Helen had always been neat and presentable, and so she was allowed to help at Pritchard’s school dances with the girls from Sawyer-Monclair. Helen would look at the girls so unlike her sisters as they passed in the half-light, their dresses with depths of tulle, their regular pearls and high heels and solid hanging curls. Their faces expected only bright things that Helen knew they would get.

One afternoon, her sister Anne caught the sleeve of her calico school dress on the front gate and opened a two-inch tear. Their mother held up the exhausted dress and then took Anne to Spencer’s in town, where they bought a new one, a white muslin with small raised dots along the sleeves. Helen waited a week, and then with one leg of Orin’s scissors worked a hole open at the front of her own school dress, and brought it to her mother in distress about catching it on the window latch. Her mother told her to sew it up again. After Helen was finished, her mother picked the stitches out, saying the repair had to be invisible. She made Helen redo it three more times.

Ben helped his mom make the Thanksgiving meal, watching her clean spinach and strip celery stalks off the bulb. Teddy had been out with friends from home until just before dawn and then slept until three, but he helped set the table for Thanksgiving dinner. They had a crisp-skinned turkey, no men came to roll up the carpets, and the only thing that could have possibly been a sign was the curling corner of the wallpaper in the hallway bathroom.

After two days the leftovers were finished, and so they ordered pizza. Ben and his mom drove to the little shopping plaza to pick it up. Just like San Bernardino but colder. They came out with the warm box into the hard early dusk, Ben pulling his boot along past the Supercuts and the Lemongrass Grill, and he saw a pocket of kids collected next to the McDonald’s.

Ben had noticed them when he and his mom had walked from the car to the pizza place, but now coming back he looked more carefully. Immediately he discerned the leader. He wore a baseball cap with a triangular logo Ben didn’t recognize, and the cap’s brim was completely flat. That flatness seemed not only incorrect, but a fuck you to the way Ben knew hat brims should look: like the narrow end of an egg, like the top half of a zero. The boy was bony, with light acne and ragged blond hair showing beneath the hat. He was dressed in a loose red-and-black-plaid shirt over black jeans torn at both knees and flat-soled black high-tops. All the other kids were wearing the same clothes, but everything was more right on him. A bright chain hung from his belt loop back to what must have been his wallet.