Mike started to protest, to tell Duane how he didn't understand half of what the bigger boy was talking about usually and read about one book a year, but he noticed that Duane was getting on his bus. Only it wasn't a bus, it was some sort of gigantic farm machine with windows on the side, a little wheelhouse on top like those Mike had seen in pictures of riverboats, and a paddle wheel on front made of what looked like revolving razor blades.

Duane leaned out one of the windows. "You're smart," he called down to Mike. "Smarter than you think. Plus you've got a real advantage."

"What's that?" shouted Mike, running to keep up with the bus/machine now. He couldn't tell which of the heads and waving arms belonged to Duane McBride.

"You're alive," came Duane's voice. The street was empty.

Mike woke up. He was still hot and he ached all over, but his pajamas and sheets were soaked through with sweat. It felt like early afternoon. Reflected sunlight and a slow stirring of air came through the screens. It must be a hundred degrees up here, even with the hall fan turning. Mike could hear his mother or one of his sisters vacuuming downstairs.

Mike was dying for a drink of water, but he felt too weak to get up right then and he knew they couldn't hear him downstairs over the sound of the Hoover. He contented himself with rolling closer to the window so a bit of breeze found him. He could see the grass on the front yard near the birdbath his grandfather had given them years before.

Ask Memo.

OK, as soon as he felt well enough to get into his jeans and get downstairs, he'd do it.

All the next day, Sunday the tenth, Harlen's ma was mad at him, as if he'd yelled at her instead of Barney and Dr. Staffney. The house was full of the kind of silent tension that Harlen remembered from the fights Ma and his dad used to have: an hour or two of yelling and three weeks of cold silence. Harlen didn't give a shit. If it'd keep her home, keep her between him and the face at the window, he'd call the constable over every other night to give her a good yelling-at.

"It's not as if 1 abandon you," she'd snapped at him when he was heating some soup for his lunch. It was the first time she'd spoken to him all day. "God knows I spend enough hours working my fingers to the bone taking care of you, taking care of the house ..."

Harlen glanced toward the living room. The only empty surfaces were the ones he or the two men had cleared off the night before. Barney had washed the dishes the night before and the clean counter looked alien to Harlen.

"Don't you dare take that tone with me, young man," Ma snapped.

Harlen stared at her. He hadn't said a word.

"You know what I mean. These two . . . intruders . . . come in here and presume to lecture me on watching out for my child. Reckless abandonment he calls it." Her voice was shaking. She paused to light a cigarette and her hands were shaking as well. She fanned the match out, exhaled smoke, and stood tapping her lacquered nails on the counter. Harlen stared at the ring of lipstick on the cigarette. He hated; that-the lipstick on cigarette butts around the house-more than anything else. It drove him crazy and he had no idea why.

"After all," she continued, in control of her voice now,"you are eleven years old. Almost a young man. Why, when I was eleven, I was taking care of three younger children in the family and working part time at the One-Fifty-One Diner over in Princeville."

Harlen nodded. He'd heard the story.

His mother inhaled smoke, and turned away, the fingers of her left hand still tapping out a fast tattoo on the counter, the cigarette jutting aggressively in the other hand the way only women held it. "The nerve of those idiots."

Harlen poured his tomato soup into a bowl, found a spoon, and hunkered over it, letting it cool. "Ma, they were only here because that crazy lady was in the house. They were worried she'd come back."

She did not turn back toward him. Her back had the same rigid look he'd seen turned toward his father so many times.

He tried the soup. It was too hot. "Really, Ma," he said. "They didn't mean anything. They only . . ."

"Don't tell me what they meant, James Richard," she snapped, finally turning toward him, one arm crossed in front of her, the other arm vertical, smoke still rising. "I understand an insult when I hear it. What they didn't understand is that you almost certainly imagined seeing someone through the window. They didn't understand that Doctor Armitage at the hospital said that you had a very serious blow to the head ... a subdural hemmy . . . hemo ..."

"Subdural hematoma," said Harlen. The soup was cool enough now.

"A very serious concussion,'' she finished and took a drag. "Dr. Armitage warned me that you might experience some whatchamacallims . . . hallucinations. I mean, it's not as if you saw somebody you knew, right? Somebody real?"

There are real people in the world who I don't know, Harlen was tempted to reply. He didn't. One day of this cold shoulder was enough. "Uh-uh," he said.

Ma nodded as if the point was made. She turned to stare out the kitchen window as she finished her cigarette. "I'd like to know where those high and mighty gentlemen were when I was spending twenty-four hours a day at your bedside at the hospital," she muttered.

Harlen concentrated on finishing his soup. He went to the fridge but the only milk carton had been there a long, long time and he had no intention of opening it. He filled a jelly glass with water from the tap. "You're right, Ma. But I was glad to see you when you came home."

The sudden rigidness of her back told him not to pursue that topic. "Weren't you going over to Adelle's Salon today to get your hair done?"

"If I do, I suppose you'll have that cop back here filing charges that I'm an unfit mother,'' she said, her voice carrying a freight of sarcasm he hadn't heard since Dad left. The smoke rose above her stack of dark hair and caught the sunlight in a pale halo.

"Ma," he said, "it's daytime. I'm not afraid of anything in the daytime. She's not gonna come back in the daytime." Actually, Harlen knew that only the first of those three statements was definitely true. The second was a lie. The third ... he didn't know.

Ma touched her hair, stubbed the cigarette out in the sink. "All right. I'll be back in about an hour, maybe a little more. You got Adelle's number."

"Yeah."

He rinsed the soup bowl out and stacked it with the breakfast dishes. The Nash made its usual loud noises as it disappeared down Depot Street. Harlen waited two more minutes-Ma often forgot something and came rushing back in hunting for it-but when it was certain that she was gone, he went slowly upstairs, into her room. His heart was beating like crazy.

That morning, while Ma was sleeping, he'd rinsed the sheets and pillowcases out in the tub, then thrown them onto the washing machine in the utility room. The pajamas he'd tossed into the garbage can along the side of the garbage. No way was he going to sleep in those again.

Now he went through his Ma's dresser drawers, poking under the silken underwear, feeling an excitement like the first time he'd bought one of those magazines from C. J. and brought it home. It was hot in the room. The thick sunlight lay over the tangled sheets and spread of Ma's bed; he could; smell her perfume thick and heavy. The Sunday papers lay scattered where she'd left them on the bed.

The gun wasn't in the dresser. Harlen checked in the nightstand next to her bed, shoving aside the empty cigarette packs and an almost-full package of Trojans. Rings, ballpoint pens that didn't work, matches from different supper clubs and nightclubs, pieces of paper and napkins with guys' names scribbled on them, some sort of mechanical muscle-relaxer thing, a paperback. No gun.