"This is going to be a long afternoon."
Khloe said it without smiling.
Sarah had no idea how right she was.
"This is going to be a long afternoon," Khloe said, and the words were still hanging in the chlorine-scented air when Karen Doyle began, without any apparent transition, to run Sarah's party.
It started with the grill.
Daniel had been standing at it since the burgers went on. He'd stepped away for maybe thirty seconds, and when Sarah looked up from the drink station, Karen was at the grill. Karen, in her flip-flops and oversized tank top, tongs in hand, turning the burgers like she'd been hired for the job.
"You were crowding them," Karen announced to nobody in particular, to everyone in particular. "The trick is to leave space. Otherwise they steam." She waved the tongs with authority. "Tyler! Ethan! Come get your plates started!"
"Daniel?" Sarah said, because her brain was offering her no other sentence.
Daniel was standing three feet away holding the empty platter, and he gave Sarah a look that was half disbelief, half a plea: your call. He was a guest. This was her house. The calculus was hers and it was terrible.
"I've got the grill, Daniel," Karen said, not looking up. "Go enjoy yourself. That's what guests do."
Daniel's mouth opened, closed. He set the platter down on the food table and moved back toward the shallow end where Priya stood with her arms crossed, watching. Sarah felt something hot rise behind her breastbone. She told herself it was the sun.
Then Karen opened the cabinets.
Sarah's outdoor kitchen was the thing she was proudest of in the whole yard — maybe in the whole house. She'd laid the stone veneer herself over three weekends, mortared the corners twice because the first time wasn't square, and the cedar she and Khloe had sanded until their fingers were raw. Inside the cabinets: the plastic cups with the lime-green stripes she'd found on clearance, the heavy-duty paper plates she liked because they didn't fold under burgers, the ice scoop, the spare tongs, the first-aid kit she'd tucked under the left hinge. These were not precious things. They were her things, in her house, arranged by her hands.
Karen opened the left cabinet, peered in, opened the right one, then the middle, like a contractor doing an inspection.
"Well, this is cute," Karen said loudly. "Homemade. You can tell." She began pulling things out — the cups, the plates, a handful of napkins — and stacking them on the countertop. "It's fine, Sarah, don't look at me like that. I'm just helping. A party this size needs a system."
"It has a system," Khloe said. She'd materialized at Sarah's elbow, sunglasses on, fruit salad bowl empty in her hand. Her voice had that flat cheerful note Sarah had learned to read at fourteen, when Khloe had used it on the neighbor kid who'd snapped Sarah's bike chain. "The system is that Sarah set it out."
Karen didn't even pause. "Oh, Khloe. You're funny." She opened the cabinet under the counter where Sarah kept the pitcher of sweet tea — Sarah's mother's recipe, the one she only made for things that mattered — and began pouring herself a cup. A tall one. She drank half of it in three swallows, made a sound of deep satisfaction, and said, "Good. Refill the pitcher when you get a chance, Sarah, we're going to run through it."
Sarah opened her mouth. Nothing came out.
The tongs. The cups. The cabinets. The sweet tea. Each one was small. Each one was, technically, nothing. Sarah was thirty-four years old and she had managed a division of forty people and once told a client, to his face, that his entire strategy was a house of cards. But standing in her own backyard she could not seem to assemble a sentence, because Karen wasn't doing any single thing you could point at — she was doing all of them, fast, like a flood coming under a door, and by the time you reacted to one, there were four more.
"Kids!" Karen called, clapping once. "Tyler, no phones at the table — you know the rule. Mason, stop chasing your sister, this is somebody's house. Ruby, take Ethan and get in the pool, that's what pools are for. And somebody — Lily? Lily! Get back here!"
Lily, who had wandered to the edge of the string lights, toddled back, obedient as a lamb.
"Now then," Karen said, and surveyed the yard like a general. She pointed at the food table Sarah had arranged that morning — the bowls at the angles she'd chosen, the fruit salad in the center, the burger buns stacked like a pyramid. "Who set this up? Never mind. Sarah, honey, you can't have the plates at the far end. People are going to walk the whole table. It's —" She began moving bowls. "— it's just logistics."
Sarah looked at the pyramid of buns come down in Karen's hands, and she felt it: the exact, specific sensation of someone rearranging her home while she stood in it. Her jaw ached. She realized she'd been clenching it for a full minute.
"Okay," Sarah said quietly. "Okay."
"Sarah?" It was Khloe again, very quiet. "Want me to—"
"Not yet," Sarah breathed.
She watched Karen direct Jess's son Sammy — Sammy, who was not Karen's child and had never met her — to "go rinse off in the pool before you eat, sweetheart." She watched Karen pull the ice scoop from Sarah's hand without asking and begin filling cups. She watched Karen's eldest, Tyler, stand by the grill with the sneer that seemed to be his default expression and say, to no one and everyone, "Place is pretty nice. For renters."
"We're not renters," Sarah heard herself say. Her voice sounded thin, like it was coming from farther away. "This is my house."
"Oh, I know, sweetie. I'm just saying — if you were, you'd be doing great."
The silence that followed had edges. Tom Whitaker, sitting in the shade with Adele, lifted his iced tea and took a long drink. Adele patted his knee — a warning or a comfort, Sarah couldn't tell.
"Let's have a drink," Khloe said firmly, and pulled Sarah by the wrist toward the drink station. In a voice pitched for Sarah alone: "Say the word. I will bury her under the patio."
"She's—" Sarah's voice cracked. She swallowed. "She's overwhelmed, Khloe. Mark's gone. Five kids."
"Sarah."
"I know." Sarah poured herself tea from the pitcher, with hands that were not quite steady.
Khloe looked at her for a long moment, and then said, "Sure. A minute." The way she said it, Sarah understood it wasn't really a promise.
Across the yard, Karen was now explaining to Melissa, at length, that Sarah's pavers were going to crack because — "I can see the sand washout already, look at the gaps, you need poly sand, my brother-in-law does driveways" — while Melissa nodded with the frozen smile of a woman being held at conversational gunpoint. Sarah took a long drink of sweet tea.
Her own sweet tea. In her own backyard. It tasted like ash.
The kids ran wild. There was no other honest way to describe it.
Within twenty minutes the careful architecture of Sarah's party — the way she'd imagined the afternoon flowing, adults talking in the shade, kids taking turns in the pool, somebody laughing at something somebody said — had been replaced by something faster and louder and edged with chaos.
Tyler filmed things.