"Yes," said DeAnne. "He was just walking over to his friend's house, three doors away, and he never got there."

"And that mother's going to blame herself, DeAnne, I know she is," said Jenny. "She's going to say, if only I had watched him. Walked out in the front yard and watched him till he went in the front door of that house."

"Yes," said DeAnne. "Yes, and she's right!"

"No she isn't," said Jenny. "Because inside that house there could have been a gun with bullets in it, and so what should she have done about that, stood over him the whole time he was playing? Forbid him ever to go to a friend's house? Lock him in his room? Do you think that the boy wouldn't have known that his mother was watching? That she didn't trust him to get from his house to a friend's house three doors away?"

"But he couldn't!"

"This time he couldn't," said Jenny. "But maybe he's already done it a hundred times. Like when your kids learn to walk, you don't hold their hand anymore, they get to a point where you just let go of their hand and they walk by themselves. Do you think that means they never fall down again?"

"Turning up missing isn't quite the same thing as falling down."

"Do you think I don't know that? Do you think I don't know that one moment of carelessness and my Aaron could be lying there under the swing set with a broken neck? Dead or paralyzed for the rest of his life? Do you think I don't have a stab of fear go through my heart when I see him up there?"

"Then why do you let him?"

"Why does God let us live on this earth?" asked Jenny. "Why doesn't he come down and watch every move we make and keep us from ever, ever, ever doing anything wrong? Because we can't grow up if somebody's doing that. We can't become anything. We'd be puppets."

DeAnne didn't know how to answer. Anguish was twisting her inside. Partly it was the newspaper story about the mother of that little lost boy. Partly it was the strain of not being in her own home, of having her kids playing with these wild hellions that Jenny was raising so free. Partly it was what Stevie had gone through at school for weeks and weeks, without DeAnne having any idea. It was Dolores LeSueur taking him aside and sowing the seeds of some terrible life-sucking weed in his mind, and by the time DeAnne knew about it, the seeds had already taken root, and there was nothing she could do except hope that Stevie's native goodness and common sense would help him get rid of those thoughts on his own.

"I just can't stop watching out for them," said DeAnne, "even though I know that I can't protect them from everything. I know that. I know that they're out of my protection for so much of the time. Stevie at school, and when I'm out of the room even. Anything could happen. But I can still do something, I can still try."

"For what it's worth, DeAnne, I actually do step in and stop my kids from doing really dangerous stuff," said Jenny. "It's just my, um, my threshold isn't as low as yours is."

"Jenny, I'm not talking about you now," said DeAnne. "I'm talking about me. Because I know you're right, and I'm just-I don't want to overprotect my children and turn them into frightened little hamsters in the corner of a box. But I can do something. I can maybe save 'them sometimes, can't I? It's like my neighbor across the street in Orem. There was this guy with a pickup truck who used to roar down the street, going too fast, and she just hated it, and her husband even spoke to him about it but he just laughed and told him to drop dead. So one evening, it's dusk, you know, when it's dark enough that you can't really see anymore but you still can, sort of, and she realizes, I've let the children play too late, I've got to get them all into the house, and she goes outside and she's calling out for them and then she hears that truck turn the corner and gun the motor and there's the headlights coming down the street and then she hears the sound of her son's Hot Wheels on the asphalt of the street. Not on the sidewalk, on the asphalt, and she thinks, he's in the street, he's going to die, and sure enough, there's her son tooling across the road, his legs churning, and there's the truck, and she knows the truck will never see the boy in time to stop, and her son is twenty yards to her right, much to far for her to run to him in time, and the truck is coming from the left, and he'll never hear her shouting at him, not with that engine, and so without even thinking about it she just steps into the road in front of the truck. Just steps into the road."

"Good heavens," said Jenny.

"And the truck guy saw her and he slammed on his brakes and it turned out that he really could stop in time, but then she was a full- sized person, who knows whether he would have seen her little boy? And he gets out of his truck just yelling and cussing at her, you know, what kind of idiot are you, and she just stood there crying and crying until finally the guy sees the little kid pull up to his mom on his Hot Wheels, right there in the middle of the road, and the guy realizes that he never saw the little kid until right that minute, and he says, 'My God,' and they didn't have any trouble with him speeding down that road anymore."

"I don't know if I could have done that," said Jenny. "I would have stood there on the curb and screamed or something. I don't know if I could have just ... stepped into the road."

"She didn't know either, till she did it," said DeAnne.

"Well of course you save your kid from a speeding car," said Jenny. "Even a lousy mother like me would try to do that! But what she did-I mean, that's beyond love, that's all the way into crazy. What if the truck couldn't stop? What does that do to the lit tle boy, seeing his mother killed right in front of his eyes? And he grows up without his mom."

"He grows up knowing that his mom gave her life to save his. That's got to help."

"Or he feels guilty all his life because he feels like it's his fault she died. DeAnne, I'm not saying she was wrong-I mean, she was right because it all worked out. But even saving his life, she might also do harm.

Anything can do harm, anything might work. Well, not anything, but you know what I mean. Maybe you're right to be so protective, and maybe I'm right to run a looser ship. Maybe maybe maybe."

"So no matter what we do, we're probably wrong."

"No, DeAnne, don't think of it that way. Think of it that no matter what we do, as long as we're trying to do our very best for our kids, it will work out. Maybe they'll get hurt. Maybe they'll grow up so mad at us that they don't speak to us for twenty years. Maybe they'll get killed-that's part of life. It's the worst thing in the world, to lose a child. At least I can't think of anything worse. But it happens. And when the child dies, God takes him into his home the same way that he takes old people who die. I mean, even if his life was short, it was life, and was it good? Was he happy? Did he have a chance to taste it, to choose things for himself, to-"

"I know," said DeAnne. Despite her loathing for herself when she was weak enough to cry in front of someone else, her tears started flowing. Just thinking of children dying, and the mother whose son was lost today, and her friend in Orem who knew, knew, that she would give her life for her child. And Stevie. "I'm sorry. It's just ... what we've been going through for the past while with Stevie ... ever since we moved here. I've just felt so helpless. And now things are going to be OK with him, because Step went to school and took care of it, I mean things are going to be fine now, if he can just get rid of these imaginary friends. So why am I crying now? Why do I just feel shaky and cold and-"

Jenny slid her chair over next to DeAnne's and put her arms around her and DeAnne cried into her shoulder. "You can't stop bad things from happening," said Jenny softly. "That's why you're crying. You think I didn't ever have a day like this? Days like this? And then I came out of it and I realized that I can only do what's possible, and I stopped expecting myself to make life perfect for my kids, perfectly happy, perfectly safe. They cry sometimes, they hurt sometimes, and it still tears me up inside, but I can only do what I can do, and that's what you've got to realize too, DeAnne. I saw that the day I met you, that you just expect too much of yourself, and so you're bound to fail all the time, because you don't count it as success unless you've done what nobody can do."