“Well,” said Sina, “take heart. I think cookies may eventually be forthcoming.”

Smoke was issuing from the kitchen and we could hear Gladys shouting, “Dadblastit! I hate this woodstove!”

“Or perhaps not,” said Sina. “Do come into the parlor.”

“Actually,” said the man, “I’d like to see the window from which you saw the meteor.”

“Why?” asked Sina, looking panicked, and I knew what she was thinking. She’d managed to straighten up the parlor and dust. But Sina’s bedroom was always total squalor.

“I’d like to take measurements,” said the man. “If you don’t mind.”

Sina looked like she did mind but couldn’t think of a reason to say no.

“Can we come?” asked Winifred.

“Yes, yes, that is, I think so,” said Sina absently, no doubt trying to remember just how bad things were up there and whether it was fit for young eyes. “Where’s Zebediah? Didn’t he want to meet the Space Institute man, too?”

“Mr. Hastings,” said the man, tipping his fedora.

“He’s run off,” said Winifred. “We don’t know where.”

“Well, I hope he’s not with the pigs,” said Sina. “Boys always seem to gravitate to the thing that can make them dirtiest and cause the most trouble.”

Mr. Hastings laughed amiably, which startled Sina because she hadn’t thought she’d been making a joke.

“What about Wilfred?” asked Sina.

“He’s with Old Tom,” I said.

Sina stuck her head out the window and called, “Wilfred! The man from the Space Institute is here!”

But Old Tom and Wilfred each just batted a hand in her direction as if to say, Yeah, yeah, doing important things here, leave us alone.

“Birds of a feather,” said Sina. “Well, come along.”

We trooped upstairs. Sina approached the door to her room as if it might be rigged with a bomb. She gently, gently prized it open and peeked in.

“Um,” she said, “perhaps I’d better just give it a quick tidy.”

“Oh, no need, we of the Space Institute see all sorts of things,” said Mr. Hastings, anxious to get on with it.

But Sina put her hand on his steadily advancing chest and gave him a firm push backward, which seemed to surprise him. She took advantage of his surprise and slipped into her room, closing and locking the door behind her. We heard a lot of furious activity and now and then, I’m afraid, an uttered oath. When she finally opened the door, she was flushed with the tumult of her action, her hair was in wisps about her sweaty face, and there was a long green sock dangling from her gray bun. I reached behind her and swiftly yanked it off and dropped it behind my back. Sina hadn’t noticed and she smiled graciously at Mr. Hastings as if none of this had happened and said, “Do come in.”

Gazing around, I wondered what it must have looked like before Sina’s quick tidy because there were still newspapers strewn about. Sina liked to read them in bed. The bed wasn’t made and there was an apple core and a bunch of dirty Kleenexes in the middle of it. Clothes were lying about in piles as if being sorted for the laundry, as, indeed, they probably were. Sina liked to keep three piles going: dirty, almost-dirty-enough-to-wash-but-still-wearable, and clean-but-not-yet-folded. She’d explained the piles to me a long time ago and said she wasn’t recommending it, only explaining it. Now her face became blank and it was clear she had decided the best thing was to brazen her way through and make no apologies, because she got down to business immediately and said, “I saw it out that window right there.” She pointed to the window over her bed.