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it.
             
    April 25
    I chickened out.
             
    April 26
    I did it. (With a fresh donut.)
             
    April 27
    I went to the cemetery this afternoon. It was a warm, beautiful day. Balmy. He wore a gray sweater. The red and yellow plaid scarf was draped over the back of his chair.
    I circled around behind him. I kept my distance. I didn’t see the white bag.
He took it!
I thought, thrilled. Then I saw the bag, a few grave sites away. It didn’t look like it had been opened. Lurched up against a tombstone, as if he had angrily flung it there. Maybe even kicked it.
    I am a meddling, nosy, interfering, inconsiderate, intruding busybody.
             
    April 30
    I tried again.
             
    May 1
    Same story. This time he kicked it farther. Should I give up?
             
    May 4
    Dootsie and I touch little fingers—our secret sign of affection. Like you and I used to do. And I sadly think of what Archie says, that the sounds of extinct birds may be preserved in the songs of mockingbirds.
             
    May 19
    Dogwood Festival!
    It’s been going on since Monday, but today, Saturday, is the big day.
    First the parade. People lining Main Street from downtown to Bemus Park. Bands. Fire engines. Dance academies. Little Leaguers. Clowns on unicycles. Politicians flinging candy from convertibles. The Dogwood Queen and her Court. The Grand Marshal was a TV weather lady.
    Dootsie was all over the candy, a great white shark among guppies. Every time a three-year-old reached for a piece, Dootsie snatched it. She was stuffing them in her pockets, her mouth. When she stuck a mini Tootsie Roll up her nose, I drew the line. I yanked her out of the gutter, pulled the Tootsie Roll from her nose, squeezed her shoulders. “Dootsie, you’re being a piggy and a bully. You’re undoing all the nice things you did on April Fools’ Day.” She glared at me. She unwrapped a Mary Jane and popped it in her mouth. And spent the rest of the parade giving her candy away to three-year-olds.
    Bemus Park was mobbed. Food stands sold everything from cotton candy and shish kebabs to funnel cakes and pierogies—and of course Margie’s donuts. You could pitch pennies to win a goldfish or find your future in the fortune-teller’s tent. There were rides for the little kids and a haunted house and open mike all day at the band shell.
    Herds of teenagers roamed everywhere. I’ve never seen so many lip rings and purple hair spikes. To Dootsie it was a zoo. She kept tugging at me and whispering: “Look!…
Look!
”
    At one point I happened to be looking at a food stand selling cotton candy and caramel apples when I saw the boy—the face in the Dumpster, the boy on Betty Lou’s porch. Someone had just paid for something and the clerk had turned away to get change when the boy veered to the stand, reached out, plucked a caramel apple from the counter, and breezed on his way.
    I started to pull Dootsie along after him—I don’t know what I had in mind—but we didn’t get far because just then I heard a horrific shriek, and people were turning and running. Kid voices yelled, “Fight!” It was nearby, in front of the Rotary Club hot dog stand. Two kids were on the ground. The one on top was pummeling the one beneath, pounding fist on face. I was paralyzed. I can’t remember ever seeing a real fight before. Until that moment, for me, one person striking another was something in books and movies. History. But history never made me queasy. All this happened in a few seconds, then two men were hauling the kids off the ground and pulling them apart even as they continued to flail at each other.
    One was a boy, the one on the bottom. Blond. The other was Alvina. The boy’s face was bloody from the nose down. There was even a streak of blood in his blond hair. I couldn’t be sure, but he might have been one of the three boys at the donut shop that day. He was spluttering bloody noises at Alvina, who