He was never, ever, to push her, hit her, or throw things at her. He didn’t want to do any of that, but his mother had told him not to anyway, saying it was Mrs. Woodrow’s rule for any child she babysat. “And don’t ever ask Jennifer if she’s sick,” his mother had told him. “Mrs. Woodrow said other children have asked that, and it isn’t nice. Jennifer’s not sick. She’s just—fragile.” Frankie was seven and small for his age, but Jennifer was eight, and smaller. Her nose came to a sharp tip and her jaw was almost not there at all, as if it had been pushed into her neck. Her skin was wrinkled and dry-looking, like a thin layer of papier-mâché. She always wore some kind of hat, indoors or out—a cowboy hat, a plastic fireman’s helmet, or, most often, a soft white Gilligan cap with the NASA logo and an elastic strap that hung loosely in front of her throat. That afternoon, when Frankie asked if they could take turns hypnotizing each other, she led him into the bathroom and took off the cap, showing him her bare head for the first time. She was almost entirely bald. Her scalp was dimpled with pink and gray spots and had just a few strands of white hair. “You have to be very smart to hypnotize a person,” she said, looking at herself in the mirror. “My brain is so big, there’s hardly room for hair roots.” Frankie stared at her too, and then the two of them looked at Frankie’s head, which was covered in dark, wavy hair. “The less hair you have,” Jennifer said, “the more brains. It’s just a fact of nature.”

During dinner at home that evening, Frankie, the youngest, looked at the five other heads around the table, each one covered with hair, and said, “Do you think we’d be a smarter family if we were bald?”

Matt and Joe burst out laughing, and Katherine bucked forward and pinched her nose. “God!” she said. “I almost snorted milk!”

Frankie’s mother had more hair than any of them; it was straight and the color of palm bark. She frowned while they were laughing, and her mouth started moving soundlessly, as if she didn’t know what she wanted to say. Finally she snapped, “All right, that’s enough now. Your father’s had a very rough day.”

At the other end of the table, Frankie’s father kept his head down and his hands close to his plate, sliding his knife through his Salisbury steak. When he put a piece in his mouth, his jaw moved like a machine with a worn-down battery. He glanced at Frankie’s mother, and between bites he said, “Why don’t you tell them?”

She swallowed and pressed her napkin against her lips. “Roy, let’s just have a nice dinner.”