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the church hall at First Presbyterian, Mrs. Bascomb opened her coat and took out a bag she’d wrapped in plastic and tucked in there. It was full of knitting. “It’s the boredom I can’t stand,” she said as Mr. Bascomb went off to get coffee. Mrs. Donovan found her sister in the robing room. I could hear her crying all the way down the hall, saying she almost fell in and drowned, which I guess was technically true.
    Mr. and Mrs. Langer were there because their house was a single-story ranch with a slab foundation; my father used to shake his head sometimes at the foolishness of building that way on low land. Cissy Langer was my mother’s best friend from grade school, which I had a hard time imagining even though they had the pictures to prove it, black-and-white photographs with white edges crimped like a piecrust of the two of them in Sunday dresses standing outside of one or the other of their houses, squinting. Cissy and Mr. Langer, whose name was Henry, weren’t surprised that my parents weren’t there. Cissy said the last time we had a bad flood my parents sat upstairs in their bedroom eating baloney sandwiches and playing Go Fish. I was a toddler at the time and my parents had let Cissy take me and my brothers to the firehouse.
    “It wasn’t anywhere near as high that time,” Cissy said. “Tommy was nine, I think, and he taught the other kids to play poker. I think Eddie did his homework or something.”
    Donald was in one corner, holding a sandwich in his hand and pulling at his lip with the other. He waved with the sandwich.
    “Were you scared?” he said.
    “Why?” I said. “You can swim as well as I can.” My father had made sure I could swim when I was so little that I couldn’t really remember it except the first time I tried diving and got water up my nose. Donald’s grandfather taught him, and Donald had such long arms now that he was always ahead of me if we went to Pride’s Beach and swam out to the foam bobbles that kept us netted in, away from the deepest part.
    “That’s just stupid, Mimi. That’s not the kind of water you can swim in. The current was strong enough to suck you under. You should have been scared.” He stuffed the last corner of his sandwich into his mouth, so his one cheek puffed out like a chipmunk’s.
    “What’s the matter with you? Don’t be so mean.”
    “Where are your parents?”
    “They stayed at the house.”
    “And you’re not even a little bit worried?”
    “Where are your grandparents?” I asked, and then I could tell by the strange, pinched look Donald got that that was why he wasn’t acting like himself.
    “They took a different boat. There wasn’t room in the one boat for them and me and Taffy, so I took Taffy and they took the next boat.”
    “You brought Taffy here?” Donald’s grandparents had an old beagle who breathed like she was gargling gravel. Donald’s grandfather said he didn’t know what his wife would do if anything happened to her, but my mother said that was the kind of dog that lived forever, that lived so long she forgot her housebreaking and made everyone miserable.
    “They made me put her in the choir room. There’s a goat there, too, and a cat in a cage.” Donald looked at the door. “My grandparents should be here soon.”
    “Maybe they stopped at our house and they’re upstairs with my mother and father playing cards,” I said.
    “Maybe,” he said.
    “You want to play cards? I bet somebody has a deck. Or checkers. I’m pretty sure there’s a set in the supply room.” Donald liked to play games and I figured it would take his mind off his worries. He was really attached to his grandparents. The couple of times I tried to get him talking about his life away from Miller’s Valley, his other school, his other friends, his mother, he hadn’t said much and I just let it go. I didn’t even know what his mother looked like. His grandmother had a heart-shaped locket she wore all the time, but the only