“Now, don’t be that way, honey,” Lydia said. But now she couldn’t figure out if she was the old woman in the wheelchair, or the young woman cutting the birthday cake. For example, she thought: Now what did Roger grow up to be? And she didn’t know who thought that: the old woman or the young one. Then the answer came. Roger grew up to be the manager of a chain of department stores. Now who knew that? The young mother couldn’t. But miraculously Lydia realized that she was both—and now the young mother, looking at Roger, also knew what he grew up to be.

But Lydia in the wheelchair thought: what a pity. Not that she had anything against department store managers, but suppose she’d encouraged Roger’s drawing more when he was little. She thought she had, then, of course. Still…. Desperately she tried to remember. What games had they played that day? Pin the tail on the donkey, hide and seek. Suppose she stepped in and made a change. Could she? Well, it was never too late to start.

“Roger … is going to make pastel sketches of each of you!” she said quickly. “Just like a real artist. And you can take them home—”

Roger said: “Wow!” and rushed off for his materials. Odd, that only now she remembered how crazy he used to be about art. He used to copy the funny papers for hours.

Now she was all mixed up again. Was she changing the past? And if she was the old lady and the young mother at the same time, then had she changed the future, too? Would Roger be different? Of course, he might not respond to the encouragement, either; she might end up not helping him at all—if that would be helping him. And had she done enough, or would she have to keep it up, inserting encouragement in suitable places in the past?

Someone said something to her in the hospital-like room. She tried to see who it was, but when she went back to the woman in the wheelchair again everything got foggy.

“Time for our pill,” Mrs. Only said. “We have a new nurse coming late today. We want to have our medications all taken care of, so she can just relax and get to know everybody.”

Where the hell had the nurse come from? What was she chattering about? Lydia scowled again. What was real and what wasn’t? Could she get back to the birthday party? She certainly wasn’t going to stay here with that maddening, condescending … person.

“Now, now,” Mrs. Only said.