And who’s to say that’s the order things happened in; was it only her junk-shop memory that had arranged them so? Maybe Orly had nothing to do with Georgia, child of divorce, always so uneasy in her body, made to take dance lessons because her mother wished her otherwise, and maybe it was Georgia who’d first pulled a plastic bag out of her pocket and waved it at Orly, Georgia who even now was vowing to raise her child differently: the baby would sleep in their bed, would have two mothers, two actual mothers, who planned to bend the world for their child instead of the easy other way around.

The doll was diaperless, and played with, and autographed: KITTY on its bicep. Its hair, like many an old lady’s, had gone mauve with age.

“She’s written on,” said Thea, looking for a way out.

“Ballpoint.” The woman spit on the tip of her finger and rubbed the K of Kitty away.

“Does it work?”

“Needs a battery, honey,” the woman said, to the doll instead of Thea. She reached into her jeans pockets. “D or C,” she mused, “D or C: D.”

The doll had a hatch in her back, and the woman loaded a battery, flipped a switch, and turned the doll over.

The baby suckled at nothing. The woman lifted it to Thea, who put out her arms as though the baby were real. She took its churning weight. Instinctively she put her hand on the baby’s chest to test for heartbeat, or breath, but could perceive only its mechanical hunger.

Could there have been a worse signal to the evil eye? Baby Alive? And what now? She could not take it home, but she could not leave it here. She couldn’t turn it off, but she couldn’t bear to see its empty mouth move and move. Maybe the TSA would see it in her suitcase and blow it up. She got to take her true love home all those years ago, and yes, she would dote on the new baby, but only because the baby would be a pinhole camera with which to look at her daughter, the near-total eclipse, the blinding event. She wanted to buy everything, the jelly jars and the PEZ dispensers, the never-played-with board games with the clicking spinners that told you how far to go and the cards that told you what you had to give up.

“I’ll take her,” Thea said. “Who else have you got?”

Look at the evening grackles strung on their overhead wires like Morse code! Impossible not to believe they spelled out something. But they didn’t; they were meaningless, in their numbers and their prattle. The call of a grackle is known as a grackle: in the gloaming, the grackles grackle.

Maybe they don’t want anything. Maybe they stare because they wonder what you signify. What brought you here, to their front lawn?