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the people in front of her to see a woman in a sunset-colored poncho carrying a guitar by its neck, picking her way across the grass to take her place on a platform. It was Jonah’s famous folksinger mother, Susannah Bay! In person she was beautiful in the way of very few mothers, her hair long and black and straight—the opposite of Jules’s mother with her acorn-cap hairdo and Dacron pantsuits. The crowd cheered her.
    “Good evening, Spirit-in-the-Woods,” said the folksinger into a microphone when everyone was quiet. “Are you having a great summer?” A series of affirmative calls rose up. “Believe me, I know this is the best place on earth. I spent a couple of summers here too. Nothing is as close to heaven as this little patch of land.” Then she strummed hard on her guitar and began to sing. In person her voice was as strong as it sounded on her albums. She sang several songs that everyone knew, and some folk standards to which the audience was invited to sing along. Before her last song, she said, “I’ve brought an old friend with me tonight who happened to be in the neighborhood, and I’d like to invite him to join me now. Barry, would you come on up? Barry Claimes, everybody!”
    To applause, the terrier-bearded folksinger Barry Claimes, formerly of the sixties trio the Whistlers, and, as it happened, briefly Susannah Bay’s boyfriend back in the summer of ’66, came up beside her with a banjo strapped around him. “Hello, my lads and ladies!” he called out to the crowd. Though the Whistlers had all worn peaked caps and turtlenecks in concert and on their album covers, Barry had abandoned both when he struck out on his own in 1971. These days, he tucked his wavy brown hair behind his ears and wore soft, checkered shirts that made him look like a mild mountaineer. He waved modestly to the campers and then began to play his banjo while Susannah played her guitar. The two instruments came together and then backed off shyly, then came together again, finally forming the preamble to Susannah’s signature song. Quietly at first, then more forcefully, she began to sing:
    “I’ve been walkin’ through the valley, and I’ve been walkin’ through the weeds
    And I’ve been tryin’ to understand just why I could not meet your needs.
    Did you want me to be like she was?
    Is that all that was in your heart?
    A prayer that the wind would carry us . . .
    Carry us . . . apart . . .”
    After the performance, which was full of feeling and warmly received, everyone stood around and ladled up pink punch from a big metal bowl. Tiny fruit flies twittered on the surface of the punch, but mostly no one could see the rest of the bugs in the descending dark. The number of them ingested that summer was formidable: bugs in punch bowls, in salads, even scarfed down on the inhale in openmouthed sleep at night. Susannah Bay and Barry Claimes mingled with the campers. The two old friends and ex-lovers, moving among the crowd of teenagers, looked happy, flushed, natural—elder-statesman countercultural figures who were treated with appreciation.
    “Where’s Jonah?” someone asked. A girl said she’d heard he’d slipped out during his mother’s concert and gone to his teepee, complaining of nausea; several people said it was a shame he didn’t feel well on this night of all nights. Looking at Susannah, it was easy to see the origins of Jonah’s beauty, though it was more tentative and unassuming in its boy form.
    Jules felt excited and stiff standing not too far from Jonah’s mother. “I’ve never been near someone
famous
,” she whispered to Ethan, knowing that she sounded like a hick but not minding. She was relaxed around Ethan by now, and she was also relaxed around Ash. It still shocked Jules that the lovely, delicate, sophisticated girl in her teepee chose to spend so much time with her, but their friendship was indisputably easy, open, and real. At night Ash sat at the foot of Jules’s bed