bean sacks as table linens, and Marlow’s mother replied that the line between rustic and “fugly” was a fine one. The second happened when both women decided they wanted Marlow’s baby to call them Nana.
In the shop, Marlow stood in the three-way mirror, wearing the dress that had been altered to fit her body, and realized that her mother-in-law had been right, months ago, when Marlow first tried it on. The color was awful. Marlow could have sworn that it was close to buttercream, but now that she was no longer taking Hysteryl—one of the pill’s biggest side effects was a color blindness that skewed all shades sepia—she saw that the dress was a greenish neon canary.
“I am sorry to say,” she sighed, “that I hate this.”
Her mother got up, batting down the chair that clung to her wide backside as she stood. She stomped toward Marlow. She was wearing sharp-toed calf-hair booties, a fur vest with padded shoulders, and lacquered black leather leggings. Her wig slid askew as she shook her head at Marlow in the mirror.
“Are you fishing kidding me?” Floss said. “You fishing chose it yourself. What the fish?” Long ago, after being fined the annual maximum for on-air profanity, Marlow’s mother had retrained her cursing reflexes.
Floss ran her fingers over the silver embroidery that snaked around the waist of the dress. She fluffed the train of tulle and fanned it out behind Marlow. Then she got distracted by the sight of her face in the glass. Marlow watched as her mother forgot what she was doing and defaulted to her usual reflection-triggered motions: pursing her lips, turning her chin this way and that.
Marlow’s mother-in-law, Bridget, recrossed her legs beneath her simple white tunic. Sitting in a chair identical to the one that was too small for Floss, she took up less than half the cushion. “I suppose I could see,” she said, as if they didn’t all remember that she had never liked the dress, “how you could hate it.”
Floss sighed. “But yellow’s your favorite,” she said dreamily. There was a pause. Then her voice thickened. “We can choose something else, but your dad will kill me about the money.”
Bridget half rose out of her chair, then sat back down. “Marlow, I think—”
Marlow nodded. She was already reaching for Floss’s hands, helping her down from the carpeted platform. “I got her,” she said. “It’s fine.”
“Will she be all right?” Bridget’s voice was pitched at an impatient octave, and Marlow briefly imagined some massive force sucking Bridget’s chair back—right through the window behind them, smash—and depositing her mother-in-law in some other dimension. Bridget had no room to be sniffy about Floss’s fogs. Both Bridget and Ellis’s father, Ryan, had to be secluded by their housekeeper bot immediately whenever their own fogs struck. Their spells were long and engulfing, leaving them in drooling stupors that would terrify children passing by, not to mention network shareholders. Marlow was one of the very few people who knew that her in-laws had quietly commissioned a room in their basement that would keep them safe from themselves and out of view when a fog took over. The walls were padded. The padding was green, not white, of course. Like all Americans of a certain age, white padded walls made Ellis’s parents shiver.
By contrast, Floss was lucky, especially considering how much she had used the old phones with screens when she was younger. Floss’s doctor had showed Marlow once, on a chart with bars that ran from pale pink to red, where her mother’s mind should have fallen—the darkest part of the graph. But Floss’s fogs were short and relatively mild, marked by glazed eyes and time travel. Anyone who didn’t know better might think she was only high, or deeply nostalgic. “It’s like smoking, if you’ve ever heard of that,” the doctor said. “We can usually predict the damage by how much someone used screens, but there are exceptions. Your mother’s lucky, for now.”
Marlow’s father, of course, was a different story.
Floss looked at Marlow without seeing her, her hands motionless in Marlow’s fingers. “He yelled at me about the AmEx at breakfast,” Floss murmured.
“Mom,” Marlow said softly, trying to fit Floss gently back into the chair, “Dad didn’t yell at you. He’s not at home anymore.”
Bridget was standing now, nervous, edging toward the fitting room’s doorway. “Water,” she said. “Let me get your mother some water.”
“Can you help me unzip this first?” Marlow said, but Bridget was already gone. Floss leaned back