Warm weather lasted from March to October. A haze settled over Willow. Owen’s little bedroom, with its wainscoted walls and single bookshelf, overlooked a vacant lot where he often played with the other children of the neighborhood, for an hour after supper in summer, in a milky twilight, the long grass scratchy, going to seed. Fungo, kick-the-can, touch football: girls played them all, since the neighborhood held more girls than boys. Once, in the lot’s matted grasses, flattened and wet with dew—for it was fall and school had begun again—Owen came upon his glasses in the brown snap case that had vanished some days before. Found! He had looked everywhere in the house, and his mother had confided what a grief it would be for his poor father to have to pay for a replacement pair. It was a miracle, it seemed to the child as he bent down and took the case, damp with its nights and days of patiently waiting for him to find it, into his hand. Inside, yes, were the gold-rimmed disks that sharpened his sight, the little bean-shapes that left dents in his nose, the curved metal handles that hurt his ears. When he had been told, in second grade, that he must wear glasses for reading and the movies, he had cried. Some day, he consoled himself, he would outgrow them. Perhaps his finding them was less than a miracle, for he took this diagonal path through the weeds every day to meet Buddy Rourke, his friend from the class above his, so they could walk to school together, away from the pack of girls from Second Street. Buddy had no father, which made him strange and slightly frightening. He was moody, with hairs between his eyebrows. He had straight coarse hair that bristled forward and a mouth that never smiled, because of braces, shiny metal bands with a silver square in the middle of each tooth. Owen wanted to run back to tell his mother that he had found his glasses and his father wouldn’t have to pay for new ones, but he didn’t want to be late for Buddy, and hurried on, the recovered case making the pocket of his knickers damp, so the skin of his thigh tingled.

From this same side of the house, beyond the lot, early on another morning, Owen heard the sound of a shot. He had been sleeping. He seemed to awake in the moment before hearing, as if in a dream, the noise that had awoken him. He had seen enough gangster movies to know the sound of gunpowder under percussion, but in the movies it came in machinegun waves, whereas this was a single, lonely sound.