“Yes, ma’am.”

“If you want to get them, please, and I’ll help you set the table.”

“I already did the mats. I hope the ones I picked out are okay.” He grabs my hand.

“As long as they match.”

We walk out of the kitchen hand in hand, and take the first left into the dining room.

“How did you learn to fish, Kay-Kay?”

That’s what Desi calls me.

“Why do you ask?” I turn on the alabaster chandelier.

“I wondered why you thought of my fishing pole when the bad lady was trying to hurt us with the drone.”

I open the side draperies to watch the rain pound the side yard in the early-morning billowing fog. Wind shakes the spruce trees and rhododendrons, and intermittently rain smacks the glass.

“I didn’t think of it,” Desi then says before I can answer him. “When she kept trying to make me do things, I didn’t think of doing what you did. I should have caught it with my fishing pole and stomped it to death.”

“It would have been much too dangerous to stomp on it.”

“I could have hit it with my baseball bat.”

“You wouldn’t want to get that close. Think of it as a huge Portuguese man-of-war you see on the beach with its long tentacles. What do you do?”

“Stay far away!”

“That’s right.”

He follows me around the table, setting down a napkin to the left of each plate I place on a mat.

“But what made you think of my fishing pole?” He’s not going to let me evade the question.

“Truthfully? Because I couldn’t think of anything else.” I open a drawer in the breakfront, and silverware clinks as we gather that next. “When I saw what she was doing I had to do something. I was lucky.”

“Why did that lady want to hurt us?”

“There are some people who aren’t happy unless they do bad things to others.”

“I know, I know. My moms are always telling me that,” Desi says, and of late he’s started calling Lucy and Janet his moms.

Specifically Mom and Moms. Lucy is the latter.

“But why did she come here and make me try to hurt someone?”

“What matters is that you didn’t.” I stop and look at him. “You told her no and you wouldn’t do what she said. And that makes you the good person, the strong person.”

“I guess so,” he says, and then he scampers out of the dining room.