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drainpipes; they built forts in trees—and all these things Shelley could do. She knew to just be quiet and wait for them to notice the work she’d done. Her grandmother had told her a long time ago, when she was a kid and came running inside because the neighbor children and her brothers and sister, too, were playing Polio and wanted to make her be it.
    â€œDon’t let ’em see that it bothers you. Go right back and say, ‘Okay, I’m it.’ Say that like you don’t give a hoot. If they see they can get you riled up, they’ll just keep piling on more.”
    So for years she’d played Polio. She was it.
    The only place she had full relief was in her gramma’s house.
    There was nothing Shelley could say that her gramma would mind much, and over there she didn’t get the urges she sometimes had at home and at school to sass back.
    And her grandmother let her flick her foot. She’d had only a little polio—so little it seemed it was something about herself, and not the polio, that made her strange to other people. It was as if a feather had brushed her with the sharp edges of each tiny thread, so fine were its marks and traces. Only one leg from the shin down, mostly the foot. And her mouth dragged a little, too, on the left.
    But while she watched TV or just did nothing, she liked to flick that foot. Everyone always said, “Stop it; you’re doing it again. Stop it with the foot.”
    Butch, her oldest brother, used to hold his shooter. Her parents said the same to him.
    â€œKeep your hands off of it.”
    Then, when Shelley was fourteen, on March 16, 1971, her grandmother died.
    It was a Tuesday. Shelley came home that afternoon and walked across the yard. The only snow left was gray and porous, in drifts plowed by the side of the road. Oozy black mud showed through last year’s grass. She felt, the minute she let herself in, that the house was empty.
    Her gramma had had a stroke in her car, the toe of her right shoe daintily pressing down the brake pedal. On the seat next to her were two envelopes she was taking to the post office and her list—“coffee, oranges, oleo.”
    Shelley lifted her just the way she was into the house. By then, Shelley had already grown to be over six feet.

VI
    I n December of her third year back, Bea received a change-of-address card from the ad agency she’d worked for in Chicago. The agency had moved to New York City, to an address on Madison Avenue!
    This required a special session with June at Kaap’s, where they resolved to plan a shopping spree in Milwaukee.
    Bea had always wanted to live in New York City. She and June worked for hours on an appropriate card to send the woman who had been Bea’s boss (bribing Peggy with dimes, one at a time, buying themselves the few minutes it took her to walk to the long cases at the front of the restaurant and select a candy).
    The woman who had been Bea’s boss had always liked the Green Bay side of her. At first, Bea had knitted only with her hands beneath her desk, but when the head of the firm caught her at it and complimented her garter stitches, she began to purl in the open. At her wildest, she’d stuck her hair up in a bun, with a Takuma bamboo circular needle. Her boss eventually worried, as Bea’s mother had, about her personal life. “How’s your weekend?” she’d say. “Having fun? Good.” At the office, there was a young assistant in the art department who stopped asking Bea to lunch after their meals turned out to be, well, only lunches. Married man, the boss decided, and didn’t press it.
    Bea and June wrote the note to her on a Green Bay postcard that showed the bridge over the Fox River lifting up in two parts as a tall boat went through.
    Congratulatory but not fawning. Jaunty—with the implication she might soon be back on board, in New York. At the same time she mailed that card, Bea posted a check