In March, Maw declares Claudine a cure and it’s a jubilee: mint muddled with a wooden spoon, and they take a hammer to a block of ice even with the brown paper wrapper still on it. Take it down to nothing—it’s a great day, a special number day. They cheer the day and the month and the year, find the good book verse for it and run their fingers all over the faces of the words until the block’s all gone and the brown paper sits there empty in the bucket, the skin of some thing left behind.