Jesse knows it’s critical to bring a dessert with your school lunch, even if it’s just one little cookie wrapped in a napkin. And he agrees with Mom about not having other people clean up your mess. After he moved in, Sheila stopped cleaning Dad’s apartment, and Jesse made us a job wheel for chores, just like the one my all-time favorite teacher, Ms. Adams, had on the wall in second grade. Jesse made one job be “lick floor under table,” and that job is always Rocco’s.

He loves walking Rocco. Rocco made at least four new dog-park friends the first month Jesse lived with us. I can’t even imagine a person (or a dog) who wouldn’t want Jesse around.

I’m too old for a babysitter now, but Sheila is still at our place all the time. She says she comes over just to sit on our couch and look at Jesse’s happiness. He was a happy kid, she says. But he was a worrier.

I’m a worrier, too. So that makes me love Jesse even more.

Magic

The night Dad told me about getting married to Jesse, my hand itched like crazy and woke me up. It was because of the ring Dad gave me for my tenth birthday that summer, silver with turquoise. My eczema gets bad around that ring.

The apartment was dark, but I could make out Rocco curled up in the hallway between the two bedrooms. I stepped over him and went into the bathroom, where I closed one eye before flipping the light switch.

I held my hand under the faucet and let water run between my fingers, the hotter the better. Hot water on my eczema is the best feeling in the world, like every itch I’ve ever had in my whole life is being scratched in exactly the right spot. But afterward my skin gets dry and itches even more than it did in the first place. And sometimes it bleeds. So I’m not actually supposed to run my hands under hot water. Ever. Mom and Dad say hot water is a “five-second solution” because it only solves the problem for five seconds before making it even worse.

Sometimes those five seconds are hard to resist.

Closing one eye is something Angus showed me. When I shut off the water and flipped the light switch, the bathroom went black. I felt my way into the hall, and I couldn’t see anything there, either. But then I opened that closed eye, and I could see. Rocco reappeared on the floor, and I stepped over him again. Angus says it works because that eye stays adjusted to the dark. The first time I tried it, it felt like magic.

Happiness