“How many?”

“A hundred and eighty.” Thunder rumbled in the west. It didn’t seem louder, but it was more focused, somehow. Ki’s eyes went in that direction, then came back to mine. “I’m scared, Mike.”

“Scared? Of what?”

“Ofi don’t know. The lady in Mattie’s dress. The men we saw.” Then she looked over my shoulder. “Here comes Mommy.” I have heard actresses deliver the line Not in front of the children in that exact same tone of voice. Kyra wiggled in the circle of my arms. “Land me.” I landed her. Mattie, John, Rommie, and George came over to join us. Ki ran to Mattie, who picked her up and then eyed us like a general surveying her troops. “Got the beer?” she asked me. “Yessum. A case of Bud and a dozen mixed sodas, as well. Plus lemonade.’’ “Great. Mr. Kennedy—”

“George, ma’am.”

“George, then. And if you call me ma’am again, I’ll punch you in the nose. I’m Mattie. Would you drive down to the Lakeview General”-she pointed to the store on Route 68, about half a mile from us—"and get some ice?”

“You bet.”

“Mr. Bissonette—”

“Rommie.”

“There’s a little garden at the north end of the trailer, Rommie. Can you find a couple of good-looking lettuces?”

“I think I can handle that.”

“John, let’s get the meat into the fridge. As for you, Michael…” She pointed to the barbecue. “The briquets are the self-lighting kind—just drop a match and stand back. Do your duty.”

“Aye, good lady,” I said, and dropped to my knees in front of her. That finally got a giggle out of Ki.

Laughing, Mattie took my hand and pulled me back onto my feet. “Come on, Sir Galahad,” she said. “It’s going to rain. I want to be safe inside and too stuffed to jump when it does.”

In the city, parties begin with greetings at the door, gathered-in coats, and those peculiar little air-kisses (when, exactly, did that social oddity begin?). In the country, they begin with chores. You fetch, you carry, you hunt for stuff like barbecue tongs and oven mitts.

The hostess drafts a couple of men to move the picnic table, then decides it was actually better where it was and asks them to put it back. And at some point you discover that you’re having fun.

I piled briquets until they looked approximately like the pyramid on the bag, then touched a match to them. They blazed up satisfyingly and I stood back, wiping my forearm across my forehead. Cool and clear might be coming, but it surely wasn’t in hailing distance yet. The sun had burned through and the day had gone from dull to dazzling, yet in the west black-satin thunderheads continued to stack up. It was as if night had burst a blood-vessel in the sky over there.

“Mike?”

I looked around at Kyra. “What, honey?”

“Will you take care of me?”

“Yes,” I said with no hesitation at all.

For a moment something about my response—perhaps only the quickness of it—seemed to trouble her. Then she smiled. “Okay,” she said. “Look, here comes the ice-man!”

George was back from the store. He parked and got out. I walked over with Kyra, she holding my hand and swinging it possessively back and forth. Rommie came with us, juggling three heads of lettuce—I didn’t think he was much of a threat to the guy who had fascinated Ki on the common Saturday night.

George opened the Altima’s back door and brought out two bags of ice.

“The store was closed,” he said. “Sign said WILL RE-OPEN AT 5 P.M. That seemed a little too long to wait, so I took the ice and put the money through the mail-slot.”

They’d closed for Royce Merrill’s funeral, of course. Had given up almost a full day’s custom at the height of the tourist season to see the old fellow into the ground. It was sort of touching. I thought it was also sort of creepy.

“Can I carry some ice?” Kyra asked.

“I guess, but don’t frizzicate yourself,” George said, and carefully put a five-pound bag of ice into Ki’s outstretched arms.

“Frizzicate,” Kyra said, giggling. She began walking toward the trailer, where Mattie was just coming out. John was behind her and regarding her with the eyes of a gutshot beagle. “Mommy, look! I’m frizzicating!”

I took the other bag. “I know the icebox is outside, but don’t they keep a padlock on it?”

“I am friends with most padlocks,” George said.

“Oh. I see.”

“Mike! Catch!” John tossed a red Frisbee. It floated toward me, but high. I jumped for it, snagged it, and suddenly Devore was back in my head: What’s wrong with you, Rogette? You never used to throw like a girl Get him/

I looked down and saw Ki looking up. “Don’t think about sad stuff,” she said.

I smiled at her, then flipped her the Frisbee. “Okay, no sad stuff. Go on, sweetheart. Toss it to your mom. Let’s see if you can.”

She smiled back, turned, and made a quick, accurate flip to her mother—the toss was so hard that Mattie almost flubbed it. Whatever else Kyra Devore might have been, she was a Frisbee champion in the making.

Mattie tossed the Frisbee to George, who turned, the tail of his absurd brown suitcoat flaring, and caught it deftly behind his back. Mattie laughed and applauded, the hem of her top flirting with her navel.

“Showoffl” John called from the steps. “Jealousy is such an ugly emotion,” George said to Rommie Bis-sonette, and flipped him the Frisbee. Rommie floated it back to John, but it went wide and bonked off the side of the trailer. As John hurried down the steps to get it, Mattie turned to me. “My boombox is on the coffee-table in the living room, along with a stack of CDS. Most of them are pretty old, but at least it’s music. Will you bring them out?”

“Sure.” I went inside, where it was hot in spite of three strategically placed fans working overtime.

I looked at the grim, mass-produced furniture, and at Mattie’s rather noble effort to impart some character: the van Gogh print that should not have looked at home in a trailer kitchenette but did, Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks over the sofa, the tie-dyed curtains that would have made Jo laugh. There was a bravery here that made me sad for her and furious at Max Devore all over again. Dead or not, I wanted to kick his ass. I went into the living room and saw the new Mary Higgins Clark on the sofa end-table with a bookmark sticking out of it. Lying beside it in a heap were a couple of little-girl hair ribbons—something about them looked familiar to me, although I couldn’t remember ever having seen Ki wearing them. I stood there a moment longer, frowning, then grabbed the boombox and CDS and went back outside. “Hey, guys,” I said.

“Let’s rock.”

I was okay until she danced. I don’t know if it matters to you, but it does to me. I was okay until she danced. After that I was lost. We took the Frisbee around to the rear of the house, partly so we wouldn’t piss off any funeral-bound townies with our rowdiness and good cheer, mostly because Mattie’s back yard was a good place to play—level ground and low grass. After a couple of missed catches, Mattie kicked off her party-shoes, dashed barefoot into the house, and came back in her sneakers. After that she was a lot better. We threw the Frisbee, yelled insults at each other, drank beer, laughed a lot. Ki wasn’t much on the catching part, but she had a phenomenal arm for a kid of three and played with gusto. Rommie had set the boombox up on the trailer’s back step, and it spun out a haze of late-eighties and early-nineties music: U2, Tears for Fears, the Eurythmics, Crowded House, A Flock of Seagulls, Ah-Hah, the Bangles, Melissa Etheridge, Huey Lewis and the News. It seemed to me that I knew every song, every riff.

We sweated and sprinted in the noon light. We watched Mattie’s long, tanned legs flash and listened to the bright runs of Kyra’s laughter. At one point Rommie Bissonette went head over heels, all the change spilling out of his pockets, and John laughed until he had to sit down.