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stay inside the lines. Joe asked if she didn’t want to draw her own pictures—I knew he was trying to encourage her to be more creative, and not just fill in what somebody else had put on the page—but Dawn said no, she liked it when the picture was already there. This was okay in kindergarten, of course. But as she grew older, the other kids began to whisper and laugh. The same teacher who’d told us she thought Dawn needed an eye exam also said to me that maybe we should have her “see someone,” though she didn’t elaborate on what kind of “someone” she had in mind. “It just seems like there’s something missing,” she said, and my stomach fell to exactly the same spot it had when, years earlier, I overheard Peter Cifforelli ask Joe if he was sure I was “enough.”
    Whatever kept me from telling Joe about the dog poop kept me from telling him what the teacher said, too.
    By the time she was in middle school, she was begging me every day to pick her up from school instead of making her take the bus home, because that was when the teasing, led by Emmett Furth, was the worst.
    But I couldn’t pick her up, because of my job. Besides, Joe would have said I was giving in to the bullies. He would have been right, but I still wished I could do it to save Dawn that heartache.
    So because I felt guilty, and because I knew how much she’d had her heart set on the surgery she thought would cure her of being different, I took her out for ice cream. The trips were our secret, because Joe didn’t like the girls eating too much sugar. When Dawn started to gain weight in eighth grade and Joe asked me why I thought that was, I pretended not to have any idea. But to Dawn I said that maybe we should cut down on the Lickety Split visits, which had started to make my waistbands tight, too. That was when she came up with the idea of getting a dog, and Abby replaced Sonic Sundaes as her primary comfort.
    At the mall, after leaving the ice-cream store, I found myself in front of the display window at Sports Authority. I must have been standing there for a few minutes without realizing, because I’m a slow eater, and my cone was almost gone. I went inside and browsed through a rack of sale jerseys: Rodriguez, Jeter, Canó. When the college-age salesman asked if he could help me, I pulled my hair over my bad eye and said no, I wasn’t looking for anything in particular.
    I walked toward the back of the store, ignoring the colorful croquet sets— FUN FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY ! —and picked up a baseball bat, which I carried to the counter. “For my granddaughter,” I told the salesman, though of course he had not asked me who the bat was for.
    “How old is she?”
    “Two and a half.”
    He smiled. “This one might be a little big, then.”
    “That’s okay. She’ll grow into it.” I signed the receipt quickly, then turned to leave; he had to call me back to hand me the bag with the bat sticking out. Immediately I felt silly about the purchase, but I didn’t have what it took to say I’d changed my mind.
    As I left the store, I thought I felt someone watching me, and turned to see a young man who looked to be about college age, though his face was so vacant he did not fit my idea of a college student. He stood to the side of the store, slurping soda through a straw from a cup the size of a bucket. He was on the short side, and thin, with reddish hair that curled down around his neck. It would have looked pretty on a girl, I thought, but it only made him appear sloppy, as did the low-slung jeans he wore with a chain hanging from the belt loops across the front. His untucked tee-shirt displayed a cartoon of a joint-smoking Cat in the Hat.
    When he caught me looking back at him, he seemed to choke a little on his drink. I told myself I was just being paranoid. I reminded myself that people often stared at me because of my mangled face. This felt like more than that, but I decided to put it out of my mind. When he turned and