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home, they drove to June’s mother’s to drop Peggy. June did that sometimes, when she needed to get school reports done or had a date or just needed to let off some steam and be alone.
    Tonight she had a stack of student dictations that needed to be typed and pasted on construction paper. The question she and the other teacher had asked the kindergarteners was, “If I had one hundred dollars, I would buy . . . ” More than one child had answered, “I’d buy my mother a house.”
    â€œYou should almost use that to advertise,” June said. Bea still thought of jingles sometimes, and she tried to use them on her flyers. But her work was boring her lately. “Or best offer” was a joke she shared with Bill.
    But Peggy didn’t want to go to her grandmother’s.
    â€œI have homework,” she whined. “Two tests on Monday.”
    â€œDo it there,” June said. “I always did.”
    â€œBut she goes to bed so early.”
    â€œYou can stay up. I’ll tell her you have to study.”
    This part of town had been incorporated into Green Bay proper in 1964. Much of the land off 141, which had been wooded the first time Bea saw it, was beginning to be developed. Fields, with silos in the distance, were marked out with one road, pastel small houses budded on either side.
    â€œIt’s all getting built-up over here, too,” June said.
    â€œI should really drive out one day and take a look around.” This was now part of Bea’s profession. For families just starting out, these properties would be more affordable. She’d done well so far by selling the large homes of her mother’s friends, but this was newer, more compelling. It meant more, even though the commissions would be smaller. Besides, Bea was sick of beautiful houses.
    Maybe everything was that way in sales. Bea knew old Mr. Campbell, the main decorator in town. They’d meet every few months, at Bosses. “These people tear out a picture from a magazine,” he told her, “and say, ‘I want it to look like this.’ All for four thousand dollars. ‘Well, I can make it look like that,’ I tell them, ‘if you let
me
take the pictures.’ ”
    Beauty had begun to seem a sham. And it meant so much to her mother. Hazel could sit at tea in her breakfast room and talk for an hour about a shade of green. There was a door they always passed on a riverside, Dutch-roofed house, an old door from the last century. The owners had painted it a pretty color, somewhere between China red and the shade of a bittersweet berry. Her mother, if left alone, would comment on that every time they passed. Every single time.
    What they all wanted, hankering after a life that looked like a picture, was permanence. Whereas Bea and Mr. Campbell understood that it was all a performance, with its opening night, its run and closing. Anyone with half a mind to see reality would notice the amount of peak-open flowers in those magazine spreads.
    And Bea remembered her mother’s letdowns and subdued rages, after a big party, after Christmas, when her energy was spent and her bones felt hollow.
    Of course, in a few weeks, a month, it would start all over again. Even in the dead of winter, Hazel and her friends made expeditions to some nursery forty miles away, where one of them had heard they had the best narcissus bulbs.
    â€œWhy?” Bea would sometimes wonder. Her mother would only shrug. “There’s only so much bridge you can play.”
    Bea had often wished she could teach her mother to knit, but—the arthritis.
    Keck Road—where she was turning now—had at first been paved in only as far as the original four houses. By the time June finally brought Bea home, there were eight. No more homes had been built since then, but there was big talk. The fields, owned by the two large nurseries, had always grown alfalfa, strawberries, and cow corn. In summer, they