“She’s always been like that, though,” Patricia says.

“Like what?”

“Every man she dates, she thinks they’re going to solve all her problems, make her this better woman, the one she ought to be. The woman she doesn’t know how to make herself be. But she never got engaged to any of them. She never took it this far. This is just ridiculous, and it’s all Henry’s fault.”

“Why?”

“He told her that his only dying wish was to see his little girl get married before he died. And what do you know, but a week later, they’re engaged!”

“You don’t think they love each other?”

“My daughter doesn’t fully love people yet,” Patricia says. “Not the way she will.”

“What do you mean?” Phoebe asks.

“I mean she loves Gary the way that I love this cocktail. The way that I have come to love a foam body pillow. The way I loved Henry at the start, when I thought love was about getting something from people. I fell in love with what Henry gave me. And he gave me so much. He truly did. But loving someone like that doesn’t make you a better woman. Only losing them does.”

She wonders if this is what it’s like to have a mother, to sit together, drinking in the afternoon, listening to her meandering stories about what it means to truly love. Phoebe feels like she’s watching a woman write her posthumous autobiography aloud, like Patricia is the dead version of herself whose saving grace is somehow knowing everything.

“How did losing Henry make you better?” Phoebe asks.

“Henry quickly deteriorated after the first diagnosis, and I couldn’t stop having this horrible feeling like I was dying, too.”

At night, she stared at her sagging breasts and her blue veins and the thin skin over her hands and wondered what happened to her. How did her skin become so thin? How had she come to own so many paintings by dead artists? How had she wound up on the board of the Preservation Society? How had she come to be a woman who put on lip liner just like her mother? She had once been so young, so beautiful that an artist from her gallery asked to paint her, and why didn’t she say yes?

“I had been too embarrassed then,” she says. “Simply put, I thought I was fat. And I didn’t think it was tasteful for a married woman to do something like that. My mother was right. I was a terrible snob. But what a shame. Because now I see that I was too young and beautiful then not to be naked all of the time.”

When Patricia realized that’s exactly how she would feel when she was ninety—that she was too young and beautiful at sixty not to have been naked all of the time—she reached out to the artist.

“It had been decades,” Patricia says. “But I just called William like no time had passed and said, I’m ready to pose for you. God, that’s what impresses me now the most. How I just did that. It felt like the boldest thing I had ever done, somehow scarier than even getting married.

“William and I didn’t have an affair,” she adds. “Even though I know that’s what Lila must think. I just wanted him to paint me. I needed him to document my body as it was at that precise moment. Of course, I didn’t realize that he had turned into a Cubist over the last thirty years. But that’s beside the point. The point was to be standing there in the garden, knowing he was considering me, every muscle, every vein. To be fully seen like that. To be fully myself in front of someone else and not ashamed one bit. To feel proud, actually. That saved me. But let me be clear. Not from myself.”

“What do you mean?” Phoebe asks.

“I didn’t want to be saved from myself. Nobody does! All we want is permission to stand there naked and be our damned selves.”

This sounds true to Phoebe. This sounds like exactly what she wants, what she has secretly always wanted. To read books when she wanted to read books. To be sad when she was sad. To be scared when she was scared. To be angry when she was angry. To be boring when she felt boring.

“Of course, Lila was horribly embarrassed by the painting,” Patricia says. “She wouldn’t talk to me for weeks after I brought it to the gallery. She was hysterical, kept saying, Dad is sick and you strip naked for another man? So I said, Honey, your father loves Cubism.”

She laughs to herself.

“Of course now I know it took Henry his entire life to admit the truth about who he was, too,” Patricia says. “I hope it doesn’t take Lila that long.”

She turns to Phoebe.

“Is she horribly embarrassed of me?” Patricia asks. “What a humiliating question for a mother to ask.”

“She’s angry at you.”

Patricia nods again. “She’s been angry at me ever since Henry got sick.”

“And you’ve been angry at her.”

The comment takes Patricia by surprise, as if she hadn’t quite been able to admit this aloud yet.

“When Lila gave away the painting to Gary for free, what a slap in the face that was. Never mind that a William Withers painting goes for at least twenty thousand at auction these days. That painting was priceless to me. It wasn’t even for sale, and she knew it. She said, Yes, you kept saying it was literally priceless, so I gave it away for free.”

Patricia sighs.

“It’s not easy being angry at your own creation. It’s like being angry at yourself.”

She worries it’s her fault and that by giving Lila everything, they have given her nothing. They have stripped her of the most important thing: actual human desire. Her life has no urgency. There are no stakes.

“The girl spills a bottle of red wine on the brand-new couch, and we just get a new one. It is as simple as that. Everything is replaceable. The windows in the bedroom, the Barbies whose heads popped off sometimes for no reason I could understand, replaceable. Her world is a world of one million Barbies; a world of cartoons, where Daffy Duck can get baked into a cake or fall out of a tree and never bleed. Her father was the first thing she ever truly lost, and so what else does she do but try to immediately replace him with a man who works in corporeal waste management.”

She finishes off her cocktail.

“Anyway. Nothing can be done now. The past is like the Gran Cavallo and you can’t fix the Gran Cavallo, right? I mean, sure, who doesn’t fantasize about drawing in the rest of the horse, and maybe the sky around the horse. But what would the painting be worth then? Absolutely nothing. So it is what it is. Imperfect, unfinished, forever. We just have to move on, call it a masterpiece, even if it’s not, and start working on a new goddamned painting.”

“I suppose I didn’t realize that’s what it would feel like getting older,” Phoebe confesses. She always imagined getting older as a narrowing street that got darker as you walked. A concretization of your personality and all the things that made you who you were. “But it’s not, is it?”

Patricia shakes her head.

“Pamela, it is all about moving on. Saying goodbye to whoever you thought you were, whoever you thought you would be. Let me demonstrate.”

She gets up, opens the bag of clothes. Holds up her sweater to the light.

“Henry was always trying to make me a sequins gal, but now that he’s gone, I can finally admit, I am not a sequins gal. So, goodbye.”

She drops the shirt in Phoebe’s lap.

“In full disclosure, I’m not a sequins gal, either,” Phoebe says. “I mean, it was fun for a day.”

“It was fun for a life,” Patricia says. “But now I wear linen and drink in the afternoon, and so be it. Because when did afternoons get so long? I mean, Christ, let’s just get on with the evening, shall we?”

The bachelorette party begins with a “water journey” at a nearby spa.

“I just wish they wouldn’t call it a water journey,” Marla says, standing in the changing room. “Then I could actually enjoy it.”

“Shh,” Suz says, and points to a sign on the door demanding that they whisper at all times. Not just for other guests, but for themselves. This is proving to be tricky for Marla and Lila, though.

“This is sort of like the hot springs in Baden-Baden, except not,” Lila says.

“Shouldn’t we be allowed to have our phones if this is our own personal journey?” Marla asks.

Phoebe waits for Lila to respond but then remembers that Lila almost never speaks directly to Marla, just stands there and lets Marla say whatever she wants.