“Come on, Ned,” said Lucille, snatching him up and ratcheting him up a notch on her hip. “These look good, Emily,” she said, counting silently and fingering the hood of a scarlet cape. “Forty, and you’ve only got two weeks. Did you take your pill today?” Then the front door scraped and the screen door banged and Lucille was gone, with the little baby reaching back over her shoulder calling, “Horse, horse.”

“I’ve got to rearrange the musicians; they’ve got the Greasy String Band too close to the Baptist-church handbell choir, and I’ve got to reschedule the live Nativity because the first Baby Jesus has to be a mouse in ‘’Twas the Night before Christmas.’ Emily, I won’t be able to come tomorrow. So remember—five dresses to go, and throw out that catalog.”

“I think you need to tell her about Ned,” said Emily.

“She doesn’t know 1909 from 1999, she doesn’t need to know about Ned,” said Lucille.

It had all started with body piercing, Lucille was convinced; her little girl, Cindy, only fourteen years old, coming home one night with a ring through her eyebrow, and soon after that the boy with the hank of hair and the spiderweb tattooed on his elbow and no expression in his eyes, and then without so much as a by-your-leave, this phlegmatic little lump of a baby plopped down in the middle of it all. “Don’t you even think?” Lucille had shouted. But Cindy had just looked at her with the same bland look the baby had and tapped the gold stud in her tongue against the side of her back teeth.

In the end there was nothing Lucille could do but take on the little baby, feed him and keep him clean, and try to teach him things. He was a slow learner; so far he only knew one word, horse, from his great-grandmother’s Sears catalog. He never said Mama, which everyone expects to hear first, and he seemed to be confused about his own name, Denorrio; but no one could blame him for that, since Lucille called him Ned.

“Denorrio!” said Lucille. “They string together a bunch of consonants and vowels and call it a name. Gibberish names, they pluck them out of thin air, just like these babies. Ned!” she said one day, putting her face right down in front of the baby, who was peacefully gnawing on his little fist. “What’s wrong with plain old Ned?”