Roy was a wreck. He’d lost his job that summer and did nothing but mope around the house. Suddenly he was telling Teresa that he didn’t want Frankie going over to the Woodrow house anymore, or having anything to do with “that sick girl.”

“Why?”

“Her mother’s a loose cannon,” Roy said. “She threatened to sue us.”

He didn’t look her in the eye when he said it, and she didn’t believe him. He was the loose cannon. But they’d fought constantly since he’d been laid off, and Teresa was tired of fighting and desperate for things to get back to normal. So she agreed.

Frankie, who was seven, cried the entire afternoon.

And as far as Teresa knows, he never saw Jennifer again. The girl lived only another five years. Teresa heard the news at the grocery store, from Mrs. Bennett (who else?), and she didn’t have the heart to tell Frankie. He found out soon enough, though; Karen announced it during dinner.

“She didn’t die,” Frankie replied.

“She did so. I talked to Sue Gallo, who lives next door to the Woodrows. Jennifer died two weeks ago. Sue said Mrs. Woodrow hasn’t left the house since the day of the funeral.”

“She didn’t die!” Frankie yelled. He wasn’t looking at any of them, just staring down at his plate. Teresa felt mortified. She had the impulse to cut her eyes over to Roy, but Roy was long gone by then; she was sitting in his chair at the head of the table.

Frankie calls to her from a distance.

She doesn’t want to see the portrait. Ever. But how will she avoid it, when it’s going to be hanging in his bedroom? Anytime she walks past his door, she’ll risk catching a glimpse of her “corrected” self.

He calls to her again, his voice rising out of a thick silence that makes her think she might have fallen asleep for a few moments. She pushes up from the bed and walks through the house, pulls open the sliding glass door off the dining room. The afternoon sky over the backyard is cloudless and the grass is a dark, rich green. Frankie is standing beside the easel; the lawn chair is waiting for her a few feet away. Barefoot, she steps across the grass and takes her seat. He drapes the tablecloth over her body.

“You’re almost done?” she asks him.

“Just about. And just in time, too, I think.”

Teresa glances up at the sky. Have I done such an awful job? she imagines asking him. And then, after a deep breath, “Do you ever think about Jennifer Woodrow?”

“Sure,” Frankie says from behind the easel.

“That situation wasn’t handled very well.”

“What do you mean?”