“Yeah.”

“And he likes you?”

“I think so.”

Josie lifted her gaze. “Then you shouldn’t worry about what anyone else thinks.”

“I worry about what you think,” Alex said. “I don’t want you to feel like you’re any less important to me because of him.”

“Just be responsible,” Josie answered, with a slow smile. “Every time you have sex, you can get pregnant or you can not get pregnant. That’s fifty-fifty.”

Alex raised her brows. “Wow. I didn’t even think you were listening when I gave that speech.”

Josie pressed her finger against a spot of maple syrup that had fallen onto the table, her eyes trained on the wood. “So, do you…like…love him?”

The words seemed bruised, tender. “No,” Alex said quickly, because if she could convince Josie, then she surely could convince herself that what she felt for Patrick had everything to do with passion and nothing to do with…well…that. “It’s only been a few months.”

“I don’t think there’s a grace period,” Josie said.

Alex decided that the best road to take through this minefield was the one that would keep both Josie and herself from being hurt: pretend this was nothing, a fling, a fancy. “I wouldn’t know what being in love felt like if it hit me in the face,” she said lightly.

“It’s not like on TV, like everything’s perfect all of a sudden.” Josie’s voice shrank until it was barely a thought. “It’s more like, once it happens, you spend all your time realizing how much can go wrong.”

Alex looked up at her, frozen. “Oh, Josie.”

“Anyway.”

“I didn’t mean to make you-”

“Let’s just drop it, okay?” Josie forced a smile. “He’s not bad-looking, you know, for someone that old.”

“He’s a year younger than I am,” Alex pointed out.

“My mother, the cradle robber.” Josie picked up the plate of pancakes and passed it. “These are getting cold.”

Alex took the plate. “Thank you,” she said, but she held Josie’s gaze just long enough for her daughter to realize what Alex was really grateful for.

Just then Patrick came creeping down the stairs. At the landing, he turned to give Alex a thumbs-up sign. “Patrick,” she called out. “Josie’s made us some pancakes.”

Selena knew the party line-you were supposed to say that there was no difference between boys and girls-but she also knew if you asked any mom or nursery school teacher, they’d tell you differently, off the record. This morning, she sat on a park bench watching Sam negotiate a sandbox with a group of fellow toddlers. Two little girls were pretending to bake pizzas made out of sand and pebbles. The boy beside Sam was trying to demolish a dump truck by smashing it repeatedly into the sandbox’s wooden frame. No difference, Selena thought. Yeah, right.

She watched with interest as Sam turned from the boy beside him and started to copy the girls, sifting sand into a bucket to make a cake.

Selena grinned, hoping that this was some small clue that her son would grow up to act against stereotype and do whatever he was most comfortable doing. But did it work that way? Could you look at a child and see who he’d become? Sometimes when she studied Sam, she could glimpse the adult he’d be one day-it was there in his eyes, the shell of the man he would grow to inhabit. But it was more than physical attributes you could sometimes puzzle out. Would these little girls become stay-at-home Betty Crocker moms, or business entrepreneurs like Mrs. Fields? Would the little boy’s destructive behavior bloom into drug addiction or alcoholism? Had Peter Houghton shoved playmates or stomped on crickets or done something else as a child that might have predicted his future as a killer?

The boy in the sandbox put down the truck and moved on to digging, seemingly to China. Sam abandoned his baking to reach for the plastic vehicle, and then he lost his balance and fell down, smacking his knee on the wooden frame.

Selena was out of her seat in a shot, ready to scoop up her son before he started to bawl. But Sam glanced around at the other kids, as if realizing he had an audience. And although his little face furrowed and reddened, a raisin of pain, he didn’t cry.

It was easier for girls. They could say This hurts, or I don’t like how this feels, and have the complaint be socially acceptable. Boys, though, didn’t speak that language. They didn’t learn it as children and they didn’t manage to pick it up as adults, either. Selena remembered last summer, when Jordan had gone fishing with an old friend whose wife had just filed for divorce. What did you talk about? she asked when Jordan came home.

Nothing, Jordan had said. We were fishing.

This had made no sense to Selena; they’d been gone for six hours. How could you sit beside someone in a small boat for that long and not have a heart-to-heart about how he was doing; if he was holding up in the wake of this crisis; if he worried about the rest of his life.

She looked at Sam, who now had the dump truck in his hand and was rolling it across his former pizza. Change could come that quickly, Selena knew. She thought of how Sam would wrap his tiny arms around her and kiss her; how he’d come running to her if she held out her arms. But sooner or later he’d realize that his friends didn’t hold their mothers’ hands when they crossed the street; that they didn’t bake pizzas and cakes in the sandbox, instead they built cities and dug caverns. One day-in middle school, or even earlier-Sam would start to hole himself up in his room. He would shy away from her touch. He would grunt his responses, act tough, be a man.

Maybe it was our own damn fault that men turned out the way they did, Selena thought. Maybe empathy, like any unused muscle, simply atrophied.

Josie told her mother that she had gotten a summer job volunteering with the school system to tutor middle and elementary school kids in math. She talked about Angie, whose parents had split up during the school year and who had failed algebra as an indirect consequence. She described Joseph, a leukemia patient who’d missed school for treatment and had the hardest time understanding fractions. Every day at dinner, her mother would ask her about work, and Josie would have a story. The problem was, it was just that-a fiction. Joseph and Angie didn’t exist; and for that matter, neither did Josie’s tutoring job.

This morning, like every morning, Josie left the house. She got on the Advance Transit bus and said hello to Rita, the driver who’d been on this route all summer. When the other passengers got off at the stop that was closest to the school, Josie stayed in her seat. She didn’t get up, in fact, until the very last stop-the one that was a mile south of the Whispering Pines Cemetery.

She liked it there. At the cemetery, she didn’t run into anyone she didn’t feel like talking to. She didn’t have to speak at all if she wasn’t in the mood. Josie walked up the winding trail, which was so familiar to her by now that she could tell, with her eyes closed, when the pavement was going to make a dip and when it would veer left. She knew that the violently blue hydrangea bush was halfway to Matt’s grave; that you could smell honeysuckle when you were only steps away from it.

By now, there was a headstone, a pristine block of white marble with Matt’s name carefully carved. Grass had started to grow. Josie sat down on the raised hummock of dirt, which was warm, as if the sun had been seeping into the earth and holding that heat in wait for her. She reached into her backpack and took out a bottle of water, a peanut butter sandwich, a bag of saltines.

“Can you believe school’s starting in a week?” she said to Matt, because sometimes she did that. It wasn’t like she expected him to answer; it just felt better talking to him after so many months of not talking. “They’re not opening the real school yet, though. They said maybe by Thanksgiving, when the construction’s done.”