Mrs McGivney met me at the top of the dark stairs and I followed her into the apartment, where her husband still sat straight backed at the window, looking out over the alley, his pale eyes empty She told me that she had forgotten to write 'pickle' on her list, and she knew that Mr McGivney would just love to have one of Mr Kane's big plump dill pickles.

I couldn't be sure to get a big plump pickle, because Mr Kane's practice was to roll up his sleeve and reach down into his barrel and give you the first one he touched. If it was little, he wouldn't drop it back into the brine and try for a bigger one because, as he explained, he'd pretty soon be left with nothing but little pickles, so people would go somewhere else to buy pickles where they had a chance of getting a big one. When I returned with an average-sized pickle wrapped in white butcher paper I found the little round table by the window set up with napkins and little plates and sugar cookies and milk for two. I told Mrs McGivney that I really couldn't accept the nickel she was trying to press into my hand, not for buying something that had only cost a nickel; but she said I had walked the same distance as if I'd been sent for a whole bagful of groceries, and therefore I had earned the nickel; but I said no, I hadn't really earned it so I couldn't take it; but she continued to hold it out, standing there with her head cocked and giving me one of those ain't-I-the-cutest-thing glances out of the corners of her eyes, the kind of look Shirley Temple used when she wanted to get her way. Adults thought Shirley was just too adorable for words, with her dimples and her pouting sideward glances, shaking her pudgy finger at people she thought were being naughty, but every red-blooded American boy yearned to kick her in the butt. Hard. In the end, I took the damned nickel. Jeez!

Those sugar cookies had something against me. They didn't get caught in the corner of my mouth this time, but I had just bitten one when Mrs McGivney asked me how my mother was, and when I tried to answer through the cookie, I coughed and sprayed crumbs and ended up feeling stupid and clumsy. Not much of a start for a slick detective.

I was curious to know what was wrong with Mr McGivney, but I didn't think I should ask. Instead, I told her I'd have to be getting home before long because my mother was sick.

"Still? Oh-h, I'm sorry to hear that."

"She's almost over it."

"Is she often ill, John-Luke?"

"Only my mother calls me John-Luke. Yes, I guess you'd say she's sick pretty often. She's got weak lungs."

"And you take care of her?"

"My sister helps."

"What about your father?"

My sister and I knew our father only from a photograph taken during their two-day honeymoon in New York City in 1929: a handsome man in a linen summer suit, his jacket held open by a fist on one hip to reveal his waistcoat, a straw hat tipped rakishly over one eye, his disarmingly boyish smile both knowing and mischievous. "I don't know anything about him."

"Oh... I see. Well... the important thing is to always be a good boy and take care of your mother."

I couldn't think of anything to say and Mrs McGivney seemed content just to sit there, smiling at me vaguely, her head tipped to one side. I glanced over at Mr McGivney, but he was still staring out the window. And I remembered a scary episode of Lights Outabout zombies and the living dead.

I felt Mrs McGivney's eyes on me, so I turned to her quickly and asked her the first question that came to mind, so she wouldn't guess that I had been thinking her husband might be a zombie. "Ah... ah... what was your nephew's name again?" I'd just ease into this interrogation. You know, like smart detectives do.

"My nephew?"

"The one who used to visit you, but doesn't anymore? You told me his name, but I forgot it." Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Mr McGivney. I'd never seen anyone sit so still before. Even his eyelashes didn't move. I watched to see if he'd blink.

"Do you mean Michael?"

"Michael? Who's Mi... Oh, yes. That's right. Michael." No, he didn't blink. Was it possiblenot to blink? I looked at his neck, then his wrist, but I couldn't see any throbbing of a pulse. It was almost as if...

"He's dead," she said with a sigh.

"What?" An icy wave rippled down my spine.

"Michael was killed in France. Poor, dear boy."

Oh... the nephew. I took a deep breath, and tried to get back to my interrogation. If the nephew died in France during the Great War, then he hadn't visited them for about twenty years. "Uh... Don't you have any other relations?"

She smiled a faint, sad smile. "No, no. My people are all gone, and Mr McGivney was an orphan, so no, we don't have any relations." She shrugged, and sudden tears filled her eyes but didn't fall. "No one at all."

"I'm... I'm sorry."

"Are you, John-Luke?"

"Only my mother calls me... Look, Mrs McGivney, I'd better be getting home." I rose from the chair and went to the door. "Thanks a lot for the cookie." Then I did something risky. I turned to Mr McGivney and said, "Good-bye, Mr McGivney."

"He can't hear you."

"Is he deaf?"

"No, no, he's not deaf." She opened the door for me. "Mr McGivney is a hero."

"Oh." I looked back at him. "...I see, well..." I left.

Uncle Jim, Gabby, Tonto, Jack, Doc, and the rest were in the alley, anxiously awaiting my return. "Michael!" I whispered hoarsely out of the side of my mouth. "Killed in the Great War. Write it down, and don't forget it!"

A week or so later, I was cutting through the back alley with an armful of books about birds that I was returning to the library. I no longer remember why I suddenly decided to make our ship come in by becoming a rich and world-famous ornithologist, but I wouldn't be surprised if I had just stumbled across the word 'ornithologist' and taken a fancy to it. It was a period when I lurched from one eventual profession to another, often on the basis of small clues to my destiny I found while reading the encyclopedia in the library. This idea of becoming an ornithologist lasted longer than most... a week or two, maybe. I had even begun my first book, Meet the Warbler,which I wrote as a book,with sheets of paper folded in half and stapled together so you could turn the pages and read my careful printing, which I justified right and left by spreading or cramming the final words. The cardboard cover had a crayon picture of a yellow warbler on it, and at the bottom: Written by Jean-Luc LaPointe, author. It was dedicated to 'my best friend, My Mother'. Working on the worn, fingernail-picked oilcloth of the kitchen table, carefully wiping the tip of my nib on the edge of the ink bottle after each dip to avoid blots, I painstakingly produced half a dozen pages of this seminal study, scrupulously altering a word here and there from my research sources to avoid being a copycat. Then something went wrong; I don't remember what. Maybe I misspelled a word, or miscalculated the room necessary to fit a word in, or made a blot. At all events, my effort to erase the error made a huge smear, and my attempt to erase the smear converted it into a hole, so I abandoned the profession of ornithologist and began to look for yet another career that might bring our ship into port. I found the aborted scholarly effort many years later, when I was going through my mother's things after her death. She had underlined the dedication: To my best friend, My Mother.

I had stopped in the alley to shift the heavy bird books from one arm to the other when three sharp clicks on a window above made me look up. Mrs McGivney was gesturing for me to come up. I indicated the books I was carrying and tried to mime the complicated message that I had to bring them to the library before it closed. But she just smiled, tilted her head in that little-girl way of hers, and beckoned me up, so I reluctantly returned the books to my apartment and went down the street, up her stoop, and up the staircase to the top floor.