"A couple of things," he said, frowning. "That was almost a good conversation with Iona. Gracie's teacher thinks Gracie may have ADD. She recommended testing, and Iona's taking her this week. The state will pay for the testing, evidently."

"I don't know anything about that," I said, as if I could have been prepared for this. "We'll have to look it up on the net."

"She would have to take the drugs if she's got it, Iona says."

"What are the side effects?"

"There are some, but Iona was more concentrating on the benefits. Evidently, Gracie's been pretty disruptive at school, and Iona wants some peace."

"Don't we all. But if the side effects…"

We spent the rest of the evening on the Internet, reading articles about Attention Deficit Disorder and the drugs used to treat it. If this seems excessive or odd, consider this: Tolliver and Cameron and I had raised those girls from birth. My mother had been roused to try to take care of them when they were infants, but if it hadn't been for us, Mariella and Gracie wouldn't have eaten, or been changed, or learned how to count, or been read to. When Cameron had been snatched, Mariella had been only three and Gracie had been five. They'd gone to a preschool together for a few mornings a week, because we'd enrolled them and then told my mother they had to go. We'd gotten them to the preschool before we went to our own school, and all Mom had to do was remember to pick them up, which she usually did if we left her a note.

Here I was remembering, when that was the last thing in the world I wanted to do.

"Enough of this," Tolliver said after a while, when we felt we knew a little bit about the disorder and the drugs used to treat it. "We'll learn more when we know if she has it or not."

I felt like I was drowning. I'd had no idea there were so many things that could go wrong with a child's learning processes. What happened to kids in the years before all these things were identified, and a course of treatment laid out?

"I guess they were labeled slow or difficult," Tolliver said. "And that was the end of it."