Tori thought she could leave four children with me while she flew to Japan, but she forgot one important detail: I had a flight of my own that afternoon, and I wasn't canceling it this time.

Back in Ohio, as Patrice later told me over a bottle of vinho verde three months later, the war began at approximately eight-fifteen that same evening.

Patrice had not remained in her navy-blue housecoat. By noon, she had changed into a pair of crisp beige trousers, an ironed white cotton shirt, and an old pair of leather loafers that she had bought in Florence in the late nineties. She had set up what she referred to as "the command center" at her formal dining room table—a mahogany expanse that had previously only seen Spode china and silver candelabras.

The red plastic folder lay open in the center of the table like a dissected toad.

Eli sat at the far end, his laptop open, his textbook propped up against a crystal water pitcher. Chloe was sitting on the rug in the corner, methodically brushing the tangles out of a collection of American Girl dolls that Patrice had retrieved from the attic—dolls that had once belonged to Tori. Finn was standing on a stepstool at the kitchen sink, his sleeves rolled to his elbows, surrounded by a mountain of suds as he washed three plastic bowls under Patrice’s watchful eye.

"More elbow grease on the oatmeal bowl, Finnian," Patrice commanded from the doorway, her reading glasses perched on the tip of her nose. "Dried starch is the enemy of civilization."

"Grandma," Finn whined, "Mom says dish soap gives me contact dermatitis."

"Your mother," Patrice replied without looking up from her legal pad, "believes that anything that requires physical effort is a medical condition. Use the sponge."

The landline on the wall rang. It was the special ring—two shorts and a long—that indicated an international relay.

Patrice walked over, lifted the receiver with two fingers, and pressed it to her ear.

"Oak Crest residence," she said, using the tone she normally reserved for telemarketers who called during Masterpiece Theatre.

"Mom!" Tori’s voice was loud enough that Eli glanced up from his history reading with a look of pure, terrified delight. "Put Eli on the phone right now. I am ordering an Uber to take them to Caleb’s partner’s house—"

"You will do no such thing," Patrice said calmly. "Eli is currently completing three chapters of European history that you allowed him to neglect last week. Furthermore, Caleb’s law partner has four children of his own and a golden retriever with hip dysplasia; he does not need your domestic overflow."

"Mom, you don't know their schedule!"

"Victoria," Patrice said, using her daughter’s full name with the weight of an anvil dropping into a well. "I gave birth to you in a hospital with no air conditioning during the hottest July on record. I taught you how to read, I taught you how to drive a stick shift, and I paid for four years of private college so you could learn how to speak three languages, none of which appear to include basic manners. Do not tell me what I know."

On the other end of the line, somewhere in the glass-and-steel expanse of Narita Airport, Tori began to weep. It was not the weeping of a broken heart; it was the sharp, angry sob of a child whose favorite toy had been placed on the top shelf.

"Caleb says Myrna sounded completely cold," Tori sniffled. "She hung up on me, Mom! She hung up on me and went to get a pastry!"

"Good for Myrna," Patrice said. "She has spent the last five years being your unpaid scullery maid because she was too polite to tell you that Charles’s death didn't make her your property. Now, listen to me very carefully, Victoria."

Patrice picked up her legal pad.

"The children are clean. They have eaten actual vegetables for lunch—carrots, Victoria, which grew in the dirt and did not come from an aluminum pouch. Maggie has taken a seventy-minute nap without a white-noise machine. And tomorrow morning, Eli is going to help me weed the hostas behind the garage."

"Eli hates gardening!"

"Eli," Patrice said, looking through the archway at her grandson, who was currently watching her with wide, reverent eyes, "is discovering the satisfaction of manual labor. If you call this house again before six o'clock tomorrow evening, I will take the red folder, I will put it into the chiminea on the back patio, and I will light it with a match. Do you understand me?"

A long silence hung on the line.

"Is Caleb there?" Patrice asked.

A muffled noise, then Caleb’s voice came on, cautious and defensive: "I’m here, Patrice."

"Caleb," his mother-in-law said, her tone softening just enough to make the knife go in deeper, "your father was a deacon at First Presbyterian. He was a man who knew how to apologize when he had backed his car into a lamppost. You have backed your car into both of your mothers simultaneously. I suggest you spend the next twelve days in Japan considering how you are going to pay for the bodywork."

She hung up the receiver.

She smoothed the front of her beige trousers, walked back to the dining room table, and picked up her pen.

"Eli," she said without looking up.

"Yes, Grandma?"

"Page one hundred and fourteen. What were the primary causes of the Franco-Prussian War?"