By mid-June it is finally warm enough to swim in the backyard pool. She plies the water, her cupped hands and the soles of her feet sculpting hearts as she breaststrokes. Along the bottom is the occasional drowned lizard. She feels their small deaths. Their waterlogged graves. She pauses her laps when she discovers a bumblebee struggling, watches

It’s eleven-thirty on a Tuesday night. Beth and I lift clothes out of an industrial washing machine. The wet jeans are heavy, but they feel cool against our forearms in the hot laundromat. I feel something round and foreign in the back pocket of my cutoff Levi’s. I fish a sand dollar out of the dripping denim, hold it up against the fluorescent light of the Fluff ‘N’ Fold. A palm-sized moon.