I lost some time after that. When I came back I was still in the freezer, or there again more probably. I heard the dachshund lady’s voice, and the scent of cigarette smoke trickled under the kitchen door from the living room. The kitchen was a little different. The tulips that had been on the windowsill were gone. The walls looked dirtier.

“It’s a scandal.” Mommy’s voice. “Throwing stones! They have broken every streetlight on this road. I blame the parents. Kids need discipline.”

I pushed open the kitchen door. The two women looked up at me in surprise. Mommy was wearing a green blouse and slacks. Through the window the day was cold, framed by bare twigs. The shaggy terrier sitting by the dachshund lady wasn’t a dachshund. It raised its brown-and-white head, blinking in the cigarette smoke. She was the terrier lady, now.

“Go on, Teddy,” Mommy said, gentle. “There is nothing to worry about. Finish the job application.” I closed the door and went back to the kitchen where the application for the auto shop in town sat half finished on the counter.

It wasn’t the same day and I didn’t go to school anymore. I had been kicked out for punching the boy by the lockers. Mommy thought it was better I stay home anyway. I was a help to her. I had never before lost so much time at once. I tried to collect the brief flashes of memory that gleamed in my mind. I was twenty or twenty-one, I thought, Mommy worked at the daycare, now, not the hospital. But actually she didn’t anymore, because she had just been fired again, because people were mean.

I felt the difference in my body. I was bigger. Like, a lot bigger. My arms and legs were heavy. There was reddish hair on my face. And there were more scars. I could feel them on my back, itching under my T-shirt.

“Meheeeeeco,” the terrier lady is saying through the door. “I’m going to have a cocktail with breakfast every day. One with an umbrella.” She has been looking forward to her vacation for weeks. “That nice Henry is coming with me. The one who packs the bags at the Stop and Go. Twenty-five years old, what do you think about that?”

“You’re terrible,” Mommy says. It sounds like a compliment and a judgment at the same time. I think about how old twenty-five is, and then how old the terrier lady is. Gross. She must be almost forty.

“Sylvia thinks so too,” the terrier lady says. She sounds sad, suddenly. “I never thought my daughter would grow up to be so judgmental. She was the sweetest baby.”

“I am very lucky with Teddy,” Mommy says, and I am filled with love for her. “He is always respectful.”