The truth is that someday I will see Mama K again, and I will say, I did what you told me to do. I made you proud. I went on a quest. I went on a survival mission. My mettle was tested. I followed the protocols. I used your training. I was intrepid. I was tough. I had stick-to-itiveness, and they never saw me sweat. I will tell Mama K this, and she will catch me up into her arms and throw me like she did when I was so small that it’s only a half moon in the corner of my eye and a pair of hands and a splinter wedged in. She will be my elfin chief. I will give her my report and she will kneel before me and touch me gravely on the forehead the way a noble old wolf would touch foreheads with a bold young pup. You have done me proud, Perley, she said. You are my Perley. You are mine.

So of course I couldn’t tell the truth, even though the pancake counselor sat staring at me with kind and sorrowful eyes. Instead, I was the lowest line on the eye chart, that silent, that small.

LILY

You have a child and then you wait for the day when he’ll call you a hypocrite. You wait for that day. He’ll use it even before he knows what it means. He’ll love how it feels on the tongue, how it sounds coming out. It sounds like an animal, like a prehistoric mammal reptile. It sounds familiar, but bad. He wants to use it against someone, and unfortunately, you’re all vulnerable. Helen, for example. Claims to be so antiestablishment but then she goes around using words like best practices and optimum and internship, words that come so directly from the establishment that no individual could have invented them. And Karen. Swears by hard work and a strict do-it-yourself ethic, but anyone can see how lazy she is. She just wants to whittle and let nature take over.

Me, I almost let myself believe I was safe from the word hypocrite. After all, I was the one who loved sweets, and sometimes I sneaked Perley sweets, too. But I’d brought Perley up to be fearless, and now here I was, so afraid I couldn’t open my eyes. I’d brought Perley up to be free, and here he was, captured, and I wasn’t doing a thing, not a thing but lying all day in the dark, warm with terror and regret.

The piece of mail Helen slipped under the door said visitation. The word inside my head was hypocrite. The lovely combination was what got me out of bed, helped me read the address on the letter, delivered me to that address on time.