She doesn’t want to believe it, though she knows it to be true. Her experience of Simon, Lester and Vera should have taught her that children are capable of anything. Not that hers were devious. Rather, they shielded her from their true selves, protected her from the fact that they were less than she’d hoped they’d be: Simon more violent, Lester willing to make bad choices, and Lincoln slaved to the past so much it excluded a future. To her they would remain trapped in her constructions of them: Simon sober and responsible, even at age ten acting like a father to his siblings; Lester shy and soft; Lincoln dreamy, isolated, turned in just like his feet as he walked to school. As for the girls, they are fading fast, becoming more distant every day.

She wonders out the window. Maybe she was wrong all along. She never protected them, never mothered them. She was wrong: children protect their parents, not the other way around.

Better to sit, then. Much better to hold the view of budding leaves, the dust-brittle brush creeping closer to the road. The one thing she is sure of is that things can always get worse, and though people usually won’t surprise you, at least they are always true to form. The scabby fields and cut-over woods, however, well that will surprise you. Surprised Jacob. He of all people should have known how to avoid the tree, to fend off the floral rage he was tampering with.

One-Two should have known better when he was up on the building. She hadn’t known him all that well when the accident happened. When Simon came home, gray and shaking, finally able to let his fear and concern come out once One-Two had been brought to the hospital, he sat down heavily in the kitchen and told her about the accident. Her heart skipped, but she handed Simon water and finished cooking dinner for the children, and after the dishes were put away she took the leftovers in a pie tin and wrapped them in a towel and calmly walked to the hospital. Visiting hours were over but she knew the hospital staff wouldn’t kick out his crew or her.

She could tell by the cloud of cigarette smoke that the men were in there and once she had shooed them out, she thought maybe One-Two was grateful for her company, for the home-cooked food. He ate, and told her that Simon had saved him, saved his legs at least.

“That’s Simon,” she said. “Stubborn.”