Somewhere behind him, Fran made a noise like a teakettle.
Vivian did not turn to look at Harlan. Avery noticed that — noticed the way Vivian's shoulders went very still at the sound of his voice, the way she kept her eyes on the water. She filed it away without knowing why.
"Thank you," Avery said to Harlan. Then, to Vivian, as steadily as she could while treading water in a dress: "Not tonight."
Vivian nodded. Just once, without hurt, as if Avery had told her the time.
"All right," she said. "That's fair."
She drew her feet out of the water. Dorian offered his hand, and she took it and stood, dripping onto the flagstones, and picked up her shoes but didn't put them on. She took her wine back from her son. Then she walked barefoot across the lawn toward the house with her shoes dangling from two fingers and her back very straight, and the crowd parted for her the way crowds part for brides and for grief.
Avery swam to the shallow end. Fran was already there, crouched at the steps with the cracker still in her hand.
"I have never," Fran said reverently, "loved you more."
"Help me out."
"In a minute. I'm memorizing this."
* * *
Harlan's downstairs bathroom had seashell soaps that no one had ever used and a framed photograph of a woman in a yellow sundress laughing on a dock. Avery stood on the bath mat and dripped.
She had wrung the dress out in the tub. It now hung on her like a wet paper bag. Her mascara, which had promised on the tube to be waterproof, had kept that promise the way politicians keep promises — technically, partially, with lines running down her cheekbones.
Someone knocked.
"It's me," Paige said.
Avery didn't answer, which Paige had always taken as a yes, and after six years Avery supposed it usually was. The door opened. Paige came in, shut it behind her, and leaned against it. She was wearing the white dress they'd found together at a consignment shop in April, the one that had made her cry in the fitting room, and she was holding a folded square of yellow fabric.
"Harlan says you can wear this," Paige said. "It was Bev's. His wife. He says she'd have wanted someone to."
Avery looked at the photograph on the wall. The yellow sundress. The dock. The laugh.
"Paige."
"I know."