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the whole story like a battlefield account to anyone who might want to listen, what he felt, what he remembered, how many stitches, how much blood, how his mother threw up three times while he was being stitched. She focused on the sun setting over the pines and she listened to the whir of the inground sprinklers of the hospital lawn, how they arced a fine misted spray in near silence and then returned with a harsh low grinding sound only to then release and once again go easy. Soft and then harsh and then again and again.
    “Do you have a door like my mama?” Now the child pressed on Rose’s stomach and then with no warning lifted her shirt and pressed that damp sticky hand against Rose’s flesh. “I needed the front door to get out. Right here near your winkie.”
    “That’s a navel.”
    “It’s a winkie.”
    “There’s no such thing as a winkie.”
    “Yeah there is, too.” She pulled up her own shirt and stuck her finger in her navel. “This is my winkie and that,” she reached one finger and poked at Rose, “is your winkie.” The child put her hands on her hips and twisted back and forth, made little nananananana sounds. “And you don’t even have a front door.”
    “No I don’t.”
    “My daddy said I was important.” The child spit the word at Rose, a black permanent marker clutched in her hand. “I got my own door just for me .”
    “Well, good for you.”
    “So how did my daddy get out then?”
    “Lord.” Rose pulled away and walked over to the window hoping to see Hank’s truck in the drive. “Who’s minding the shop?” he used to ask in those early years when something went wrong —a pot of rice burned and stuck, a bill forgotten, a bag of trash left where a dog could get in it. But he hadn’t used the phrase since that day Drew got hurt when she used it to berate herself again and again. And now it seemed he was overprotective about all their belongings to a degree that preoccupied his every moment. He couldn’t bear to lose anything, not an old mangy barn cat, or a plant to the cold, not a dime on the floor. Nothing made him angrier than to lose his train of thought.
    “My daddy probably come out the back door,” the child said.
    “ Came out the back door,” Rose corrected, horrified that she was even participating in this discussion.
    “Women have three different doors, you know.” The child waited, testing her. The marker was now uncapped, strong fumes that probably weren’t good for a child to breathe all day long.
    “Why don’t you go see what’s on television?” Rose asked, desperate to escape. Hank had promised the child monkey bread and he would be disappointed if Rose didn’t fix it. “I’ll get you a snack.”
    “I drew a picture of your door,” she said and rifled through that stack of messy papers. “Grown-ups have hair, you know.” She pulled out a page and Rose stared back in shock. A tangle of purple atop two orange stick legs, legs too thin to ever support the enormous mouth and breasts that filled most of the page. “I drew your fanny, too.”
    Rose turned back to the window, wondering what Hank would do with this. She thought of the way he cradled and carried Drew in from the car that day after the accident. He placed him on the sofa in the den and they brought him milk shakes and cookies and comic books. He wanted Kentucky Fried Chicken for dinner and she drove across town herself and waited in line, noticing only then in a warped chrome reflection that her sneakers were all bloodstained and that mascara streaks smeared her cheeks like war paint. She tried to change the bandage the first timeand got so lightheaded she had to call Hank to help her. The long scar stayed white, so noticeable in the summer against his olive skin and the dark hairs of his legs. Drew loved to roll up his pants and show it, to tell the story, Rose wincing every time.
    “Do you have a boo-boo place?” the child asked, and Rose shook her head, thinking, Not really, not