When Ru came home after running away to find her father, Augusta sent her to a therapist, a tall woman with deeply inset eyes. Before the woman became fascinated by the exactitude of Ru’s memory functions, she focused on Augusta. Ru described her mother as “a baby, a doll, fragile like that.”

“Really,” the therapist said. “And so you think of your mother as a baby doll you must protect?”

“No, no,” Ru said. “She’s a baby on the outside but on the inside she’s more like a mobster. She might be powerful beyond measure.”

“And so she’s a mobster baby?”

“No,” Ru said, “maybe more of a baby mobster.”

And this was a perfect example of the baby mobster: Standing in the pantry, Augusta proved in one moment to be incredibly naïve—she’d never assumed her housekeeper for the past few decades understood anything about her private life?—and then in the next was storming out of the house to confront Mrs. Pedestro about her role as a top-secret messenger and to find out if the father of her children was dead or alive.

“She’s on the move!” Ru shouted to her older sisters as Augusta banged out of the front screen door. It was an expression they’d used as children to explain the flurry that followed one of their mother’s inspirational ideas about founding a new movement. “I repeat: She is on the move!”

Ru ran after her mother across the busy street as Liv and Atty ran downstairs together and followed.

Esme appeared at her bedroom window. “What’s going on?”

Ru shouted, “She’s going to ask Mrs. Pedestro if our father’s dead or alive!” Ru’s plan had veered off-course. She’d walked into the pantry to tell Jessamine and her mother that she had a guest coming to dinner—one sad and forlorn Teddy Whistler—but she’d missed that window now. Everything had careened out of control.

“How would Mrs. Pedestro know if our father’s dead or alive?” Esme shouted back.

Jessamine stepped out of the front door onto the small lawn and looked up at Esme. “She’s been the messenger between your mother and father all these years.”

“How do you know that?” Esme asked.

Jessamine shrugged.

Augusta knocked on the Pedestros’ front door. By the time it opened, Ru, Atty, and Liv had formed a semicircle behind her.

Virgil Pedestro answered. His hair had thinned and grayed, but he had the same nervous smile and wore a polo shirt with the collar up. “Who do we have here?”

Ru looked at the ground, hoping he wouldn’t recognize her from the night she barged in on him, naked except for a blue blazer, standing behind a tripod.

“Where’s your mother, Virgil? Is she here?”

“Maybe she is and maybe she isn’t.”

“Like I have time for this shit, young man,” Augusta said. “Tell her I want to talk to her right now.”

Virgil opened the screen door a little, dipped down, and peeked at Ru’s face. “Are you Ru Rockwell?” he said.

Augusta reached out and grabbed Virgil by the short row of buttons on his shirt. “Get her now. Do you hear me?”

“Hey, hey!” he said, lifting his arms in the air. “Ma! Mrs. Rockwell’s here to see you! Ma!”

Mrs. Pedestro appeared behind him, looking exactly the same as the night Ru handed her the letter she’d written to her unknown father. Her hair was still puffy and pinned back on one side. She was wearing the same kind of clothes—well fitting and nearly sporty. She’d just washed her hands, it seemed, and was drying them with a sand-dollar-appliquéd hand towel.

“Augusta,” she said, sensing alarm. “What is it?”

“I want to know if Nick is dead or alive.”

“I can’t say anything like that. I can’t…You know…It’s not…There are rules.”

“Is he dead then?” Augusta said, nodding curtly. “He’s dead. Isn’t he?” She reached out and grabbed Atty, who was closest. The girl’s eyes went wide. “He’s gone. That…triple asshole! He’s dead!” Their mother wasn’t accustomed to cursing so when she did, her expletives were often strangely vivid and inventive.

Here, again, was a perfect moment when the line between baby and mobster was blurred beyond distinction. Was her mother a baby about to break down wailing on Mrs. Pedestro’s lawn, or was she faking it, using the threat of explosion to bully Mrs. Pedestro into telling her the truth?

“No, no!” Mrs. Pedestro said. “He’s not dead! He lives in a retirement complex in Egg Harbor. He’s got a shih tzu named Tobias. He’s fine!”

“Egg Harbor?” Augusta said. “What’s in Egg Harbor?”

“He has a shih tzu?” Liv said, laughing. Ru wasn’t sure if it was the fact that the term shih tzu was inherently funny or that the small dog seemed to emasculate their father’s image—or both.

“Why’d he name it Tobias?” Atty said. “After the novelist Tobias Wolff?” Raised on a boarding school campus, Atty was inculcated in the art of naming pets after writers.

“Is he still with it?” Ru asked. “Mentally?”

“Let me put it this way,” Mrs. Pedestro said, tucking her chin to her chest. “There’s a sign in his room that reads: IN CASE OF EMERGENCY: DO NOT WAKE ME UP BY TOUCHING ME OR EVEN SHOUTING WITHIN TEN FEET OF THE BED.”

“I don’t know what that means,” Liv said.

“He was trained to wake from a dead sleep, disarm, and pin an intruder down,” Ru explained.

“Cool,” Atty said, gripping her iPhone then quickly tweeting.

“How do you know what’s posted in his bedroom?” Augusta asked Mrs. Pedestro.

“I’ve visited him. He gave me a tour,” Mrs. Pedestro said defensively. “He was surprised to hear from you after all these years, Augusta. He was sure it was over.”

“It is over.”

Mrs. Pedestro looked at Augusta as if she felt sorry for her, and then she turned and pulled a small envelope from a drawer in a hall table. “I was going to slip this in our mutual hiding spot, but I guess that’s not necessary anymore.”

Suddenly it felt like Mrs. Pedestro and Augusta were the ones who were clandestine lovers all these years. A wash of self-consciousness seemed to make Augusta blush, a rarity. She didn’t reach out and take the letter. It was as if she’d have to admit Mrs. Pedestro’s intimate role in her life, and she couldn’t do it.

Ru took the letter. Liv then ripped it out of Ru’s hands, opened it, read it, and then handed it off to Atty, who read it aloud.

Augusta,

Of course I want to see the girls. You’ve told me to show up and that’s what I’ll do.

As for my enemies, you’re right. They’re mostly just beset by nostalgia not vengeance.

Love,

NF

“He could show up at any time,” Ru said and it dawned on her that her mother must have thought she was seizing control of the situation by demanding Nick Flemming show up at their house—but by not setting a date and time, she’d actually relinquished all control. It was a grave tactical error.

“What’s NF stand for?” Atty asked.

“Nick Flemming,” Liv said, in a soft motherly tone Ru had never heard from her before. “Your grandfather.”

“Enough!” Augusta turned and started to head back to the house, but she took only a few paces before she stalled and looked at Jessamine in the yard and Esme still propped in her bedroom window. She glanced back over her shoulder at Liv, Ru, Atty, and Mrs. Pedestro.

Then her eyes went back to Jessamine. In some strange way, Jessamine knew Augusta best of all. Augusta searched Jessamine’s face and she saw sorrow there, but also courage. Jessamine looked at Augusta steadily. Cherish this, that’s what Jessamine’s face seemed to say. Jessamine’s husband was now dead. Augusta had been preparing herself for change, thought she was open to it, but this was too much at once.

A car pulled up—a little economy number—and a man stepped out. Teddy Whistler. He looked at the family looking at him. “Hi!” he said and waved.

Ru felt a strange desire to trumpet—it was how the elephants reacted to a surprise or when they were excited. On top of everything else, here was Teddy Whistler, returning to the Rockwells’ front lawn where she’d seen him so dizzy and dazed, professing his love for Liv. Ru knew that she shouldn’t feel like trumpeting when she saw Teddy, but she did, instinctively. She piped up from the Pedestros’ lawn, “Oh, and Teddy Whistler’s coming to dinner!”

“Teddy,” Liv whispered.

“Yes,” Ru said.

Liv turned on Atty, angrily. “This is the man you told me about! Why didn’t you say his name? Why didn’t you—”

“She doesn’t know,” Ru said.

Atty glanced between Liv and Ru. “Who is he?”

“Teddy from Ru’s book,” Liv said. “She didn’t make him up. He was already real.” The last time Liv had in any way acknowledged the existence of Teddy Whistler was the angry voice mail she’d left for Ru after reading the summary of her novel in The New York Times Book Review. The truth was that Ru had listened to the message, but was simply too ashamed to bring it up. She’d been waiting in line for a friend’s retro punk rock concert and when Cliff asked who it was, she hit DELETE. “Just my sister Liv, confusing life and art.”

“A spectacle!” Augusta whispered. “After all those years of hiding and fixing and keeping it all together, it’s just a spectacle!”

And then Ingmar started barking, deep inside the house.

Augusta’s back went straight and she started loping, which turned into a very slow and heavy jog. She raised her hands in the air, stopping a bit of traffic, and then she was running. She’d always told her daughters she’d been very fast as a child, but the girls had doubted this. It seemed, for a moment, that she was charging Teddy Whistler and so he took a step toward the driver’s-side door, but she veered, rounding the car.

“What is it?” Esme shouted.

“That son of a bitch! Your father!” Augusta said, raising her fist in the air.

Augusta could feel him. He was already in the house. She was sure that’s what had alarmed the dog but also she just knew. The moment before she’d ever laid eyes on him—that first time—she’d sensed his presence running alongside the downtown bus. She sensed him each time they met in public—a crowded train station, a bookstore, an airport bar. In all of those various hotel rooms, she knew he was going to knock just moments before he knocked.

Liv, Ru, and Atty took off after her.

Esme made a Statement of Personal Honesty. “My life is a shit show,” she declared, and she dipped back in through her bedroom window and headed for the stairs.

And soon enough all of the Rockwells were gone, leaving Teddy Whistler and Jessamine. He walked up to her and extended his hand. “Hi,” he said. “I think I was invited to dinner.”

Jessamine smiled. “Welcome to the Rockwells’.”