“How about you?”

“I don’t have to imagine. I’ve seen you naked. Your naked body’s burned into my brain.”

Ranger turned onto my parents’ street. “I’m going to wait in the car. And if you send your grandma out to harass me, I swear . . .”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t know what I swear. I can’t think of anything awful enough to do to you that wouldn’t leave you maimed or psychologically scarred.”

“Nice to know there are boundaries.”

Ranger parked in front of my parents’ house and got out of the car.

“I thought you weren’t coming in,” I said.

“I’m not. I’m going to stay out here. I can’t see the entire street if I sit in the car.”

Grandma Mazur opened the front door for me. “Is that Ranger with you? Isn’t he coming in?”

“He thinks he’s coming down with a cold. Doesn’t want to infect everyone.”

“Isn’t that thoughtful! He’s such a nice young man. Lots of times men aren’t nice like that when they’re hot-looking. Maybe I’ll bring him something from the kitchen.”

“No! He just ate. He’s not hungry. And you can’t take a chance on getting infected. What if you got sick and gave the cold to the baby?”

“Oh yeah. Well, you tell him I was asking about him.”

“You bet.”

Valerie was on the couch, nursing the baby. The girls were watching Valerie. My father was in his chair, concentrating on CNN.

My mother came in from the kitchen, took a look at me, and made the sign of the cross. “Your arm is bandaged, you have grass stains on your pants, and pieces of some sort of bush are stuck in your hair. And Ranger is outside, wearing a gun.” She looked more closely. “Is that a wig?”

“It’s my real hair. I got it cut.”

With the exception of the baby, everyone stopped what they were doing and looked at me.

“Sometimes it’s fun to change things,” I said. “Right? What do you think?”

“It’s . . . cute,” Valerie said.

“I wouldn’t mind wearing my hair like that,” Grandma said. “I bet it’d look real good if it was pink.”

The phone rang.

“It’s Lois Kelner across the street,” Grandma Mazur said. “She wants to know if we’re being invaded. She said it looks to her like there’s one of them terrorists in our driveway.”

“It’s just Ranger,” I said.

“I know that,” Grandma said, “but Lois is calling the army.”

My mother did another sign of the cross.

“Maybe you should get Ranger out of the driveway,” Valerie said. “Paratroopers landing on the roof would upset the baby.”

Grandma’s eyes lit. “Paratroopers! Wouldn’t that be something.”

“I’ll try to get back later,” I told everyone. I stopped in front of the hall mirror to pick the branches out of my hair and to take a close look at the cut. I’d never before thought of myself as cute. Sometimes I felt sexy. And sometimes I felt downright fat and stupid. Cute was a new one.