But once you get used to biting, to expulsion, it’s hard to stop. He’s a wonderful kid, his teachers said, but he bites. Or: He’s wonderful, but he can’t sit still. Or: He’s a good kid. Come get your kid. You need to get your kid. I’m sorry. Orly outgrew dance and he outgrew sports and he outgrew school. He outgrew his bed: he slept on his floor, in his closet, out in the world. In those years Thea heard from Florence only when he’d been missing awhile. “I was wondering if he’d called Georgia,” said Florence. “He’s always loved her so.” He always had loved her, Thea said; he never had called. He went to rehab twice the year he was thirteen. Twinkle-eyed Vandyked Loren turned out to have a nineteenth-century streak to his parenthood, and Orly was sent for three months to a camp in Idaho for wayward boys. He came home furious, but with roses in his cheeks. He overdosed and detoxed five times before dying in the parking lot of the Safeway at sixteen, brought down to earth for good.

Perhaps he had died somewhere else and been brought there, the police said, as though that might be a solace.

The children weren’t friends any longer, thank God. Fate and their mothers had kept them apart—Florence most of all. She decided that he was contagious—he must have caught his troubles from some other, worse boy—and this was the way she failed her son. Wasn’t caution catching, too? Shouldn’t he have been exposed to plenty of it?

That’s what Thea guessed, anyhow.

The funeral was open casket, which surprised Thea. They’d combed the curls right out of his hair, though maybe he’d done that himself, alive; maybe they’d been working from a recent photo. On the church pew Thea and Georgia slid on the needlepointed cushions and did not know whether they were supposed to pray aloud with the believers or not. It was jam-packed. People wailed. You’d think the whole world would never recover.

Afterward, at the house, Florence held them by their elbows. How different did she look from the day they’d met thirteen years before at the converted fire station, the groovy mother, the mother of many colors? (How different would she look now, her child gone nearly that long?) This was the last time they might see each other, thought Thea. She wished she had done something, slept with Loren, loaned Orly money for his fatal dose, something that could not be forgiven. She didn’t want Florence to come looking.

“He loved you,” Florence said to Georgia, caressing her elbow, squeezing it.

“He loved everybody,” said Georgia, who’d had to borrow a pair of her mother’s pantyhose for the occasion.

“No,” Florence said. “He loved you particularly.”