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I told him, “I don’t want Logan to think we expect him to act like those boys.” I reached for his hand before continuing. “If we tell Logan we want him to blend, he’ll still get his ass kicked, only this time, it’ll be us doing it.”
    “Don’t be so dramatic, Lisa. That boy needs to learn how to fight. Once the other kids see they can’t push him around, they’ll back off. That’s how it works.”
    “Why does he have to change?” I protested. “They’re the ones with the problem.”
    “Fine,” Jason snapped. “I’ll take Logan to Dempsey’s Gym and you go to McDoyle’s house and do some little sensitivity workshop with the boys. Good luck with that.”

Chapter Four
    September
    By the middle of the month, the house looked almost lived in. The furniture was in place, paintings hung on the walls and my favorite pieces were displayed. What looked so cute and funky in our place in San Francisco was dwarfed in our Utopian home, though. The shabby chic couch and love seats covered with multi-colored knotty silk ribbon looked like doll furniture in our cavernous family room. End tables looked like thread spools. Paintings that had been real attention-grabbers in the old place looked like postage stamps on an oversized package. The only thing that seemed to fill the new space well was the six-foot sculpture of a butler that stood on the foyer. Junky Jeeves’ head was made from a car differential with eyes I made from small medical lamps. Finding scrap metal for his eyelids was easy, but wiring the eyeballs to light up was tougher. I placed a row of screws over our butler’s eyes which gave him stern looking brows, then used a small circuit board from an old computer as his mouth. What I loved was that the outside circuits were red and the rest was white so it looked like lips surrounding teeth. I made his body from the usual car parts, compressed springboards and miscellaneous scrap metal.
    As I stood in the family room assessing its look, Logan came to my side and read my thoughts. “Our stuff doesn’t work here.”
    “We’ll make it work,” I assured him.
    Jason and Maya sat in front of our new television, which fit the room quite well since we bought it for the house. It was nearly a movie theater-size flat screen. Jason hooked up surround-sound so loud that we could feel the room shake during movies. If we ever rented Jurassic Park or Night at the Museum, we’d surely lose a few glasses.
    Logan surveyed the room and shook his head with dismay. “Nothing fits right, Mom.”
    “We’ll get some trees and more chairs and fill the space up.”
    “That’s not going to work,” he said.
    Maya and Jason burst into laughter over something on the television. Didn’t they notice how strange our home looked? Didn’t it bother them?
    “We need new furniture for this space,” he said, scanning the room again.
    “I know,” I said, placing a comforting hand on his shoulder. “I promise you, Logan, we’ll make this place feel like home.”
    Logan used his hands to create a frame and held it over the fireplace. “What do you think of something cozy like Grandma Zoë’s hexagon quilt?”
    Ah yes, the acid trip quilt, as my father called it, because my mother sewed the entire thing by hand while on one very long LSD trip. According to who you believed, it took anywhere from six days to six months to make it. I’ll give her this: She didn’t miss a stitch and it is unique . At first glance it simply looks like a random pattern of colorful patches, but if you stare at it for a while it becomes Madonna and Child. Not Mary and Jesus, but the Material Girl and Baby Lourdes as they appeared on the cover of Vanity Fair .
    Returning to Logan, I asked, “Not a mirror? I always like mirrors over a mantle.”
    “For what, to open up the room?” Logan snorted. “Please, we need to soften the space, not make it look even bigger.”
    I stood back and absorbed what he was saying. “Maybe you’re