The American Academy of Pediatrics could not explain why Martin, at seven years old, rolled around on the living room floor flapping his arms and cawing, while Teddy, who was not yet five, waited placidly on the front walk. Teddy rolled the empty wagon back and forth and sucked his thumb. Teddy was Emma’s defenseless plum baby who still nursed, who worshipped her weary body the way no man ever had. Martin, her firstborn, rose each morning with novel ways of turning Emma into some­one she hated. Martin refused to get in the wagon until he found his troll doll with the hot pink hair and the hot pink shirt that read TOTALLY RAD, and after ten minutes of him flapping and cawing and not even looking for the troll, Emma wanted badly to hit him. Instead, she leaned down until her nose was almost touching his and she yelled into his face, If you don’t stop that I swear to God I will throw all your toys in the trash and I mean every single one do you hear me.

For some reason that didn’t make Martin stop. He only cawed louder right back at her, eye to eye, like she was the enemy and he the proud and defiant baby freedom fighter. He was not a baby. He was a big kid, which she screamed at him. She collected every toy she could find and dropped them into the can under her mother’s kitchen sink, where of all places she found the totally rad troll doll, so Martin was all right again, which meant she could be all right again, and both boys climbed into the wagon. Martin had his troll and Teddy had his plastic dragon and Emma had made it all morning without hitting anyone. She had a clogged milk duct in her right breast, which had lately grown into an enormous veiny ball of cement. Nevertheless, she persisted in pulling her kids in the wagon all the way to the park.

“When you were fghting with Martin, two birds stopped singing,” Teddy said, sailing his dragon over his head. The pain in Emma’s breast made her dizzy. She wanted to go home. She hadn’t wanted to go to the park in the frst place. She was here because of guilt. She was here because she was probably get­ting divorced. She was here because she was living temporarily in her mother’s house. She was here because the central or­ganizing committee of Nation Awake, whose website said that its mission was to build identity, support community, and win local power, had chosen the town of Avalon, Ohio, for its frst annual White Family Picnic.

At dinner the night before, Emma’s mother had read the cov­erage aloud from her phone. Nation Awake, as it turned out, had a local campus chapter right here in Avalon. It had grown from ten to thirty members in the past year alone, according to a student spokesperson, who, oppressed by endemic cul­tural Marxism at the university, wished to remain anonymous. In fact, membership in white nationalist groups was up by at least ffty percent nationally, and growing. Nation Awake had invited organizations from Kentucky and West Virginia, from Pennsylvania and Maryland and Michigan. They were expect­ing picnickers in the hundreds.

Why Avalon? Emma said. I’d think we’re too small to be noticed.

Eloise held up her hand and kept reading. Appalachia is an obvious choice, the spokesperson said. The region is over­whelmingly European. Avalon, for example, has a population of twenty-four thousand. Twenty-two thousand of those people are white. We have been sneered at, made to feel bad about our­selves in the name of diversity. But our pure Scots-Irish ancestry is a source of pride, not shame. Like the Avalon of legend, we will rise to defend the land and the people from darkness.

Eloise put down her phone. Can you imagine, she said. In this year of our Lord 2017. Shameless. After what happened in Charlottesville this summer. And the media, my God. So voyeuristic and breathless.

In Emma’s opinion, Eloise sounded rather breathless her­self. Emma rubbed her breast irritably.