Samantha had this crazy thought that wasn't anything really except a very weird kind of lonesome nostalgia for her childhood coupled with a completely irrational idea. She was smart enough to know it was a kind of shock, like a dream, how the mind tries to hold onto what it cannot understand.

A little before Thanksgiving she found herself thinking of having a tea party and inviting Javier's daughter, the girl whose boyfriend drowned in the creek, and maybe one or two other females. Though she wasn't sleeping she could see it and it was more like a dim memory of some birthday party than a girls's tea party because all the girls were little and wore white dresses with crinolines and ribbons at the waist. Even as she thought of this stuff she knew how stupid and hallucinatory it was and it made her laugh a little inside though she also found herself wanting to cry.

She could also see the tea cups. They were these strange tin cups and saucers and a teapot her mother had as a girl in Canada and which Samantha had seen only in family photographs. Each saucer had a rolled rim where the tin was crimped to keep from cutting you, each cup also. There was a pattern of blue flowers on the rim of the saucers and the side of the cup.

She asked mother the name of the flowers and, then because she had asked such a strange question she felt she might as well tell her what she dreamed in her delirium.

"You could do it, you know, though probably not with those people," her mother said. "When I was growing up women had teas for all sorts of reasons. Not tea parties exactly, but teas. They calmed things that way."

You could never really tell what Lisle would say, she was so strange. To Samantha it felt like more of the delirium, like when you get away from someone in a dream and wake from one dream into another...