“Well,” Kirby said. Exalta’s gaze was unrelenting and Kirby could see she really did want to know about Kirby’s life. Kirby flashed forward fifty years to 2019, when Kirby herself might have grandchildren. Wouldn’t she want to know the truth about their lives? (What would being a twenty-one-year-old in 2019 look like? Kirby couldn’t begin to imagine.) “There is someone I’ve been seeing now and again.”

“I knew it,” Exalta said. “You have that glow. Tell me all about him.”

“Well, he goes to Harvard.”

“Excellent!” Exalta said. “A Harvard man like your grandfather!”

Nothing like Gramps, Kirby thought. “His mother is a doctor and his father is a judge,” Kirby said. “He has a house on Martha’s Vineyard. That’s where I met him.”

“This all sounds marvelous,” Exalta said. “Why have you been keeping this boy a secret? He sounds divine. Tell me, is he handsome?”

“Very,” Kirby said.

“Of course he’s handsome!” Exalta said. She poured more champagne into both of their glasses. Kirby watched the bubbles fizz, pop, and evaporate. Which was exactly what would happen to Exalta’s enthusiasm about Kirby’s mystery man. “Why don’t you invite him for Thanksgiving?”

“He has a family,” Kirby said. “His parents and aunts, uncles, cousins.” She took a sip of her champagne. They would need another bottle if Kirby told the whole truth about Darren.

But why not just come right out and say it? Kirby wondered. She thought of Senator Kennedy, who had gone on television on July 25 and made a speech of explanation and apology about the Chappaquiddick incident. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts had not spontaneously combusted, nor had its citizens called for Kennedy’s head, thrown him in jail, or stripped him of his Senate seat. If the country could accept Kennedy’s story of being confused, discombobulated, and in a state of shock following the accident—so much so that he didn’t even call the police—then Exalta could accept Kirby’s relationship with Darren Frazier.

Or at least, she hoped so.

“Darren’s black,” Kirby said. She laid her hands on either side of her silverware on top of the linen tablecloth and forced herself to deliver the words right to Exalta’s face. “He’s Negro.”

Exalta blinked and then said, “I’ve learned a lot in my seventy-five years, Katharine.” She’d lowered her voice into what Kirby thought of as her serious register. “Some knowledge has come to me quite recently. I’m sure it was difficult for you to tell me that, maybe because you expect me to react in a certain way. But I’ll have you know, your young man—what is his name?”

“Darren,” Kirby said. “Darren Frazier.”

“You can feel free to bring Darren Frazier to meet me at any time. I would be honored.”

Inexplicably, this caused Kirby to tear up. “Really?”

“Of course,” Exalta said. “People are people.”

People are people. Her grandmother couldn’t have said anything to make Kirby happier.

Now Kirby turns her attention back to her mother. “So…did Nonny drive up here by herself on Monday?” This seems unlikely. Exalta has a license and a car but she has never, to Kirby’s knowledge, driven all the way to the Cape.

“No,” Kate says. “Bill Crimmins came and fetched her.”

Jessie pinches Kirby’s leg. “I told you so,” she whispers.

Her grandmother and Mr. Crimmins. The society matron and the caretaker.

People are people, Kirby thinks.

They are headed out to the end of the earth, Jessie thinks. When they are nearly at Madaket Beach, the best place to see the sunset, Kate tells David to turn left. They go down a winding sand-and-gravel road that’s bordered on both sides by scrub pine and Spanish olives. They cross a battered one-lane wooden bridge and then the land opens up. There are fields on either side of the road and a steel gray stripe on the horizon—the Atlantic Ocean.

Jessie is awestruck. This part of the island is natural and wild; it’s a far cry from the manicured streetscapes of town. She tries to memorize every detail so she can write about it to Tiger and to her new pen pal, Pick.

Jessie received a letter from Pick in early September, right after school started. He’s living in a sustainable community outside of Pottstown, Pennsylvania. His mother did end up taking him to Woodstock, and the way he described it in his letter made Jessie glad she hadn’t gone. Pick and Lorraine drove to the concert in a VW bus with a couple from their community. The bus got a flat tire right before Eldred, New York, and Pick said it was easier to abandon the bus and hitch a ride than to track down another tire; the bus didn’t have a spare. Pick and Lorraine had to hitch rides in separate cars. The road was a logjam of vehicles headed to the Yasgur farm, and some cars were so crowded that people sat on the roofs and hoods. Pick worried he would never find his mother again.

Needle in a haystack, he wrote to Jessie. Four hundred thousand people, half of them women, and all of them looked and acted just like Lavender.

Pick hooked up with a couple who had brought their seven-year-old son, Denny, and in exchange for Pick keeping an eye on the little guy, they included Pick in their family unit and shared the food they’d brought.

The concert had good moments. Pick’s favorite band, Creedence, had played after midnight on Saturday night, but he fell fast asleep before Janis Joplin went on. He woke back up to hear Jefferson Airplane. I’d forgotten where I was, he wrote, then I heard Grace Slick’s voice. There were times when I was bored and tired and hungry but there were other times when I was part of this teeming, gyrating, smoking, singing mass of humanity. I felt proud to live in this country.

When Monday morning rolled around and Jimi Hendrix, the final performer, played a psychedelic version of “The Star-Spangled Banner,” Pick still hadn’t located his mother. He figured she would have wanted to stay and see Hendrix, but he decided if he didn’t find her, he would hitch a ride with someone heading back to Cape Cod and return to his grandfather on Nantucket.

But then this amazing thing happened. Denny saw a kid who had a balloon animal and he declared that he wanted one. Pick somehow, through asking one person and then another, found the man who was making the balloon animals. He was clearly strung out—he wore only a pair of red satin shorts and a red bow tie—and Pick was hesitant to approach him. It was Denny who charged forward toward the balloon man, and thank goodness, because Pick saw that the woman who was collecting the money for him—the animals were a dime apiece—was Lavender.