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from school?” Iris asked, at the breakfast table.
    Instead of answering, George got up and looked at the weather thermometer outside the west window of their bedroom. “Twenty-seven,” he said, when he came back. But he still didn’t answer her question. He was afraid to answer it, lest it be the wrong answer, and she blame him. Actually, there was no answer that was the right answer: They had tried sending Cindy to school and they had tried not sending her. This time, Iris kept her home from school — not because she thought it was going to make any difference but so the pediatrician, Dr. de Santillo, wouldn’t blame her. Not that he ever said anything. And Cindy got to play with Laurie’s things all morning. She played with Laurie’s paper dolls until she was tired, and left them all over the floor, and then she colored in Laurie’s coloring book, and Puppy chewed up one of the crayons but notone of Laurie’s favorites — not the pink or the blue — and then Cindy rearranged the furniture in Laurie’s doll house so it was much nicer, and then she lined up all Laurie’s dolls in a row on her bed and played school. And when it was time for Laurie to come home from school she went out to the kitchen and played with the eggbeater. Laurie came in, letting the front door slam behind her, and dropped her mittens in the hall and her coat on the living-room rug and her knitted cap on top of her coat, and started for her room, and it sounded as if she had hurt herself. Iris came running. What a noise Laurie made. And stamping her foot, Cindy noted disapprovingly. And tears.
    “Stop screaming and tell me what’s the matter!” Iris said.
    “Cindy, I hate you!” Laurie said. “I hate you, I hate you!”
    Horrible old Laurie …
    But in the morning when they first woke up it was different. She heard Laurie in the bathroom, and then she heard Laurie go back to her room. Lying in bed, Cindy couldn’t suck her thumb because she couldn’t breathe through her nose, so she got up and went into Laurie’s room (entirely forgetting that her mother had said that in the morning she was to stay out of Laurie’s room because she had a cold) and got in Laurie’s bed and said, “Read, read.” Laurie read her the story of “The Tinder Box,” which has three dogs in it — a dog with eyes as big as saucers, and a dog with eyes as big as millwheels, and a third dog with eyes as big as the Round Tower of Copenhagen.
    T AP , tap, tap
on the bedroom door brought him entirely awake. “What’s Laurie been reading to her?” he asked, turning over in bed. That meant it was Iris’s turn to get up. While she was pulling herself together, they heard
tap, tap, tap
again. The bed heaved.
    “What’s Laurie been reading to you?” she asked as she and Cindy went off down the hall together. When she came back into the bedroom, the light was on and he was standing in front of his dresser, with the top drawer open, searching for Gelusil tablets.
    “Trouble?” she said.
    S TANDING in the doorway of Cindy’s room, in her blue dressing gown, with her hairbrush in her hand, Iris said, “Who sneezed? Was that you, Cindy?”
    “That was Laurie,” Cindy said.
    So after that Laurie got to stay home from school too.
    “I SAW Phyllis Simpson in Gristede’s supermarket,” Iris said. “Their cook committed suicide.”
    “How?”
    “She threw herself in the river.”
    “No!”
    “They think she must have done it sometime during the night, but they don’t know exactly when. They just came down to breakfast and she wasn’t there. They’re still upset about it.”
    “When did it happen?”
    “About a month ago. Her body was found way down the river.”
    “What a pity. She was a nice woman.”
    “You remember her?”
    “Certainly. She always waved to the children when I used to walk them to school. She waved to me too, sometimes. From the kitchen window. What made her do such a thing?”
    “They have no idea.”
    “She was a big