Perhaps the baby who wasn’t a baby climbed up on a metal milk crate like they used to have back then and peered through the window at her mother and her aunt. Perhaps her mother was sitting at the kitchen table with her head stuck through a plastic tablecloth, drinking coffee from one of the pink Melmac cups that would outlast all the people in this story and all the people reading this story. Perhaps the mother was smoking a cigarette and was holding it out every so often so that the aunt, who was wearing plastic gloves and mixing up a vat of hair dye, could take drags off it. Perhaps the flat bottle of liquor that the mother and this particular aunt favored was sitting on the table. Perhaps they had dosed their coffee with it in order not to “kill the children.” Perhaps just beyond them was the small, neat living room with its chunky green furniture and its cabbage-rose draperies closed against the sun. Perhaps all the way through the house, nearly to the front door, was their telephone table on which sat the heavy black telephone with a dial that the kid in soggy shorts standing on the metal milk box could barely even move. Perhaps the mother herself sometimes resorted to using a stubby pencil to dial this phone, which suddenly rang out in the tiny house, a loud, old-fashioned sound, startling everyone and causing the milk box to wobble and the mother, who was getting her head painted dark brown, to say “Shit” in a loud voice.

It’s likely that then the tipped milk box pitched its rider onto the dirt by the back door, embedding a piece of gravel in her right knee, leaving a pale blue O-shaped scar that, along with two accommodating moles, would form what she would ever after think of as that knee’s stricken face. It’s likely as well that the mother, wearing her plastic-tablecloth poncho, walked through the living room with its one dramatic dark green wall to the telephone. Just as likely is that the aunt stayed where she was, setting down the bowl of dye and whatever she was applying it with, which was why while the mother was picking up the phone and saying hello and then listening to what the caller had to say, the aunt was peeling off the gloves and stepping out onto the back stoop to pick up the kid who had fallen onto a sharp rock and was wailing. It’s likely the aunt was confused for a long moment that afternoon about why, after she got the soggy child with the bloody knee calmed down, she still heard crying.

Or did she? Maybe on those hot summer afternoons, when coffee made women languid, when the scent of trellis roses mixed with the scent of ammonia, when girls pretended they were mothers while mothers pretended something else entirely, perhaps anything could happen.