“Oh, I know. But I can’t wait to see the expression on your face when you see how fast I am. Like ridin’ a bike—you never forget.”

“Will you teach me how to do it?”

“If you’re nice to me…maybe.”

Now both women laughed, and it was a fine sound, a happier sound, a sound of healing.

Lucy did feel better eventually, and she did find a better man than Larry Parre (who was shot to death before his twenty-ninth birthday during a botched liquor-store robbery attempt, unemployed and trying to get enough cash together to pay for an abortion for his girlfriend), and she and her new husband, Eric Holcomb, gave Henrietta a beautiful granddaughter who she named Sarah, after all, and who Henrietta, true to her word, spoiled rotten every chance she got.

And, yes, she did show Lucy her diaper-changing method, which left Lucy awestruck.

At the moment of Sarah’s birth, the best six years of Lucy’s life had begun.

Chapter Three

During the ensuing years, things weren’t all that bad for Ronnie, either. Though he had to take the Hurting away from more children than he would have liked, he also took it away from several animals, as well, and each time found that he was gifted with the memories of each and every animal and child, as well as the visions of what would have happened to them, had not he come along to save them.

The first and most painful of the children had been the eleven-month-old baby outside the Kresge’s Department Store two weeks before Christmas when Ronnie was ten. Its mother had come outside, weighted down with packages, and realized that she’d left her purse on the checkout counter. Setting down the boxes and bags, she went back inside and left the baby alone in its stroller. Ronnie (who’d been downtown doing his own Christmas shopping with the twenty-six dollars he’d saved from his allowance) walked over to the stroller and looked down at the baby, then made the Puffy Face that always caused babies to laugh, but this one didn’t. It just looked at him, expressionless. It didn’t even so much as smile and make the goo-goo noise. This was not right. The Puffy Face always worked. Always.

Ronnie looked around to make sure no one was watching him, then bent down, reached inside the stroller, and took hold of one of the baby’s hands.

And Knew.

Knew so very clearly.

God, how he Knew.