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sigh and a quick glance at his watch, he followed her downstairs without argument. Argument was futile. Arguments were for people who could change their mind. The reality of his daughter Jelly was that her mind could not, would not, ever change.
    “I peg her IQ at about 50, maybe a little higher,” the old family doctor had told them. “You can look at her yourself and see that she’s totally vacant.”
    Walt had looked at his perfect little three-year-old with the big brown eyes and had not seen anything vacant about her. She was pretty and sweet and quiet. No, she was not like her sister, Andi. In that doctor’s office Andi would have been into everything. She was curious about everything, climbing everywhere, and nothing in the room would have been safe. Jelly sat there, perfectly dressed with a bow in her hair. She wouldn’t cause a problem for anybody.
    “We can’t always predict these outcomes. Adulthood is a long way off,” the doctor continued. “But I’d say you’ll be lucky if she’s self-feeding and potty trained.”
    He heard his wife, Ella, gasp. He glanced over at her. Her face was pale, stricken. All he could think to say was, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I asked you to marry me. I’m sorry I got you into this mess. But it was not something a husband could say. He kept silent.
    “It’s up to you, of course,” the doctor continued. “What I recommend, in cases like this, is to send them to a state institution. They usually don’t live all that long anyway and it’s harder if the family gets attached to them.”
    “We’re already attached to her,” Walt told the man. “We’re not sending her anywhere.”
    The doctor shrugged. “A lot of the new thinking is that they do better at home with their families. And the law saysnow that they can’t be kept out of public school. So if you want to take her home…well, just do the best you can.”
    And they had.
    Downstairs in the laundry room, Jelly set her basket of dirty clothes on the floor and immediately began sorting the whites and the colors.
    Walt opened the cabinet above the machine and retrieved a couple of plastic measuring cups and a bottle of detergent.
    “How many loads do you think you have?” he asked rhetorically.
    With a furrowed brow, Jelly assessed her laundry pile critically.
    “About twenty,” she answered.
    Walt glanced at her dirty clothes and set two measuring cups on the counter. “I think you can make it all fit in one load for whites and one for colors,” he said.
    “Okay,” Jelly agreed.
    Walt poured the correct amount of detergent in each cup. Jelly had real issues with portion. Whether it was overfilling the milk glass, permeating the house with perfume or having an inch of sugar in the bottom of a cup of tea. If some was good, more was better. Walt had mopped up the laundry room too many times to allow her to pour her own laundry soap.
    “One of these for each load,” he reminded her. “Just like on your chart.”
    The chart he indicated was a homemade poster attached to the front of the washing machine. It showed seven blocks of color, red, yellow, blue, green, orange and purple, lined up left to right. These were interspersed with stick pictures of washing fundamentals. The colors matched up to splashes ofthe same color on buttons, dials and doors of the washer and dryer. A big black arrow on the left indicated where to start. And sitting atop it was a brown-haired girl magnet, representing Jelly herself. Moving the magnet through the steps would keep Jelly on task.
    “Remember to look at your chart and follow your colors,” Walt told her.
    Jelly gave him a long-suffering look, more typically seen on the face of an average teenager.
    “I know how to do it, Pop,” she said. “I follow the chart. I don’t need your help.”
    “Okay,” he said. “Just concentrate on what you’re doing. I have to go out to an appointment. Andi will be back soon, but I don’t know exactly when.”
    Jelly