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steps.
    Throughout the past weeks, from a second-floor vantage point, Rose has watched their comings and goings. Initially, before Ned brought home the facts, she took the girl to be the boy’s older sister. She certainly doesn’t look a day over sixteen. She is scrawny, thin as a playing card. Not exactly what you’d call pretty. With red hair like nothing Rose has ever seen in captivity.
    â€œShe’s the kid’s mother,” Ned reported one night, sharing the information he has picked up over coffee at Trudy’s: Her name is Opal Gates; she is from the South—North Carolina according to the plates on the Buick—and has rented the Montgomery place for a year; hers is the only name on the lease; the husband has not been sighted.
    Right then Rose understood the whole story. The girl has gone and gotten herself pregnant and had a shotgun wedding. Probably a high school dropout. Well, at least she didn’t have an abortion. Give her credit for that. The husband has either abandoned her or enlisted. Rose can’t make up her mind which.
    The most interesting thing is that Opal Gates makes dolls. According to Maida Learned over at the Yellow Balloon, the girl can take a photo of a child and produce a doll that’s nearly a twin. Maida has already ordered several for the store, although Rose can’t imagine this is the kind of thing you can make a living at.
    Other bits of gossip have surfaced. The general opinion is that the girl is far too casual with her care of the boy. Gloria at the Cutting Edge said when the pair turned up for the boy to get a haircut, he was allowed to run wild. “Nearly tore the shop apart while she just sat there and didn’t say a word.” And Gloria’s daughter Marcia had seen them at the playground. When she tried to warn her about the jungle gym, the one the Levitt child broke her collarbone on just last month, Opal Gates laughed and then went right ahead and allowed her son to climb the bars. “Now don’t you go worrying about that,” she said to Marcia. “Boys bounce.”
Boys bounce.
The audacity of it. The carelessness of it.
    Boys
don’t
bounce. They break.
    Rose herself had been a devoted mother, insisting on breast-feeding Todd, even though Doc didn’t want her to, although now, don’t you know, the experts say breast-feeding is good, that it protects and enhances an infant’s immune system. Of course, Rose knows that nothing can really make people immune, that nothing on God’s green earth can keep people safe, that no amount of money or goodness, fame or love can protect. Still.
Boys bounce.
The unfairness of it.
    In the yard next door, the girl continues to fiddle with the radio with no improvement in the music, while the boy runs around in circles, arms extended like wings, screeching like a little banshee. Rose hopes she isn’t going to be expected to put up with this kind of racket. If it keeps up, Ned will have to go over and have a talk with her. And here it is October and neither of them wearing shoes. You can’t blame the boy, he’s too young to know better, but the mother should use her head. Barefoot in October. A flea would have more sense. Rose isn’t prejudiced and doesn’t like to form judgments about people, but it looks to her that the girl is what you’d call Southern trash.
    Rose is pinning up the last pair of Ned’s socks when she hears the girl’s shouted “hello.” Naturally, she ignores this. She has no intention of mixing in. Nothing but trouble there.
    It galls her that someone has probably already told the girl about Todd. “That’s poor Rose Nelson,” they tell newcomers, as if that is her full name.
Poor Rose Nelson. The woman who lost her only son in that
dreadful accident a few years back.
Spreading her business to anyone who will listen. People here couldn’t keep quiet if they were paid to. Then she wonders, as she