycophant? Kind of bald? Works for the town?”

“Jeff Greenberg? He doesn’t work for the town.” Walter has set down neither the sign nor his briefcase. He’s not trembling, exactly, but something along those lines. Imperceptibly vibrating.

“Oh yeah, Jeff Greenberg. Well you know what I mean. He’s like, civically involved or something.”

“So let me get this straight. Jeff Greenberg just came and stuck this”—Walter gives the sign a shake and a few bits of earth fall from the wire stakes—“in our lawn?”

“Walter.” Bennie stands.

“What?”

“Hello.”

The look on his face is the same one Pim turns on her whenever she rouses him from a bad dream: as though she is the source of what afflicts him. Then, slowly, he is recalled to his surroundings. Something coiled releases. “Hello,” Walter responds, and he takes in the room, the various people arranged around the table, adjusting his mien as he registers the newest newcomers—“Lloyd! Ellerby! You made it”—and sets down his briefcase, and laughs. “Sorry, folks.”

“He didn’t stick it in the lawn, Dad,” says Clem.

“What?”

“Jeff Greenberg didn’t put it in the lawn, he left it on the porch. I saw him. He asked if he could leave it and if you’d give him a call.”

“He was wearing a festive shirt,” contributes Aunt Glad.

“He said mazel tov about the wedding.”

“He said mazel tov.”

“Yeah.”

“Uh-huh.” Walter sucks his teeth. “If he didn’t put it in the lawn, how’d it get there?”

“Maybe it blew?” says Mantha, whose mother’s injunction to leave the table seems to have slipped her mind.

“Maybe it flew.” Pim, fresh off the poetry slam.

“Maybe it grew!” Mantha and Pim laugh uproariously.

“It was stuck,” says Walter, “into the ground. Out by the road. Someone put it there.”

“I did,” says Tom.

In the silence that follows, everyone’s breath seems amplified.

“We will not. Have it. In our lawn.” Walter’s delivery, though quiet, is unwontedly authoritarian.

To the rest of the family’s surprise, Tom persists. “Why not?”

For one moment, gloriously and precariously, they can all picture him as a man.

“You know they’re racist?” says Tom. “In New Ashkelon the ultra-Orthodox hung an effigy out the window of a man in dreads and a rasta hat.”

Walter squares his shoulders, opens his mouth.

But: “This needs to wait,” says Bennie in a voice that could cut brick. She alone is privy to the complexity of all Walter is grappling with: not only the village politics of newcomers and locals, race and religion, who belongs and who gets to say so, but also the particular politics of their selling the house, the implications of having the sign on display, and the signal it might send to potential buyers, whoever they may be. But he must not give vent to all that here and now. Not before the kids, not before the company, not before Aunt Glad, and not before the imminent celebration. She lasers her gaze, charged with telepathic warning, at her husband.

Who receives it. Whatever he had been going to say comes out instead as, “I’ll go wash up.” He heads to the powder room.

Bennie, with something like concerted breeziness, says, “Tom, please fill Dad’s water glass. Aunt Glad, can I serve you a little more salad?”

Mantha gives it a moment to see if she remains exiled. Only when Bennie has sat back down and resumed eating, without evidence of remembering her decree, does Mantha slide her chair back up to the table and stab another pineapple chunk.

“OW,” MUTTERS HANNAH. “That used to be my foot.”

“Sorry,” whispers Chana. Crickets are chirping and out along the county road the occasional sound of an engine dopplers in and out, but other than that the night is quiet, as she herself has been striving to be.

“What are you doing?”

Rummaging through her duffel in the tent in the dark. “I forgot to take my pill.”

Hannah grunts.

Chana keeps delving as noiselessly as she can, searching with her fingers for the stiff plastic rectangle, smooth on one side, the other side having twenty-eight raised bumps. “Sorry, Hannah, can I check your bag?” she whispers.

Another grunt, crankier.

“Sorry, sorry—I just can’t find it and I’m thinking maybe it accidentally went into yours.” Is it her fault Hannah’s bag is equipped with literally the loudest zipper ever?

“Oh my God,” moans Hannah. “What do you need it for? Are you dying?”

This time it’s Chana who doesn’t answer.

“It absolutely has to be right this second?”

“It’s just that I’m supposed to take it the same time every day.”

“What’s the matter?” Now Clem’s awake, too.

“Sorry, sorry, you guys,” Chana whispers.

“Bo Peep here lost her pills.”

“What are they for, Chanaleh? Can we help you look in the morning?”

“I guess . . . I swear I put—”

“Baa-aa.”

“Do you think you left them in the room we slept in last night?”

“. . . maybe.” Oh God, did she? Dismay flares in her mind like a sparkler: oh let it not be harbinger of a migraine! Clem’s uncle is in that room now, so it isn’t even like she can dash back and check. Of course it’s nicer here than in that stuffy attic, with the tent windows unzipped and the damp odor of the earth, even if it is spooky staying next to that big carcass of a barn, even if there’s a mosquito trapped in the tent with them (its whining in her ear is what made her wake up and remember she hadn’t taken her pill in the first place), if only—Breathe, Chana, stress’ll only make it worse. Going on the pill has made all the difference with her menstrual migraines; she’s afraid if she gets off schedule she’ll be in for a doozy. Oh please let these spurs of light not be migraine aura! She wouldn’t mind explaining about her meds to Clem but not in a million years could she do it in front of Hannah, who for some reason doesn’t like her and never has: if Hannah knew she was a lesbian on birth control she’d never hear the end of it.

It’s hard being here in the midst of someone else’s family, especially when it’s her first time meeting any of them, especially when none of them know her. What more acute loneliness than to be a stranger in the midst of a group of people who are knitted together in the most intimate way? It’s even hard here in the tent with Clem and Hannah, especially when she understands she’s the second-best friend, the second-choice bridesmaid, chosen perhaps as much (she’s not an idiot) because she has a car as because Clem wanted her here. She’s been working hard to fend off the shameful secret that dogs her: at nineteen she still battles severe and occasionally debilitating homesickness. Besides her therapist the only people who know are her mother and father, who have been countless times the recipients of her middle-of-the-night weepy phone calls. Not weepy: sob-clogged, gut-stinging, anguish-riven. She tries channeling them now. Shuush-shh, Chanaleh, don’t do this to yourself, she can hear her mother say. Then her father’s voice: Try to breathe, honey, that’s it. Take another. Deep breath now.

“We’ll help you find them when it’s light,” promises Clem, burrowing back down in her sleeping bag.

“Thanks,” whispers Chana. But already she’s getting the feeling. It’s coming, it’s already here. A mournful metallic tang in her mouth. Flashbulb geometry in her skull. The assault from within: it creeps with undeterrable fortitude through her limbs, fizzles like Pop Rocks in her blood. She wraps her arms around her knees, lets escape a tiny whimper.

“Leave them alone,” Hannah murmurs into her pillow—is she being nice? “And they’ll come home, wagging their tails behind them.”

ornament SECOND NOCTURNE

THE MOON

On this June night at three a.m. the moon, that lithe trespasser, gains access to the Local Archives Room on the third floor of Rundle Junction Public Library. It sends one narrow column through the fan-shaped window to cast a rhombus of light across a study carrel, on which several items have been left: a cardboard file box labeled True List of Persons, 1917–present; a lipstick-stained Styrofoam cup (this despite food and beverage not being permitted in the Local Archives Room); several index cards covered with pencil scribbles; two tattered clothbound volumes, titled Handbook of American Pageantry and Spirit of Progress Grand Community Pageant, Rundle Junction, N.Y., 1927, and a smattering of diminutive black grains . . .

THE MOUSE

. . . which are in fact rodent droppings, excreted by an elderly doe mouse who makes her home together with a couple of younger females near the hot water pipe that runs behind the baseboard of the Local Archives Room. She belongs to the same species, Mus musculus, as the young mother mouse we met earlier, the one who lost all her first litter to flooding and is now building a nest in the wall behind Aunt Glad’s cot. Although they are genetically alike and physically almost indistinguishable, although they live less than two miles apart, and although in a broad sense they might be considered members of the same tribe, in a conventional human sense they could not be called relatives. That is, if it were possible to draw the extended family tree of each, even going back as far as a dozen generations (much further, as a point of reference, than either the Blumenthals or the Erlends could possibly trace their own ancestries), one might find no overlap.

This particular mouse (now, after only three years on earth, in her dotage) first became a mother at twelve weeks of age. She has fulfilled her evolutionary purpose by giving birth to more than three hundred children. She and her domestic companions (both descendants of hers) nurse their babies communally in a nest composed chiefly of chewed-up paper.

At the time that the moon is sending its lozenge of light into the Local Archives Room, the mouse is making her usual rounds, flitting across the stacks, scavenging for crumbs (happily for the mice, the no-food-and-beverage rule is routinely disregarded) and nest-augmenting materials.

This is the final night of her life. She will expire of natural causes by morning.

Now on the study carrel she climbs the small edifice of tattered volumes, displacing a few index cards as she does, and stands on her hind legs to sniff at the lipstick on the rim of the Styrofoam cup.

One last time her whiskers touch moonlight.

They quiver.

MEMORY

The Styrofoam cup and the index cards had been inadvertently left behind the previous day by a historian researching the early-twentieth-century American cultural phenomenon of civic pageantry for an intended monograph of which she has not yet written a single word save the title; she is planning to call it Pageant Fever.

Although the historian’s stock in trade is stories, and although she herself has, like anyone else, a life rich in stories, as a character she does not figure in this one. But her notes do. A sample of her misplaced jottings:

“A map of the United States dotted at every point where a pageant has blossomed during the last decade might be as thickly-speckled as a fertile meadow in the season of dandelions.”

—Ralph Davol, A Handbook of American Pageantry, 1914

ABSTRACT:

Nearly all pageants shared same general plot → Grand Course of Progress from Forest Primeval to City Beautiful. Regardless of variations, end goal of pageantry movement was uniform: “to stoke in citizens a deepened sense of fellowship and to minimize differences among them, whether of class, politics, race, religion, or ethnicity.”

PAGEANTS AS NURSERY OF PATRIOTISM

threat: “our foreign citizens after years in this country are still our foreign citizens”
solution: use pageants as tool for encouraging assimilation, allegiance, national solidarity
- educate/inculcate the “foreign-born element,” glorify traditional hierarchies, squash discontent
- depict anyone rising up against government as villains → ultimately vanquished by forces of good

•   •   •

Ex.: 1920, Miami, Ohio—“good people” fight off band of red-capped gnomes “who wander about in the dark, stirring up trouble and unrest”

•   •   •

Ex.: 1921, Nassau, Long Island—member of the “Black Hand” carries concealed explosives, is apprehended/interrogated by police

•   •   •

Ex.: 1925, Lexington, Massachusetts—scarlet Fan of Unrest attempts to rally workers against bosses until Freedom comes along and persuades them to act as individuals, rather than organize as revolutionary masses

•   •   •

Ex.: 1926, Stoughton, Massachusetts—Spirit of Anarchy tries to get recent immigrants to accept Red Flag, before being defeated by Spirit of Liberty and removed by uniformed soldier and sailor

•   •   •

Ex.: 1927, Rundle Junction, New York—(unscripted*) conflagration breaks out beneath grandstands during fifth and final performance, eighteen spectators dead (all children), thirty+ injured; usual suspects: immigrants, socialists, labor unionists, atheists, bachelors, artists, Jews

*though not part of official pageant, tragedy co-opted to fit/reinforce traditional pageant narrative →

officials declare cause of fire “indeterminate” despite accounts of blast (explosion/loud noise). possible explanations: fertilizer bomb, Molotov cocktail, “pyrotechnic paraphernalia gone awry,” anarchists, communist agitators, Freemasons, anti-Prohibitionists
another theory—though unpopular—was natural causes; spontaneous combustion possible if hay baled too wet or green
eventually becomes settled opinion that tragedy caused by an isolated “malefactor”
this individual (never found) deemed “unnatural, monstrous, beyond the pale”

BEYOND THE PALE, said the men gathered around the old Glendale. The men: regulars who came to Erlend’s to pick up their mail and stock up on razors and thread, saltines and seeds, then pulled up chairs and whiled away a morning exchanging gossip and news. The old Glendale: cold and unlit because it was summer. Still, the very position of that fat black iron stove in that building that had official status—for it was, despite its homeliness, a federal space, recognized and sanctioned by the great republic for which they all stood, for which they all sprung gladly to their feet whenever the band struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner”—made it a natural place to gather.

Beyond the pale, they repeated, taking up the refrain, passing it around like a flask. As if no other words could approach the degree of loathsomeness, the extent of reprehensibility: to cripple with grief fourteen mothers and fourteen fathers (for two pairs of victims had been siblings and one couple had lost all three children in the fire); to think—as the men sitting around the Glendale tended to—of the mothers, as the loci of the village’s collective anguish, brought to their knees at grave sites, taking to their beds in the invalidism of suffering, eventually rising again but forever changed, crimped by sorrow—all this was nothing if not beyond the pale.

Pale from palus, a wooden stake. Driven into the ground to mark a boundary. Or a series of stakes to make a fence. To be within the pale is to be within the jurisdiction, within the region governed by law and protected by society. To be beyond the pale is to be by definition lawless, uncivilized, lost.

In the absence of any concrete suspect, and unwilling or unable to envision him as anyone they knew, the people of Rundle Junction fell into the habit of referring to the malefactor as “the person from away.”

It was axiomatic: the evilness of the deed made the villain by definition unfathomable. And in the days and weeks and months following the tragedy, the men who smoked and chewed tobacco around the cold iron hearth of the Glendale (the men whose circle, if you happened to notice, no longer included old Lester Vilno, the bachelor or widower, depending on what story you’d heard and believed; the odd fellow who lived alone and made marionettes and did puppet shows for the area children; the small, stooped figure who was never exactly one of the regulars gathered around the Glendale, but who frequented Erlend’s just the same and was often to be seen lingering on the porch, whittling some hunk of wood, or perusing with prolonged and concentrated interest the jars of penny candy before making his small purchase; the foreigner with the long beard and hooked nose and accented English and heavy, dark, liquid eyes—and hadn’t the part of Europe he was supposed to have fled, come to think of it, been called the Pale of Settlement?) with their very words, their refrain, its choral repetition—Beyond the pale, Beyond the pale—edged the villain farther away, distancing and transfiguring him into something at once more and less than human.

Until he was neither a living being to be contemplated nor a problem to be puzzled out, but a chimera, a thing that doesn’t exist, or exists only as a symbol, terrible, fantastical, yet eminently practical, for its one vital use: to remind us why palings, why fences and boundary lines, must be established, must be well-kept.

THE PRODIGAL

Lloyd lies on his back, sleepless, in the hottest room of the house. The wedge of attic where Clem and her bridesmaids slept the night before. His childhood room at the back of the house, now shared by Tom and Pim, had always been the coolest of the bedrooms. It was gloomy in winter but sweet in summer, with the towering pines shading the tiny screened balcony.

It’s three in the morning but the room is lit almost brazenly by a lemon-drop moon floating smack in the middle of the curtainless window. Lloyd is naked but for his watch, an old analog on a cracked leather strap. Because it’s beat-up people assume it’s an heirloom. Many have asked its story. Women, men, strangers he’s met in bars and roadside diners, at free outdoor concerts and at the put-and-take section of the dump, at the plasma bank and on protest marches, and at the giant flea markets he likes to frequent, with their endless aisles of junk repurposed as wares. All those flea markets where he has been known to score a good deal, turn a decent profit. Or just as often lose his shirt.

But because Lloyd is Lloyd he is always well-received. Even when he owes money, lenders find themselves bending over backward to give him a break. Even when he’s broken his word, shown up two days late, dented your car, lost your keys, forgotten what he promised, changed his mind. Even when he’s ripped you off—not by conning, he never cons, unless you count his indolent charm a form of con, but he never lies outright, never schemes, just has a particular talent, a native grace, a knack for parting fools and their money—even then people can’t help but feel fond toward him. Want to buy him a drink, cook him a hot meal, follow him home—or, more likely, take him into their own homes, their own trailers or apartments or motel rooms for the night.

The thing about Lloyd is that he’s eminently adaptable. He knows it, too, knows how to work it, knows it works for him wherever he goes, his chameleon nature, his tractability. His appeal the appeal of an orphan, a cipher. Unthreatening, impermanent, consistent only in his willingness to vanish. His commitment to vanishing. If he had a family—not Ellerby, she doesn’t count, being a child and a bit of a wraith herself, a dark-eyed hoverer who spends most of the year out of sight and who, the few months she is with him, floats silently alongside, taking invisible pictures with her imaginary camera—but if he had a real family, a tribe he truly belonged to, he wouldn’t be able to slip in and out of other people’s stories the way he does. It’s only by virtue of all he’s declined that he remains free.

He brings his watch around to his face and in the light of the moon reads the time: 3:07. He stands, pulls on his jeans, takes the book he has been reading—an old liver-spotted copy of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, rediscovered on a living room shelf—and treads lightly downstairs. On the second floor he stops in the bathroom and without bothering to turn on the light, pees. The bathroom smells of the cool, cracked porcelain tiles he can see perfectly in his mind as he feels them underfoot; of the rusty water in the tank; of mice. Always mice, this house has always smelled of mice. Throughout his boyhood: their caraway-seed droppings in the pantry, spring traps set with peanut butter, sounds of scurrying in the walls.

He makes his way down to the kitchen where he drifts toward the fridge, leans into its cold yellow light. A jar of olives, a block of Parmesan. Bunch of mint. Ceramic bowl of raspberries red as mouths. The myth of Persephone comes to mind, the garnet juice bursting between her teeth, the mistake that condemned her to eternal return. Not that Rundle Junction’s Hades. Not that he had an unhappy childhood. He just never cast anchor here. Some kind of abstemiousness in his nature, some asceticism necessary to keep his mind clear, his path unimpeded, for hadn’t he always been aware—from the very earliest moments of his awareness—that there was somewhere else he had to go, some distant destination he had yet to find?

He fills a mug from the drying rack with water from the tap. Manages the screen door to the porch with such experienced delicacy it does not squeak. Goes to sit in the old cane chair and nearly has a heart attack.

“Hey,” says Tom, already occupying said chair.

“Jesus H.” Sits in the rocker instead.

The moon filters through the curtain of hanging plants in streamers and scraps, like bits of paper torn and tossed across their laps and scattered on the floor. Insects chirr. Treetops stir. Lloyd can feel Tom waiting, braced: A grown-up . . . Can feel his mute expectation: Questions shall ensue.

More than a minute goes by. Lloyd takes a swallow of water. Who is he to question Tom? No one, hardly. No one at all.

Tom extends his palm: pair of hand-rolled cigs. “Smoke?”

“What is it?”

“Tobacco.”

“No thanks.”

Tom rests one on the arm of his chair, lights the other for himself. “I can get weed.” Part etiquette, part boast.

Lloyd’s smile’s lost in the darkness. “I’m good.”

Another thirty seconds pass. “So you’re not going to interrogate me about what I’m doing up at three?”

“You want me to?”

“No. That’s cool.” After a bit: “So you’ve been involved in like, activism, right?”

“I’ve marched here and there. Held a banner or two.”

“Ever been arrested?”

Lloyd blows a little air through his nose. “Not for that.”

“For what, drugs?”

At that he laughs outright. “What does your mom say about me? Or—never mind. Guess that’s obvious.”

“No! No, she hasn’t said . . . I mean—I don’t know . . . it just seemed like a reasonable guess.”

Lloyd nods, sucks his teeth. After a moment volunteers: “I’ve never been arrested. I was taken into custody once for trying to help some people who came here illegally, but there were never formal charges.”

“What happened?”

“Too long a story for three a.m.” And now he does ask, “What about you? Law on your tail? Or is this just garden variety insomnia?”

Tom takes a drag, exhales, and examines his cigarette, rotating it between forefinger and thumb. “Actually,” he confides, “I was just over at the site of the new development. The thing from dinner—what all those signs are about?”

“The thing that’s got your dad so up in arms.”

“Yeah. I wanted to check it out for myself. See if the units really do have two kitchens and whatnot.”

“How’d you get there?”

“Biked.”

“How much could you see in the middle of the night?”

“Not much. I, uh—climbed around a little, but I couldn’t get into any of the units. I tried to figure it out by the gas lines.”

“And?”

Sheepishly, “I couldn’t tell which pipes were which.”

Lloyd can feel Tom’s desire. It’s like a damp pressure, a bottled breath. Some new-hatched thing with untested wings. He’s not sure what the desire is for. He’s not sure Tom knows. But how well he recognizes it. How it brings him back. “You care.”

“What?”

“You care about this thing, you’re invested.”

“I don’t know if I’m invested. I’m curious. Do I care about Rundle Junction? Do I care about hate crimes? Do I care about killing the planet?”

“Do you?”

“Of course. But caring’s easy. Knowing what to think is harder.”

“And?” inquires Lloyd. “What are your thoughts?”

“I don’t know. At first I thought my dad was dead wrong.” Tom reaches into the recycling bin, feels around and extracts an empty tuna fish can. He ashes into it, holding it cupped there in his hand. “About it being anti-Semitism. I thought the main issue really was the environment, the wetlands, the silver maples and that.” He takes a drag, exhales. “But then I was talking with Chana earlier tonight, you know? She’s from New Jersey. She’s like super-Jewish, right? Goes to temple with her parents, goes on marches with Jewish Voice for Peace, the whole nine yards. And she says the ultra-Orthodox have basically taken over this town near where she lives and it’s literally a travesty. Her words. She says they basically impose their religious beliefs on the whole town. They boycott shops that won’t close on the Sabbath, put them out of business. They send their own kids to yeshivas but meanwhile they get themselves elected to the public school board and basically turn the public schools to crap, cut the budget for sports, music, APs, stuff like that.

“So now I’m thinking, maybe it is anti-Semitism. Maybe Dad’s right. Maybe the whole environmental thing is bull—a smokescreen, a way to fight them legally. But here’s the thing: sue me, but I don’t really want them to cut AP classes and sports and stuff. Even if I graduate before any of that happens, what about Mantha and Pim, you know? Dad says if you believe in democracy you have to accept it on its terms. Majority rule, everyone’s allowed to run for the school board, everyone’s allowed to vote how they want. Shop how they want. Live how they want. Which—I mean, yeah. Obviously. That’s what we believe in, right? Except, being totally honest, I don’t really want the Haredi taking over my town. You know? And if talking about the silver maples is the best way to stop that, maybe I’m for it. Even if it’s sneaky.”

Tom puts out his cigarette in the tuna fish can. “You think I’m being disloyal.” It’s that thing he does of asking a question but inflecting it like a statement.

Lloyd makes a small sound, neither cough nor laugh.

“What?”

He holds up his palms: I didn’t say anything.

“I am, technically,” decides Tom. “Being disloyal.”

“Maybe,” says Lloyd, “you’re being aloyal.”

“What’s that?”

He shrugs. “I just made it up. But there’s immoral and amoral, right? So maybe there’s disloyal and aloyal.”

“What’s the difference?”

“Are you opposing your dad for the sake of opposing him? Or do you actually have your own thoughts that differ from his?”

“I have my own thoughts. That differ from his. How is that not the definition of being disloyal?”

Lloyd gives a rare belly laugh. “What if it is?”

Tom frowns at the tin of ashes.

“Look, maybe loyalty’s overrated,” Lloyd goes on. “What does loyalty ever do but cloud our perception? Muck up our thinking—replace thinking—it marries us to an ideal and blinds us to what’s actually there. And for what? What’s the great payoff?”

“But—”

“In and of itself, what does loyalty serve? It doesn’t serve truth. It doesn’t serve justice. It doesn’t teach, or heal. Or create growth. It’s not a real virtue. It isn’t even a form of love.” Lloyd is speaking so softly now Tom has to strain to hear. “Though it sometimes gets dressed up that way. Though it often gets dressed up that way.”

Tom is hungry, thinks Lloyd. That’s all. Everyone is. Every healthy person hungers. To know things for himself. Form his own questions, test his own ideas. Funny how a person’s own family is often the first to punish him for that.

“The only thing loyalty serves,” Lloyd says, “is loyalty.”

Five and a half years from now, as a senior in college, Tom will take this question as the basis for his honors philosophy thesis. A dozen years from now, as an intern at a Brussels-based venture on conflict mediation and alternative dispute resolution, he’ll explore how the question is affected by cultural and situational variables in real-life case studies. Forty-three years from now, as an internationally renowned expert in the field of transitional justice and reconciliation, he’ll fly from Jerusalem to Arizona, where he’ll retell the story of this conversation as part of the eulogy at his uncle’s memorial service.

On this June morning he digests it in silence.

Astronomical twilight has begun. Astronomical twilight: the twice-daily period during which the geometric center of the sun is between twelve and eighteen degrees below the horizon. In the morning this period is succeeded by civil dawn, the moment when the sun reaches six degrees below the horizon. At this moment, in clear weather conditions, solar light becomes sufficient for conducting most outdoor activities. In several countries civil dawn is the basis for laws related to aviation, hunting, and the use of headlights.

In Rundle Junction, night loosens its grip. The sky, like blotting paper soaking up ink, begins drinking in the light now draining from moon and stars.