For a while nobody mentioned my parents at all.

Danny said Lily had gotten fast, and I said she had been practicing, and he asked, at avoiding the spray, and I said that too, and we drank our sodas and toasted a particularly good jump, and it was, for long stretches, simply an ordinary Saturday, which after the preceding weeks felt like a kind of wealth I had forgotten I could have.

It was not that the hard things had been resolved.

Linda asked me, quietly, whether I was still sending the five hundred and fifty, and I said no, and she nodded and said she had thought I might change my mind, and I said, so did Mom, and that was as close as any of us came to the center of it.