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“I guess.”
    We were quiet for a while, listening to the sounds of Phil getting ready for bed—his feet plodding on the stairs, the water running in the bathroom.
    “What about the boys?” I asked.
    “Are you kidding? No way am I inviting the boys.”
    I laughed. “No, I meant—what are they like?”
    “Oh, um—besides their video game skills? Alex and Eric are really smart and kind of quiet. Kelsey told me they’re both going to be doctors, like their parents. They go to the school she used to go to, Ass Bury.”
    “ Ash bury.”
    “And then Mac...he’s kind of an idiot. But he’s funny, I guess.”
    “Thank goodness for that,” I said, smiling. Maybe this would be the beginning of something—of friends in and out of our house, breathing life into our empty spaces. “So it was fun overall?”
    But Danielle had closed her eyes and was already drifting off to sleep.
    * * *
    In the morning, I made a trip into Livermore for groceries, lingering for a long time in front of the aisle of chips. What did teenage girls eat? Flavored chips, diet soda? Was it possible to make a wrong choice and completely blow my daughter’s chance at a social life?
    I put Danielle to work straightening the house, which mostly consisted of hauling unpacked boxes from the living room to the garage. It was junk, all of it, but junk I couldn’t bear to throw away—an old spaghetti pot with the enamel worn thin, binders and outdated college textbooks.
    Hannah arrived twenty minutes early—shy, answering my questions with polite monosyllables. Unlike her mother, she was plump, fat puddling at her armpits. She was awkward in her racerback tank suit, and I decided I liked her.
    Kelsey was twenty minutes late, her face dwarfed by an oversize pair of sunglasses. Danielle was right. In her black bikini, with a sarong tied casually across her hips, Kelsey might have been a model for an advertisement in a men’s magazine. “It’s so nice to meet you,” she said, holding out a confident hand, as if she were the adult, welcoming me to her home. “I hear that you work at Miles Landers.”
    “Right, I’ve been there for seven years now. I think you’ll like it.”
    She pushed the sunglasses to the top of her head, revealing eyes that were the same pale blue as her mother’s, but somehow colder and flatter. “Anything would be better than Ass Bury.”
    All together, they were an odd trio, thrown together by circumstance rather than similarity. Throughout the afternoon I caught odd snatches of their conversation and glimpses of them from various windows of the house. Danielle blew up the beach ball I’d bought at the Dollar Store and the three of them smacked it back and forth across the surface of the water, sometimes viciously, sometimes idly, until it popped.
    At one point Danielle came inside to use the bathroom and I intercepted her with a kiss on the forehead. At my insistence, she’d slathered herself with sunscreen, and her skin gleamed pink and raw from the previous week’s burn. “I’m glad you’re making friends.”
    “Well, we haven’t taken a blood oath or anything yet, so don’t get too excited,” she said, hurrying past.
    When Phil came home, he found me browning beef for enchiladas and wrapped his arms around my waist, swaying gently with me cheek to cheek.
    “You’re in a good mood,” he observed.
    “Why wouldn’t I be?”
    “So how did it go? The great swim party of 2014?”
    “Still going.” I jerked my head in the direction of the backyard, where the girls had been taking turns on the diving board. Hannah was there now, pumping her legs, her large breasts jiggling with the vertical motion. She took a clumsy leap and hit the water with a splash. I saw Kelsey and Danielle exchange smirks and felt suddenly, inexpressively sad. “I invited the girls to stay for dinner.”
    Phil straightened, releasing me. We stood next to each other, watching out the window as the three of them bobbed in the