Margie sits on my footlocker and stares at her sneaker scraping the floor. “I hope Sara’s not being punished. It ain’t right. We all did it.”

Something makes me want to hug her. Her body seems to cry for comfort, a body so worried, wrapped in big happy bands of yellow and blue polyester. But instead of hugging, I grin my silly spastic grin. Margie’s face goes light. I sit up straight to say everything will be all right.

She stands up and pushes the broom across the floor for the third time. In the dustpan she collects barely a thimbleful of sand. “No way Mr. Bob going to find sand in this cabin. Not the least little bit.”

“Margie,” Denise says, “I heard the other cabins leaving a while back. Mr. Bob should be here now. I think he won’t be inspecting today.”

“That’s all right, I reckon.”

“Yeah, who needs Mr. Bob anyway?” Denise bobs her head. “Margie, you know more about clean than he ever dreamed of! Just tell me how these blinds look.”

Margie hides her face behind her hands, but she can’t resist peeking through her fingers at the blinds. They are level all around, with cords coiled like new spools of thread.

“Let’s put up all these things,” she says. Margie, Denise, and Peggy Jo take toiletries off the window ledges and stow them in footlockers. Finally, Margie sets my teddy bear on my pillow, so straight he could be posing for a portrait.

When the cabin can’t get any cleaner, we go outside and Margie sweeps the path.

Near the gangway an oak seedling has sprouted. I count eight leaves. Each leaf spreads as flat as an open hand; the thick, round fingers mirror one another on two sides of the center vein. On a sturdy old bough, those leaves would look right, but instead they are attached to a slender young twig: adult leaves, baby tree. So far as I can tell, this infant oak is alone in the world, no parent in sight. I can’t recall seeing any oaks since I’ve been here. How did one acorn come to fall in this spot?

I imagine the oak growing strong, branching out, reaching for the sky. No. It won’t make it. There’s no room. It sprouted right on the edge of the asphalt. On the other side, the hillside drops straight down. The next hard rain will wash away the sliver of loose sand and the seedling with it.

I could get Margie to dig it up and plant it in a better spot. But I think not. If I transplant the seedling, I might kill it. Left alone, it will die in due course, by the same accident that caused it to spring where it is.

That will be better.

“You see anything else needs cleaning?” Margie asks.

I shake my head, and we go inside.

*   *   *