“Okay…”

But somehow he’d been assuming he had weeks and weeks yet to do that, and in fact he hadn’t given it any further thought. “It’s August,” he said now, disbelievingly.

“It’s late August,” Kitty told him.

“Isn’t that always the way?” Liam asked Damian. “Summer just flies right by.”

And Eunice had been merely a summer romance, if you didn’t know the whole story.

Damian had seated himself at the table, and he was biting into a piece of toast-Liam’s toast, as it happened. He might not have realized Liam was addressing him. Kitty said, “Summer didn’t fly by for me. I was buried alive in a dentist’s office.”

“Well, I’ll have to think this over,” Liam said, stalling for time. He dished his eggs onto a plate. “Of course it will depend on what your mother says.”

“She’s going to say no,” Kitty told him.

“So in that case you can’t do it, can you.”

“But if you talked to her-”

“I told you I would.”

“When?”

“Oh… I’ll call her this afternoon.”

“No, not on the phone! It’s too easy for her to say no, on the phone. We should go visit her in person.”

Liam studied her suspiciously.

“I want her to realize we’re serious,” Kitty said. “You and me should drive over there right this very minute and lay out all our reasons.”

“What are our reasons?”

“We don’t get in each other’s hair, for one thing.”

Liam said, “If by that you mean that I’m more lax, then your mother is going to say that you should be with her. And she would be right.”

Oops, he had sent Kitty into her prayerful-maiden pose. Plop onto the floor, hands clasped to her breast. Damian stopped chewing and stared at her. “Please, please, please,” she said. “Have I given you any trouble this summer? Have I violated my curfew by one single eentsy minute? I’m begging you, Poppy. Have mercy. All I could think of at the beach was, School’s about to start and I’m going to have to go back home and deal with Mom again. It’s not fair! I should get to live with you a while. I’ve never lived with you, not when I was old enough to know it. In my whole entire life all I’ve had is this little bit of summer-July and part of August. Xanthe and Louise had lots more time than that. And it’s only for a year, you know. After this I’ll be in college. You’ll never have another chance at me!”

Liam laughed.

It seemed ages since he had laughed.

“Well,” he said, “let’s see what your mother says.”

Kitty clambered to her feet and smoothed her clothes down.

Damian asked, “Have we got any marmalade?”

It was proof of how serious Kitty was about all this that she wouldn’t let Damian come with them to Barbara’s. “You would just complicate things,” she told him. “We’ll drop you off at your mom’s house on the way.”

Damian said, “Thanks a lot!” but Kitty paid no attention; she’d already moved on to Liam.

“I hope you’re planning to shave,” she told him.

“Well, I could do that, I guess. Once I’ve had my breakfast.”

“And how about what you’re wearing?”

“How about it?”

“You’re not planning to go out in those clothes, are you?”

He glanced down at them-a perfectly respectable T-shirt and a pair of pants that he always referred to as his gardening pants, although he didn’t garden. “What’s wrong with them?” he asked. “It’s not as if I’m appearing in public.”

“Mom will think you look… not reliable.”

“Fine, I’ll change. Just let me finish my breakfast, will you?”

Kitty backed off then, but he was conscious of her hovering at the edges of his vision, fidgeting and flouncing about and picking things up and putting them down. Damian, meanwhile, had assumed a horizontal position in an armchair with the sports section from the Sun. Every now and then he read out a baseball score to Kitty, but she didn’t seem to be listening.

As Liam was shaving, it occurred to him to wonder why he had said yes to her. He didn’t want this child living with him permanently! For one thing, he was tired to death of all these fruity-smelling shampoos and conditioners crowding the rim of his bathtub. And the carpet in the den had not been visible since she’d moved in there.

But when he emerged, presentably dressed, he found she had washed and dried the breakfast dishes and cleaned up the kitchen. He was touched by the earnestness of the gesture even though he knew it wouldn’t likely be repeated.

It was an overcast day, but pleasant enough that people were out and about on their Sunday pursuits-tooling down the bike lane along North Charles, jogging, walking, spilling forth from various churches. On the street where Damian’s mother lived, two teenage boys were tossing a football back and forth, and Damian exited the backseat with barely a “Thanks” and went to join them. “I’ll let you know how it goes!” Kitty called after him.

Damian lifted an arm in acknowledgment, but he didn’t turn around. It was his broken arm-the cast gray with dirt by now and scribbled over with graffiti. Evidently it didn’t hinder him, though, because when one of the boys sent the football his way he caught it easily.

“On Tuesday they’re cutting his cast down so it’s not covering his elbow anymore,” Kitty told Liam, “and then he can drive again. You won’t have to chauffeur me around after that. See how it’s all working out for me to live with you?”

“Just don’t get your hopes up,” Liam warned her. “I’m not sure your mother’s going to go for this.”

“Oh, why are you always so negative? Why do you always expect the worst?”

He left the question unanswered.

In Barbara’s neighborhood-his neighborhood, once upon a time, green and manicured and shaded by old trees-the central fishpond was surrounded by children feeding bread crumbs to the ducks. Strollers and tricycles dotted the grass, and blankets were spread here and there for babies to sit on. Liam drove slowly, for safety’s sake. He braked to let a small group cross in front of him, two couples shepherding a little girl and a taller boy who might have been her brother. “It was the same turtle we saw last time; I know it was,” the little girl was saying, and Liam wondered if it was the same turtle he and his daughters used to see. Louise always tried to pet it; she would lean so far over the edge of the pond, reaching a hand toward the water, that Liam had felt the need to grab hold of her overall straps in case she fell in. And once Xanthe actually had fallen in, when the girls went ice skating on a winter afternoon. The pond wasn’t deep enough to be dangerous, but the water had been cruelly cold. She had arrived home in tears, Liam remembered, and Louise had been crying too, in sympathy.

He turned onto Barbara’s street and parked in front of their old house, which was a modest white clapboard Colonial, not half as large or imposing as most of the others. When she and Madigan married there had been some talk of their buying a place in Guilford, but she hadn’t wanted to leave her neighbors. Secretly, Liam had been glad of that. He would have felt even more rejected, more ousted, if she had moved somewhere he couldn’t picture in his mind’s eye when he thought about her.

He was just stepping out from behind the wheel when Kitty said, “Oh, shoot.”

“What is it?”

“Xanthe’s here.”

He looked around him. “She is?” he said. “How do you know?”

“That’s her car in front of us.”

“That’s Xanthe’s car?”

It was one of those new sharp-edged, boxy things, pale blue. The last he’d known, Xanthe drove a red Jetta. But Kitty said, “Yup.”

“What happened to the Jetta?”

“She traded it in.”

“Is that a fact,” Liam said. He tried to remember how long it had been since he and Xanthe had seen each other.

“This is the last thing we need,” Kitty said as they started up the front walk.

“Why’s that?”