“But it could be that something’s wrong with him,” Red said.

“Well, and what if it were? You’d just throw a child to the wolves if he’s not Einstein?”

“And would he fit in with our family? Would he get along with our kids? Is he our kind of personality? We don’t know the first damn thing about him! We don’t know him! We don’t love him!”

“Red,” Abby said.

She rose to her feet. She was fully, crisply dressed, at nine thirty on a Saturday morning. Which was, come to think of it, not her usual weekend custom. Her hair was already pinned up in its topknot. She looked uncharacteristically imposing.

“He was sitting on the edge of the bed last night in his pajamas,” she said, “and I saw the back of his neck, this fragile, slender stem of a neck, and it struck me all at once that there was nobody anywhere, any place on this planet, who would look at that little neck and just have to reach out and cup a hand behind it. You know how you just have to touch your child, sometimes? How you drink him in with your eyes and you could stare at him for hours and you marvel at how dear and impossibly perfect he is? And that will never again happen to Douglas. He has nobody left on earth who thinks he’s special.”

“Dammit, Abby—”

“Don’t you curse at me, Red Whitshank! I need this! I have to do this! I cannot see that little stem of a neck and let him go on alone in this world. I can’t! I’d rather die!”

Mandy and Jeannie and Denny were standing in the kitchen doorway. At the same moment, both Red and Abby became aware of that. None of the three had dressed yet, and all of them wore the same wide-eyed look of alarm.

Then a soft, padding sound came from behind them, and when the children turned, Douglas walked up to stand at their center.

“I wet the bed,” he told Abby.

They didn’t adopt him. They didn’t notify Social Services. They didn’t even make an announcement to their friends. Everything went on as before, and Douglas went on being Douglas O’Brian — although, since Abby developed a habit of calling him “my little stem,” he did acquire a nickname. And sometimes the neighbors referred to him as Stem Whitshank, but that was just absentmindedness.

Outsiders had the impression that he was only staying till his mother got her affairs sorted out. (Or was it some other relative? Stories differed.) But most people, after a while, just assumed he was one of the family.

In a matter of weeks he took to calling Red and Abby “Dad” and “Mom,” but not because they told him to. He was merely echoing the other children, in the same way that he echoed Abby and addressed even grown-ups as “sweetheart,” till he got old enough to know better.

He grew more talkative, though so gradually that nobody could recall what specific day he became a normal, chattery youngster. He wore clothes that fit him, and he slept in a room of his own. It had once been Jeannie’s room, but they moved Jeannie in with Mandy because Stem certainly couldn’t continue sharing with Denny. Denny was sort of prickly about Stem. It all worked out, though. Mandy more or less put up with Jeannie’s presence, and Jeannie was thrilled to be living in a teenager’s room with cosmetics crowding the bureau top.

Above Stem’s bed hung a framed black-and-white photo of Lonesome holding a Budweiser, snapped by one of Red’s workmen the day they finished a building project. Abby believed very strongly that Stem should be encouraged to cherish his memories of his father. Of his mother too, if he’d had any memories, but he didn’t seem to. The reason his mother had gone away was, she was unhappy, Abby always told him. It wasn’t that she hadn’t loved him. She loved him very much, as he would see if she ever came back. And Abby showed him the page in the phone book where his own name was listed year after year, “O’Brian Douglas A,” along with the Whitshanks’ number so his mother could easily find him. Stem listened to all this closely, but he said nothing. And in time it seemed he lost his memories of even his father, because when Abby asked Stem on his tenth birthday whether he ever thought about him, he said, “I maybe remember his voice.”

“His voice!” Abby said. “Saying what?”

“I think he used to sing me a song when I was going to sleep. Or some guy did.”

“Oh, Stem, how nice. A lullaby?”

“No, it was about a goat.”

“Oh. And nothing else? No recollection of his face? Or something you two did together?”

“I guess not,” Stem said, without sounding too concerned about it.

He was an old soul, Abby told people. He was the kind of person who adapted and moved on, evidently.

He went through school without a fuss, earning only average grades but fulfilling all his assignments. You could imagine him as the butt of school bullies, since he was small for his age in the early years, but actually he did fine. It may have been his friendly expression, or his general unflappability, or his tendency to assume the best in people. At any rate, he got along. He graduated from high school and went straight into Whitshank Construction, where he’d been working part-time ever since he was old enough; he said he didn’t see the need for college. He married the only girl he had ever shown any real interest in, had his children one-two-three, seemed never to look around and wonder if he might be better off someplace else. In this last respect, he was the one most like Red. Even his walk was Red’s — loping, leading with his forehead — and his lanky frame, though not his coloring. You could say that he looked like a Whitshank who’d been left out to bleach in the open too long: hair not black but light brown, eyes not sapphire but light blue. Faded, but still a Whitshank.

More of a Whitshank than Denny was, Denny had remarked when he heard that Stem had joined the firm.

Although once, back when Denny was a teenager still living at home, he’d asked Abby, “What’s this kid doing here? What did you think you were up to? Did you ever consider asking our permission?”

“Permission!” Abby said. “He’s your brother!”

Denny said, “He is not my brother. He is not remotely related to me, and for you to tell me he is is like … like those pretend-to-be liberals who claim they never notice whether a person is black or white. Don’t they have eyes? Don’t you? Were you so keen on doing good in the outside world that you didn’t stop to wonder if this would be good for us?”

Abby just said, “Oh, Denny.”

Oh, Denny.

ON SUNDAY MORNING the study door was closed — Denny’s door — and everyone tried to keep the little boys from making too much noise. “Go play in the sunroom,” Nora told them when they’d finished breakfast. “Quietly, though. Don’t wake your uncle.” But even on their best behavior, exaggeratedly tiptoeing as they left the kitchen, they seemed to radiate disruption. They jostled and elbowed and poked one another and tripped over their own pajama cuffs, while Heidi ran frenzied circles around them. On the floor in the corner, Brenda raised her head to watch them leave and then groaned and settled her chin on her paws again.

Red was sleeping late too, so the others had no way of knowing how things had gone at the train station. “I tried to stay awake till the two of them got home,” Abby said, “but I must have nodded off. I can’t seem to read in bed anymore! I should have sat up for them downstairs. Another cup of coffee, Nora?”

“I can do that, Mother Whitshank. You sit still.”

It was going to be a while, evidently, before the two women settled just who was in charge of what. This morning Abby had put out toast and cereal as usual, and then Nora had come down and scrambled an entire carton of eggs without so much as a by-your-leave.

Stem was in his pajamas and Abby in her bathrobe, but Nora wore one of her dresses, white cotton with navy sprigs, and sandals that showed her smooth, tanned feet. For breakfast she had eaten more than all the rest of them put together, but so slowly and so gracefully that it seemed she hardly ate at all.