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get back to Sammy’s house tonight.”
    Kendra’s grin lights up her face. Mari sees herself in that grin and is relieved to feel that connection. For a moment, she remembers the weight of a sleeping infant in her arms, the sweet smell of Kendra’s fuzzy baby head. Time is passing too fast. But isn’t that what time does?
    Mari makes pizza, anyway. She and Ethan eat it on the back deck. The cut on his foot left a scar, but he’s healed fast enough that he barely limps. She watches him build with Lego blocks as she flips through a parenting magazine she bought from the school fund-raising campaign. Nothing in it seems relevant to her, but she tries hard to pay attention to it, anyway. She pages past glossy photos of mothers and children posed around platters of decorated cupcakes, modeling hand-printed T-shirts. She skims the articles, skipping the words and phrases that give her trouble. She can read competently enough. It’s the lack of context that confuses her.
    When the fireflies come out to dot their tiny yellow brightness against the backdrop of night, Mari calls Ethan away from his toys and hands him an empty canning jar. Together they stalk the lightning bugs and capture them until the jar is full.
    “Hold it up,” she tells him. “Aren’t they lovely?”
    “We can’t keep them,” Ethan says solemnly. “Wild things deserve to be free. Don’t they, Mama?”
    “They do. But we can hold them for just a little while, right?”
    He laughs and holds up the jar. “Yep. Then we’ll let them go.”
    “Let’s have some ice cream.”
    “Hooray!” Ethan dances, forgetting that lovely wild things also don’t like to be shaken around in their glass houses. The bugs swirl and dip, falling off the jar’s slick insides.
    Mari takes it from him as he runs ahead of her into the house. She sets the jar on the deck railing as she goes inside to scoop large bowls of ice cream for them both. Whipped cream. Fudge sauce. She loves sweets, even if her teeth ache in memory of past indulgences. She should limit herself and, she supposes, Ethan, too, to one scoop. But she can’t help it. Even with the memory of thousands of dollars and dozens of hours of dental work to repair the damage done to her teeth through childhood neglect, Mari can’t resist.
    Ryan comes home as she and Ethan have settled into chairs on the deck. The sweep of headlights illuminate the backyard for a second as he pulls into the drive, then it’s all dark again except for the jar of tiny living lights. A square of light appears as he opens the door from the garage into the laundry room.
    “Hello?”
    “Out here!” Mari turns in her chair to greet him with a smile. “Want some ice cream?”
    “No, thanks.” He kisses her briefly and ruffles Ethan’s hair.
    “Dad, look at the fireflies.”
    “I see. Where’s Kiki?”
    “She went to Sammy’s. Her mom’s taking them to a movie. Then she’s sleeping over.”
    This is a normal conversation. Mother, father, son. Ice cream on a new summer night, fireflies in a jar. It could’ve come right out of the pages of a magazine. It’s everything she was taught to believe and want, right there in front of her. And she deserves this, doesn’t she? This normal life?
    “She’ll never be right, Leon. She’ll never be normal. You have to realize that. I know you want to keep working with her, but—” The woman in the sorrow suit shook her head.
    No, not sorrow. The color of her suit was called navy, and the skirt Mari wore was the same. She didn’t like this skirt. Too tight at the knees. It meant she couldn’t run. Couldn’t jump. Couldn’t crawl. Had to sit up straight like a good girl, a nice girl.
    Normal girl.
    * * *
    “Is it time for us to let them go, Mama?” Ethan, mouth smeared with chocolate, hair standing on end, holds up the jar.
    Inside it, fireflies wiggle and flash. They’re so pretty, all gathered there. Mari looks out to the yard, then beyond that to the fields just past the