June 25

T twelve months passed and once again: the company picnic. A day greeted with joy, with dread, with stoic indifference, depending on who you were. It was Tess’s company, where she’d worked since college graduation. The whole family attended every year—a late-June weekend that was inevitably hotter than average, the sun proud and ablaze in its new summer glory, temperatures of 85 to 90 that felt like 115, whorling clouds of insects above the weathered tables. The children loved it. It was held at a place in Maryland called Misty Glen Farm, which was not a farm at all but a sprawling outdoor corporate-event facility, staffed with dozens of young hourly workers manning massive grills and bounce houses and pony rides. The picnic was practically an all-day affair, noon to seven. Barbeque, pies, horseshoes. Old-fashioned family fun. They lived in northern Virginia, thirty miles southwest of DC. They climbed into the car just before noon. The usual skirmish broke out between the three children—ages thirteen, ten, and eight—about who got the windows, who was stuck in the miserable middle. Long ago the thirteen-year-old devised a schedule, a complicated rotation system based on their weekly hours in the car—which ultimately gave her the least number of center-seat minutes, though no one could prove it—and while the schedule now annoyed her (she was far too old for such stupidity), she reminded her siblings of it, dusted off the parameters of the system, hinted at its complex rules and implications for this daytrip. Her sister and brother, utterly confused but unwilling to admit it, conceded.