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    Things continued this way. Most afternoons Odessa would pick up the paper from the porch and ring Mrs. Grisham’s bell.
    “Why are you always talking to that old lady?” Oliver asked. “She’s weird.”
    “You’re weird,” Odessa snapped back. She gave him a shove in the direction of their house, as if she were urging him home rather than just enjoying the pure pleasure she got from shoving him.
    Odessa had never noticed Mrs. Grisham’s paper on her porch before, but one thing was certain: since that first day she’d delivered it, Mrs. Grisham never seemed to go out and get the paper for herself.
    During their afternoons Odessa tried out all of her theories about the house.
    She asked if magicians had built it.
    “No,” Mrs. Grisham answered.
    Odessa asked if it had been struck by lightning.
    “Nope,” Mrs. Grisham said.
    Odessa asked if, to the best of her knowledge, ghosts had ever been known to haunt her house.
    “Not to the best of my knowledge,” Mrs. Grisham sighed. She seemed to be growing tired of Odessa’s line of questioning. “Look, stop worrying about the house and just enjoy living there. Sometimes houses, like people, are peculiar. And sometimes they come along at just the right time. Now stop asking me so many questions. Do you want a cookie?”
    Of course Odessa wanted a cookie.
    So Mrs. Grisham started feeding Odessa homemade treats on her visits, and they sat in her front parlor, where she kept her enormous collection of owl figurines, and Odessa stopped asking questions. Instead she mostly talked about school, sometimes exaggerating details to make her stories more interesting.
    And then, one afternoon, when Odessa rang the bell with the paper tucked under her arm, Mrs. Grisham took even longer to get to the door than she had on that first afternoon. She opened it only halfway. She wore a long floral thing with buttons that must have been a bathrobe.
    A housecoat? A dressing gown?
    Odessa wasn’t sure what it was called, but she knew that even old women didn’t go out in public in something that looked like that.
    Mrs. Grisham managed a weak smile as she took hold of her paper.
    “Thank you, dear.”
    It was the first time she’d ever called Odessa anything.
    She started to close the door, without stepping outside for one of their chats and without offering any treats. Odessa grabbed the handle.
    “Um, are you okay?”
    “Yes. I’m fine. Just a little … oh, shall we say … blue. ”
    Odessa loved the word blue. It said so much more than sad or unhappy. It was a word you could see. A word that painted a picture.
    Odessa wasn’t used to grown-ups telling her how they felt, unless they were feeling fed up or out of patience.
    “Why are you blue?” she asked.
    “Well, it’s my birthday.”
    Her birthday? Birthdays were the happiest days of the year. Birthdays were the opposite of blue.
    “So why aren’t you … jovial ?”
    “Jovial?”
    “You know, happy.”
    Mrs. Grisham smiled, and that made Odessa feel a little jovial herself.
    “Oh, I suppose because when you get older, birthdays aren’t all clowns and carousels and cotton candy.”
    Odessa thought Mrs. Grisham was closer to describing a carnival than a birthday, but still, she appreciated all those hard- c words strung together one after the other.
    “Didn’t you get any good presents?” Odessa asked.
    Mrs. Grisham turned the newspaper over in her hands. “You brought me this,” she said. “That’s something.”
    “It’s not much of a present. I mean a real birthday gift, with paper and ribbons and everything.”

    “I’ve never been much for presents,” she said. “Mr. Grisham used to give me a bunch of orange dahlias every year on my birthday. That was the best.”
    “Dolleeyas?”
    “Yes, dahlias. My favorite flowers.”
    Odessa was about to ask what happened to Mr. Grisham and his dolleeyas, but then she stopped herself. She used logic like Benedict. Mrs. Grisham was blue . She didn’t