“Batsy” was a pretend word, a private word, which Owen had coined when he could not yet pronounce everything and made words up without meaning to, like “odduce” for “orange juice” and “nana” for “banana.” “Batsy” had to do with food that he didn’t like, that he thought too runny or mixed-up or too much like guts to eat. He must have meant “bad” mixed with “nasty”; the word had stuck, as if describing a reality that couldn’t be touched by the tongue with an actual word. Fresh bird doo-doo on the rim of the stone birdbath and earthworms that had dried out crossing the hot sidewalk were also batsy.

“What was it for?” he asked, his past tense showing an awareness of something discarded, of something whose mysterious moment of use was past.

Both his parents were silent as the three of them walked onward, leaving the fascinating rubbery thing behind in the roadside grit. They were the kind of parents, unlike some, who thought it wrong not to answer a child’s questions. He could feel guilt nagging at them.

“It was for tidiness’ sake, Owen,” his father at last said. “Like a Kleenex.”

“It was a stork-stopper,” his mother added, her voice better-humored now, laced with a girlish complicity. He could feel his parents, behind him, drawn closer in their secret knowledge. Usually it was he and his mother who had the secrets, in all those hours when his father was absent at work. Her unhappiness was the main secret, though what exactly she was unhappy about he could not quite guess. Being a daughter, wife, and mother all in the same house was stressful, she let him know, though he wasn’t sure why it would be. He was himself a son and grandson, a classmate and playmate, all at once, and could easily have been somebody’s brother. It was as if just being a woman by itself was enough to cause unhappiness. There were days when his mother went to bed with her eyes shut; it frightened him when she was like this, and he stayed away from her. There were days when her whole being said, Don’t touch me.

Owen’s little room was next to his parents’, and their exchanges unignorably seeped into his ears—the brisk thrusts and counterthrusts of a quarrel, the sighs and groans of weariness in the evening, the playful chatter that began the day. He was happy to have her love him more than she did his father, but he wanted things to be friendly and cozy between the two grown-ups, so that after one of his nightmares they could comfort him by letting him into the warm space between them in their bed.