Did she know he was in her closet that last night before his dad left? That in fact, one of the Ninja Turtles—he believes the one who says “Cowabunga” all the time, Michelangelo maybe—had slept in her closet?

No, no, she didn’t know that. But he was only four then; how could he remember?

And she didn’t know that he had memorized a lot of really disturbing facts about murders and keeps a list to share with kids who pick on him, that he had successfully scared the hell out of several of them, that the teacher had gotten phone calls from parents.

No, no, she didn’t know.

“So it’s just the two of you?” he said.

She gets asked that a lot, it seems, and it bothers her. It happened in the grocery store when a man in army fatigues, maybe from Fort Bragg, asked her, and was he trying to meet her? Did he know something about her, or did they know someone in common? But Harvey was spinning a rack, spinning a rack, spinning a rack, and it was hard not to think about spinning, about time spinning and the way Jason’s dad had done his time in the Gulf War. She learned all of that the first night she met him. That was back when war first became something to watch on television, the first reality show starring a very young Wolf Blitzer; yes, there’s the war—bombs and lights, and they say people might be dying—and now a word from our sponsors—Show ’em your Crest best—and it’s a good time to go to the bathroom or to the kitchen to get something to drink before the war comes back on. That’s what she remembers people saying: “I’m gonna watch a little of the war before I go to bed.” Why didn’t anyone see something wrong with that? She was going to ask that man what he thought about that, but when she’d looked up, he was in the checkout line talking to someone else, a woman in exercise pants, with pink hair and a tattoo that said feelin groovy.

“He has an older brother,” she told him now.

“Harvey also mentions the Smile Train a lot,” Ned said, his voice lowered to a kind whisper.

“Oh.”

“He said he’s saving money for it.” He paused. “And a couple of times, he has talked about wishing his dad would come back or that he could go see him.”

She waited, not responding

“Any chance of that?”

“I bet that might happen,” she said, even though she had no idea. Brent seemed to reject Harvey at the end, and he’d almost always been cool toward Jason. Sometimes, she caught him studying Jason’s handsome profile, his complexion. “What was your husband?” he’d asked.

“A marine.”

“You know what I mean.”

“A man,” she’d said.