Mrs. Torvald called to invite them to Sunday dinner the very next day. Because their mother hardly ever answered the phone anymore, it was Nate who took the call. He knew, from all the times he’d heard his mother respond to some invitation to a potluck or something, that he should ask what they could bring.

“Just bring yourselves, Nathan,” Mrs. Torvald told him.

The one who was most excited about having dinner with the Torvalds was Junie, of course, who loved making new friends and never felt her family had as lively a social life as she would have liked, particularly not since what she called “my dad’s accident.” She had not said anything more about her birthday party, though on the bus now, she no longer called out her cheerful greetings to the other kids or offered compliments if one of the girls had a new coat or lunch box.

Hearing they were invited over for a meal at somebody’s house—somebody who wasn’t a relative—had thrilled his sister. She changed her clothes three times that afternoon, trying to decide on the right look after having been discouraged by Nate from her first choice: a shirt that said I BELIEVE IN BARBIE.

They were due at the Torvalds’ at five o’clock. At twenty to, when Nate came downstairs in a clean shirt and chinos, he found his mother in the kitchen, still in the pants she’d been wearing all day as she’d cleaned out the implement shed with Poppa.

“Is that what you’re wearing?” Nate asked her.

“Listen, honey,” she told him. “I was thinking I’d just let this be a visit for you and your sister. Uncle Harold said he’d pick you up and bring you home. I’m just not feeling up to it tonight.”

She was trying to sound casual, but Nate could see her hands shaking. She had reached the point recently where she hardly ever left the house.

“It could be good to get out,” he told her, knowing it was a losing battle. The picture came to him—crazily—of families on TV shows he and Junie watched, families that were always having barbecues or doing fun things with their neighbors. Not that an evening with the Torvalds was likely to be as lively as how it was when the neighbors got together on Dick Van Dyke and they all rolled up the carpet and started dancing.

“Maybe some other time,” Mom said, placing a couple of pieces of silverware in the cutlery drawer, as if in slow motion.

“Yeah, right,” Nate said. The bitter, disgusted tone of his voice took even him by surprise.

It was as if he’d punched her. “It’s hard for me . . . ,” she began, so softly that he could barely hear her.