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Virgie hurried straight for the court, which was nothing more than packed dirt with hoops nailed to a tree at either end. Her daughter’s teammates were all colored girls, and they were playing against colored boys. At least one of the young men towered over her daughter.

Virgie glanced sideways for the reporter.

Can you imagine if he shot a picture of this?

The wrath she would endure from her husband, who would taunt her for calling him paranoid.

She saw red then. Virgie had trusted her daughters.

She strode across the grass to the hoop, a white lady in white Keds, and grabbed Aggie by the ear, dragging her away from the game.

“Let go of me, Mom. LET GO.” Aggie’s pupils narrowed to slits, and she broke out of her mother’s grip, her breathing ragged.

“You need to come home. Now.” Virgie exited the court, waiting for her in the grass. She wasn’t sure if she was angry because Aggie had snuck out, because she was playing basketball, or because Charlie had inserted himself into her head a little too much.

Louisa seemed to come from the bushes, carrying a lemonade that dripped down her hand; she was still wearing her Island Books pin on a scallop-sleeve sweater. “I told her not to join the tournament, but Aggie insisted, so I came to watch out for her. I wasn’t sure if she’d be safe…”

Aggie headed to a free throw line they’d marked with a piece of yarn. “Why wouldn’t I be safe? I’m playing with a bunch of Vineyard kids.”

“You don’t even know these kids!” Virgie followed her, very aware that the other teenagers were watching her. She imagined her daughter lying on the court after falling awkwardly and breaking an arm.

Aggie motioned to a friend to toss her the basketball. “You don’t know these kids, but I do. I’ve been playing with them all summer.”

Virgie gripped the metal fence links. “You’ve been sneaking out?” She couldn’t help but look for the reporter.

“I didn’t really lie. We went to Junie’s house, then we’d come here.

” Aggie’s hands went to her hips as the kids on the court began to whisper.

She walked up to her mother, facing her, and Virgie realized how tall her daughter was; they were nearly the same height now.

“You told me to go after my goal. You said that I can’t let people stop me.

All that stuff about how women want people to take us seriously, so here I am.

” Aggie bounced the ball. “Well, I demanded to be taken seriously, and now you’re angry.

So which is it, Mom? Should I listen to all those boys on the court who are telling me I shouldn’t play because I’m a girl, or should I push back? Because it can’t be both.”

“I didn’t mean for you to go do all the things we told you not to do.” And still, her daughter’s point was solid. She was doing exactly what Virgie had told her to.

“And why not? You told us to fight. Well, I’m fighting. I’m fighting to play a game I love.”

Aggie wiped her nose with the back of her wrist. There was an image in Virgie’s head suddenly.

Aggie wearing her high heels in grade school, clacking around the house in a too-big tweed dress and pretending to be a hotel concierge.

Asking Virgie if she wanted a pot of tea, approaching her sisters and announcing a concert pianist on the “back porch,” meaning she would play “Row Your Boat” on the piano in the living room.

It had made Virgie cringe because she didn’t want Aggie to aspire to be at someone else’s beck and call, and now this five-foot-eight woman was asserting herself.

She was showing Virgie what being your own woman looked like. Rebellion was rarely convenient.

The game picked back up, one of Aggie’s teammates eyeing Virgie as she trudged back to her car.

Aggie caught the ball, her eye on the hoop.

She shot a free throw. Time slowed as Virgie watched the ball careen straight into the basket, Aggie’s teammates coming to her for high fives.

It captivated Virgie, the way her daughter was dribbling the ball around the court, how she slammed her weight into one of the boys to pass the ball to her teammate.

For a second, she couldn’t take her eyes off Aggie: running up and down the center, fanning out to the edges, the studious focus in her eyes.

Each time a teammate passed her the ball, she was ready to catch it, then dribbled it to the basket.

All this time Virgie had been worried the boys would laugh her daughter off the court.

But these boys passed to her. They took her seriously as a player.

It was so very surprising.

“She’s right, Mom,” Louisa said as she followed Virgie back to the car by the baseball dugout. “You did tell us to go after our goals.”

Her frustration returned all at once. Virgie slammed her car door shut, keeping up her window, and instead of talking to Louisa, she yelled to the strawberry air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror. “That doesn’t mean sneak off to some girl’s house and lie to your mother.”

Louisa was trying to get her mom to open the window, but she bounded out of the spot, peeling out.

The worst part about seeing her daughter playing basketball was the realization that she was a really good player.

Virgie had seen one boy grin into his hand at one of Aggie’s shots, like he couldn’t believe a girl could play like that.

It had been satisfying to see that, even Virgie had to admit. She turned on the radio to distract herself, then shut it off.

Charlie was wrong in saying Aggie couldn’t spend time with colored children, but maybe Virgie had been wrong about forbidding her daughter to play basketball. The sport gave Agatha power, it gave her might, and maybe the only thing to fear about the sport was her daughter’s pointed free throw.

She chuckled then, remembering the moment when Aggie had pushed right past a taller colored boy with the ball. The look of shock on his face.

Virgie carried in an armload of flowers from the garden, mostly fiery daylilies and delicate Chappaquiddick daisies that grew wild along the exterior walls of the house.

It relaxed her to make small bouquets to place on bedroom bureaus and the kitchen table, and after her conversation with Charlie, and the scene that had played out with Aggie earlier, she wanted to stay busy.

She’d caught Charlie on the phone at the imposing Russell Senate Office Building before he slipped off to attend a meeting of the Senate Budgetary Committee.

He spoke quickly, his tone impatient and clipped, the voices of his staff carrying on in the background.

“I have no idea why this reporter wants to know why I was on Nantucket,” Charlie said, saying something to his staff about finding him the Transportation files.

“I did stop on the island on my way home last week—it was a planned meeting to see a donor with a house there. There’s nothing foul to sniff out. ”

“Why wouldn’t you tell me that?”

“Tell you what? That I was going to Nantucket?”

“Yes, Charlie.” Her upper lip quivered as she filled a mason jar with water.

“It just didn’t seem relevant. I’m always off to a dozen places.”

“Well, that is what I told the reporter.” She didn’t like his answer.

It was too vague. She gently set down the mason jar on the counter, afraid it might shatter.

Perhaps she’d always felt it, a deep-seated fear that she didn’t know her husband as much as she wanted to.

That there were parts of him that were sealed off, even to her, like a honeycomb with empty tunnels.

“If I hear from him again, I’ll let you know. ”

Next week, she would hold the first meeting of the Edgartown Ladies of Social Concern, the “Tea” that she organized in Charlie’s honor.

She told him as much, but she didn’t tell him that his name would be nowhere in the room.

Only the suggestion of it. After a few more quick exchanges, he said, “I’m sorry, love, but the budget meeting is in five minutes and it’s on the other side of the Capitol.

” He sounded so far away, and a part of her wished she could tell him about the stunning revelation she’d had about Aggie.

“Before I go, tell me something about the girls. Quick.”

“This morning Betsy sang ‘God Bless America’ at the breakfast table.” She smiled into the quiet as her husband laughed. “I love you,” she said.

“I love you too,” he said.

There were flowers in every room when Aggie came home that evening just before dinner.

Her daughter didn’t say a word when she dropped her canvas backpack on the table, and Virgie didn’t either.

The pesto was ready, and the spaghetti was boiling, but they’d waited for Aggie.

She’d raced upstairs to take a shower, Betsy and James doing cartwheels on the lawn.

Virgie called through the screen. “James, I tried to invite your mother to come eat with us, but she’s not picking up.”

“I can go ask her, but can Betsy come with me?”

“Sure, I’ll come.” Betsy grinned. The two of them raced down to his small rowboat.

Wiley had given him a small outboard motor, and James could get them across the harbor in half the time now.

As he pulled the choke, Virgie yelled through the window, “If she can’t come, ask if it’s okay for you to eat with us. ”

Louisa was reading a romance that Virgie knew she should censor, but she was too overwhelmed with everything to try.

Her daughter had spent a half an hour defending her decision to protect her sister’s choice to play in the impromptu tournament until Virgie had scolded her, “Enough already! You did the right thing. Is that what you want to hear?”

She’d nodded. “In fact, yes.”

The shower turned off, and minutes later, the stairs creaked from the other room.

Virgie stiffened while tossing the salad.

Aggie padded into the kitchen in a gingham sundress, walking straight to Virgie’s back like an arrow finding a target.

Wrapping her arms around her mother’s narrow waist, Virgie felt her daughter’s apology.

Her whole body vibrated against her, and her daughter’s tears wet her shirt.

“I’m so sorry, Mommy. I’m sorry for going to the courts and not telling you, and I’m sorry for yelling and not getting in the car.”

Virgie exhaled and turned to face her daughter—Agatha was her easiest daughter because she was an open book; Louisa and Betsy held their emotions inside, and she had to spend hours interrogating them before they believed it safe to show their feelings.

Aggie’s mouth gaped, a mouse fearful of a lion.

Neither one said a word until the timer for the garlic bread dinged.

Virgie pressed a lock of her daughter’s hair into a neat side part.

“It was wrong of you to lie to me,” she said.

“I know.” Aggie put her head in her hands. “I feel so dumb. I’m just so dumb.” The phone began to ring, and something in Virgie told her it was Charlie. That he’d found out about the basketball game, that someone got a photograph with Aggie on a court filled with colored kids.

“You’re not dumb, honey.” She hugged her one last time, then said, “I’ll tell you one thing: you knocked my socks off back there.” She let her serious tone turn light. “You play some seriously good basketball.”

When a child smiles, a mother can lose her bearings, changing from solid to liquid. Syrupy.

“You really think so?” Aggie said.

“Girls really can play ball. That’s what I think. I shouldn’t have stopped you—I was just so caught up in my own fears until I saw that they were unfounded.” Virgie kissed the smooth side of her daughter’s temple, the smell of Pert shampoo in her still-wet hair. The phone trilled again.

Sliding on an oven mitt, Aggie went to work, like she always did in the kitchen, helping her mother pull out the bread. Virgie raised the earpiece: “The Whiting residence.”

It was Betsy’s voice on the other end. Small, distant, panicked. “She’s not moving, Mommy. I’m not sure if she’s breathing, and James just keeps shaking her.”

“Betsy? Are you okay?”

“I’m okay, but she’s not. James’s mom is not breathing.”

“Call 911,” Virgie instructed, as calmly as she could manage. “Call 911 right now, and I’ll get on the ferry.”

Louisa and Aggie jumped into the car alongside their mother, all three women holding their breath as the car raced down the narrow streets.