“It hasn’t been used since the library board met there yesterday,” the children’s librarian kept saying, “and the library board is not inclined to be careless about such things.”

“All’s well that ends well,” Miriam said, unashamed of the cliché. “I just want it on the record in case anything like this happens again.”

The young officer studied Adrien for a few seconds.

“Her shirt,” he said, “was it always on inside out?”

It was only then that Miriam noticed the seams, visible on the shoulders of the long-sleeved T-shirt that Adrien had insisted on wearing despite the day’s heat. Yes, there were the grass-green machine stitches, which looked like little surgical scars. The pink plaid pants were on right side out, though, and the shoes were still tied in Miriam’s distinctive rabbit ear. She was glad, looking at those shoes, that she had developed this silly way of tying shoes. If her daughter’s shoes had not been removed, then her pants had not come off. If the pants had not come off…then Miriam never had to think of this again.

Only she did. And when she did, she thought of the day as the knot on a piece of embroidery thread. The needle had poked through the muslin and was anchored in place by a strong knot, tight as a fist. But until it poked back through, creating that first small stitch, there could be no pattern. There was only a knot, a beginning, hidden on the other side of the cloth.

“Where’s the baby, Mom?” Alice asked Helen at breakfast. She had the “Lifestyles” section of the Beacon-Light propped up on the sugar dispenser, turned to the comics and horoscope.

“What?” Helen’s voice was sharp, her morning tone. “What baby? What are you talking about?”

“The doll’s head, the one that used to sit in the middle of your cut-glass saltcellars. I just noticed it’s not on the shelf anymore.” Alice pointed her forkful of fried egg at the wall next to the kitchen window, where painted shelves held the things Helen had started and stopped collecting over the years-saltcellars, vintage salt and pepper shakers, cobalt blue glassware.

“Oh.” Helen had a habit of touching her own face, her hair, her neck-not the usual pats and rubs that people used to put things back in place, but lingering strokes with her fingertips. She drew the skin of her forehead up and into her hairline, smoothing the furrows in her brow. “I got tired of it. It was too…precious. Like the time I nailed the old wedding dress to the wall. Remember that? The wedding dress on one wall, the black cocktail dress on the other.”

Alice did remember. She had an even clearer memory of the shoes that Helen had nailed below the dresses, the white and black pumps. The white ones had been attached to the wall sole down, side by side, prim and proper. The black spike heels had been driven into the wall through the vamps, so the phantom wearer appeared to be spread-eagled. There had been a pair of long black gloves as well, thrown wide, as if a singer were finishing a song. Helen had told people it was an artwork titled Madonna versus Whore, Part I. Young as Alice must have been at the time-seven, maybe eight-she had understood there would never be a Part II.

“Now that everyone else is doing stuff like that, it’s not so much fun,” Helen said on a yawn. She had slept late, as was her habit on Saturdays and Sundays, coming down at noon in her yellow silk robe, uncovered at the Dreamland vintage store years ago, back when most people were a little afraid to go down to that part of Baltimore. “I can’t run with the herd, you know.”

Alice knew, for it was the type of thing her mother often said of herself, in different ways. Helen Manning’s interest in her own personality was inexhaustible. I am not a morning person, she might announce, almost startled by the insight. I have never liked sweet potatoes. I simply cannot wear that shade of off-green. But then, most people were like that. Alice was odd because she didn’t find her quirks interesting. She wasn’t even sure she had any.

Still, she missed that doll’s head. It had been so unexpected, sitting there among Helen’s saltcellars. It was the old kind of baby doll, with lashed eyes and a rosebud mouth with a little hole, where a child could stick a bottle. Then, depending on how you held the doll, Helen had explained to Alice and her friends, the water-formula would flow out through the doll’s eyes or bottom. For a long time, Alice had assumed the head was one of the toys Helen had salvaged from her youth. Their house was full of Helen’s old playthings. But it turned out it was another flea market find, purchased because Helen found it interesting.

“Anything in the paper?” Helen asked.

“My horoscope says all eyes will be on me today-and that I’ll find something I misplaced.”

Helen’s hand knocked her cup, and although it didn’t turn over, it sent a great slosh of coffee over the Formica table. Automatically Alice got up and grabbed a sponge from the sink, wiping up before the spill could lap the edges of the newspaper. As a child, Alice had found this table embarrassing, although her friend Wendy had insisted she considered it, and the entire kitchen, extremely cool. “It’s like the Silver Diner,” she had said approvingly, inspecting the old-fashioned sugar container, the tin signs advertising various ice creams, forgotten flavors such as Heavenly Hash and Holiday Pudding. “Or TGI Friday’s.”

Wendy had not liked the living room, but then-neither had Alice. The furniture was fussy and uncomfortable, her grandparents’ castoffs. The walls had been kept a boring and now somewhat dingy white in order to showcase Helen’s real artwork, as she called it. These were bright oil paintings of animals doing housework. A dog making breakfast, a fox vacuuming, a duck changing a baby duck’s diaper. When visitors asked about the paintings, Helen always said they were ideas for a children’s book she had never gotten around to doing. Alice was glad the book never happened, because the paintings scared her. It was hard to explain why. Perhaps it was because the animals did not look happy as they went about their chores, and there were no human touches-no clothes, no bonnets. Alice thought the fox, for example, should be wearing an apron, a frilly one, and the dog should have a chef ’s hat.

“No, you don’t get it,” Helen had said when Alice tried to explain why the paintings disturbed her. “I don’t want to celebrate housework. I don’t want to make it pretty. If I put clothes on them, the paintings would become too cozy, too safe.”

Yet the baby duck was wearing a diaper, Alice noticed, although she didn’t point this out, for she knew her mother would say she was too literal. That was her mother’s primary complaint about Alice. She was too factual, too fond of numbers. “You’re a concrete thinker,” Helen had said once. Alice knew what this meant, more or less, but she couldn’t help imagining herself as a big blockhead, her head as square and hard as a rectangle of sidewalk.

“If you’re going to read the newspaper,” Helen said now, inspecting her sleeve for coffee stains, “you might consider the want ads. You’ve been home for more than two months and you still don’t have a job.”

“I’ve been going to places in person. I went to Westview Mall looking for a job. You told me I had to find a job, remember?”

“What kind of job were you looking for at Westview?”

“Clothing stores.”

“Those are hard to get.”

Hard for a fat girl, Alice thought, but said nothing.

“I don’t understand why you don’t try the fast-food places. There are a dozen of those places on Route 40 alone, and you could walk to most of them, or take the bus.”

“I said, I’m looking.”

“But they’re always hiring.”