“Okay. Spit.” Wilson sits forward and spits into the white plastic sink beside him. He watches blood and chunks of gum swirl with the constant stream of water down the drain. The hygienist hands him a small cup. “Rinse.” He rinses, spits, and sits back. “Okay, open.”

The shoe store is stuffy and crowded with after-school shoppers. One corner of the room looks more like a playground than a shoe store: there is a small plastic slide, and there are puzzles, blocks, Nerf balls, and a basketball hoop maybe three feet in height. Isabelle sits on a bench on the other side of the room beside her mother, waiting for the next available salesman to help them. She’s selected two pairs of boots from the assortment of them mounted on the wall; one is the type you pull on and off, like her last pair, which Isabelle doesn’t like because each step seems to tug her socks down farther around her heel and she can never seem to get the boots off without her socks coming off along with them. But unlike her last pair of boots, this pull-on pair is fur-lined, and Isabelle can’t resist. The other pair she’s chosen is rubber at the foot and leather up the ankles. This pair laces up; they are a small version of what her father has.

In the same corner of the room as the toys is a popcorn machine and a stack of paper cones. Isabelle eyes the popcorn, the salty yellow kernels glowing under the light that is keeping them warm. She watches as a boy scoops popcorn into a cone, salts it, and hands it to his younger brother beside him. The younger boy watches the older one scoop another coneful up for himself, absently tilting his own cone as he stares. Popcorn kernels spill onto the nubbled carpet, the same kind they have at school, Isabelle notes, where already other kernels lie stale and smashed by heels. The older boy turns from the machine and starts to cross the room to where he’d been sitting earlier, his younger brother in tow. He lifts three kernels from the cone with his tongue. Isabelle’s mouth waters. She looks from where the boys sit with their popcorn back toward the machine itself.

“Do you want some popcorn, Isabelle?” her mother asks. Isabelle quickly drops her eyes to her lap. “It’s free,” she says. “You can help yourself.” Isabelle tugs at a hangnail, and then she sees her mother’s hand cross into her field of vision and press down on her own. “Don’t pick,” she says gently. “Do you want me to get the popcorn for you?”

Yes, Isabelle thinks. Yes, I do—will you please? She looks at her mother’s hand on her own. Her mother’s hand is thin, and her pinky finger hooks inward in the same way that Isabelle’s does, so that when she holds the fingers of one hand together, the pinky fits neatly against the contours of the ring finger. Isabelle can see in her own hands and her mother’s how the fingers must have been first a solid unit in the womb, separating later, sometime before birth; they still fit neatly back together like an easy puzzle, or the continents of the world.