And nothing was. Except Polly.

She should have gone to Reno, after all. Might have cost her Adam, but it would have saved his life. She shouldn’t have wound Gregg up like a top, knowing he would come spinning right at her. She never planned to shoot him. Or did she? She wanted only to provoke him into crossing some line, proving that he was the unfit parent. It’s hard to remember all her beautiful plans, which ones worked, which ones didn’t. She saved herself. She saved her daughters. Everyone else was—what was that word that Adam liked to use? Lagniappe.

She is paying for her tomatoes when she hears a band at the far end of the parking lot start a familiar song. The man next to her—cute, probably ten years younger than she is, his graying hair gathered in a short, thick ponytail—begins to croon, almost under his breath. When he sees her head jerk up in recognition, he talksings the words to her: “I’d like to get to know you.”

She sees the dim interior of the High-Ho, the jukebox’s tubes glowing pink and green. The sun setting and rising over the cornfields, bigger than any other sun she has ever known. An iron bed, a quilt folded over the footboard. A silk dressing gown. A metal-top table. Room 3 at the Valley View. A slip of green paper, the scrawled order for poached eggs and rye toast carrying an erotic charge unlike any she had ever known, or would ever know again. The summer of 1995 feels like a century ago. Last August, she took Joy and Jani to Rehoboth, ignoring the Belleville bypass and choosing the old main road, the one that goes past the High-Ho. It’s a Mexican restaurant now, advertising Margarita Mondays and Two-fer Taco Tuesdays. The Valley View? Razed, leaving only a view of the nonvalley. Mr. C died in 2002, and it’s doubtful that Max and Ernest are alive, much less showing up for Margarita Mondays in a bar that’s been repainted with red, white, and green stripes, the better to resemble the Mexican flag.

Everybody’s dead. Except Polly.

Ponytail smiles at her, pulls out his cell phone and offers its blank text screen to Polly. Give him your digits, Jani would say if she were here. What could it hurt?

Oh, honey, if only you knew.

“I really would like to get to know you,” he says with the confidence born of never being turned down.

Polly shakes her head, glad for the dark glasses that hide her eyes.

“Trust me, you wouldn’t.”

Polly drives home, to the perfect house with the two perfect daughters—yes, both perfect; anyone who doesn’t see their individual perfection is dead to her—who will never know, must never know, what their mother did to provide them with their happy lives. The summer sky is a cloudless blue that seems hundreds of miles away, a towering ceiling, out of reach, higher than any bird or plane could fly.

You could even say it arches.