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Caroline forced a smile. “Well, right after the wedding Suzi and Otis and Ava need to get back to Tallahassee. School starts next week.”

“And soccer.” Suzi lay her head on Marylou’s shoulder. Dear Suzi. Now she’d be her real granddaughter.

“Wilson and I will take you kids back to Tallahassee,” Marylou offered. “You can stay at my house. Your mother and father should stay here and have a little vacation together.”

Vic and Caroline glanced across the room at each other, their expressions tentative and hopeful. Marylou had never seen this kind of interaction between them. They usually faced off from their corners, entrenched in their positions, ready to defend themselves. Now they appeared vulnerable. It was hard to watch. What if one rebuffed the other one?

“I do have some vacation days coming,” Vic said quietly, as if he didn’t want to get too hopeful.

“I wish you’d take them,” Caroline told him. Then she gave him a shy smile.

There was a sudden lightness in the air, the way it feels when a storm has finally passed over. A relief, renewed purpose. Mama and Papa were friends again! They do like each other! Life could go on! These thoughts, Marylou knew, were flitting around their circle, joining them together in joy like the Holy Spirit did at Genesis Church. Marylou expected someone to get up and dance, would’ve done it herself if she wasn’t nearly eighty.

It didn’t last. Of course, they couldn’t let it last.

“I’m not going to stay with Marylou,” Ava announced from her chair where she sat like a queen, swinging her crossed leg. “I’m going to get an apartment. With Travis.”

Suzi guffawed and Ava shot her a black look.

“Buff’s nephew Travis?” Caroline said. “Gigi’s son?”

“He can’t help who he’s related to.”

“That’s not the point, and you know it,” Vic bellowed.

And they were off—Caroline lecturing Ava about how she was too young to take such a step, and that, anyway, she shouldn’t move in with a man, any man, before she’d really gotten to know him, Ava arguing that she was old enough to make her own decisions, and Vic chiming in occasionally, agreeing, for once, with his wife, then gradually settling back in his padded chair, his eyes fluttering like he was fixing to doze off.

After a while Suzi got up and limped off into the dining room with her cell phone, texting someone. She called over her shoulder, “I’m going to pour us some Sprite! We’re going to celebrate Granddad and Nance’s engagement! I mean Marylou and Granddad. Ava, change out of my dress!”

“Into what, fool?” Ava yelled back.

Otis drifted out onto the front porch and settled in the glider, which squeaked back and forth as he pushed it. Was he thinking about what he’d done, regretting it, or was he planning how to make his next nuclear device? Who knew? But Otis and Ava were now her grandchildren, too, and she liked feeling responsible for them.

So she just sat and listened to everything, to all the new noises in a house that had been silent for so many years, thinking, This is my family now, certainly not a happy family, but my family, happy enough, and in time perhaps, happier. Okay, they could be described as a pack of neurotics desperately in need of family therapy, and she, the Radioactive Lady, wasn’t a paragon of stability herself, but so what? You get what you get and you don’t care a bit. That was a little rhyme Helen used to say all the time. She’d learned it in kindergarten. Marylou had found it annoying … she did care what she got, dammit! Funny that she should remember it now, remember Helen saying it then, as if she were saying it now. You get what you get and you don’t care a bit.

“That glider really needs to be oiled,” said Wilson. He scooted closer to her.

“Yes, indeed,” Marylou said, and rested her head on his shoulder. “But for now, let’s just let it squeak.”

I was inspired to write this novel after reading Eileen Welsome’s book The Plutonium Files, in which she used her Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative-reporting skills to uncover