“Don’t you want to go home?”

“I dunno. What time of year is it at home?”

“It’s summer, like here. But hotter. Fig time. Peach time. Ice creams on the beach time.”

“Is school out?”

“Yeah, school’s out.”

“Do you think marbles are in fashion back home, too?”

“I dunno. If not, you can always make them the fashion.”

Morgan sighs. “I’ll miss that Game Boy of Artemio’s. How are we gonna get back? Are we gonna have the same trouble getting across the border?”

“Nah, getting back into France is easy. Gillem’s gonna put us on a plane to Perpignan.”

Morgan looks up. His face is suddenly illuminated. He raises his sinewy golden arms like wings. “We’re going to fly?”

“No, stupid. The plane is.”

Rat is sitting in a deck chair under the umbrella, converting her threadbare corduroys into a pair of shorts.

Once the corduroys were navy blue. Now they’ve faded to some pigeon shade of pinkish lavender, and there’s a rip in the seat. First she cuts them along the latitude she’s marked with a Magic Marker and sews a hem, and then she searches through Kate’s sewing box for a piece of cloth to cover the rip.

Gillem is sitting on the grass, reading the paper and watching her work. Usually it’s she who sits and watches him while he works; today it’s the other way around.

Rat chooses a square of pale green for her patch which he recognizes as coming from an old pair of overalls of Kate’s. It’s pleasant to imagine her wearing this little scrap of Hawkridge Road back in Saint Féliu—a piece of Them.

“You sew like a man,” says Gillem.

“What’s that mean—messy?” She smiles back at him.

“Big stitches, but you can tell they will hold,” he says. “Do you ever wear dresses? I should give you some of my mother’s clothes, next time you come to London.”

Gillem goes back to his newspaper, but he’s finding it hard to concentrate. Tomorrow he will take Rat and Morgan out to the airport. He hates airports almost as much as he hates good-byes. The sadness, the incipient panic of loss is something he can feel in his lungs.

Two months ago, he didn’t know this girl. Now he feels as if she’s flesh of his flesh, as if she’d caused him pains of childbirth. He wished she had, because he will never be able to recoup the years he missed.