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father. I call him Joe because I don’t want him to die.” She slurped her chocolate loudly, but Ms. Holben didn’t seem to mind. “Lisa died,” she added. She looked down at the mug of chocolate, losing herself for a moment in the Blue Willow pattern on the sides, imagining herself with Koong-Shee and Chang escaping over the little bridge as she braced herself for the question she knew would follow.
    “Lisa is your mother?”
    She avoided Ms. Holben’s eyes. “I don’t have a mother . . . Do you know the story of the Blue Willow on the mug and the plate?”
    “No. Tell me.”
    Fritz glanced at her to see if she meant it. She shouldn’t have said why she had to call Joe by his name. It was a secret, the kind of secret that made grown-ups upset, and she had never told anybody. She just couldn’t be sure about grown-ups. Sometimes she sensed that they wanted her to talk because they felt sorry for her—because she was a motherless child, not because they wanted to listen. And sometimes they wanted to talk so that they could really find out something else. Like Aunt Margaret asking her about school and Della and Charlie when she really wanted to know about Joe and Brenda. She had seen Aunt Margaret kiss Joe one time in the kitchen, kiss him hard while she hung on to him as if she thought he’d run away. And Joe did want to run away. He kept turning his face and trying to pull Aunt Margaret’s arms from around his neck. And he kept saying, “For God’s sake, Maggie, don’t! Michael’s my brother!”
    But Ms. Holben was listening—as if she knew Fritz had just told her something she hadn’t meant to tell.
    Fritz moved the cookies off the plate and pointed to the people on the bridge. “This is Koong-Shee here in front with a staff. This one in the middle is her true love, Chang,” she recited solemnly.
    “And who’s this?” Ms. Holben said, pointing to the third figure. Her fingers were long and her fingernails short and polished with clear polish. Fritz liked fingernails like hers, like a mother’s when she wanted to be special and not every day, like the mothers who came to the Parents’ Tea at the Catholic school. She didn’t like fingernails long and painted shiny red like Aunt Margaret’s. She liked shiny red just on cars and trucks.
    “That’s Koong-Shee’s father. He’s carrying a whip because he’s mad.”
    “Why is he mad?”
    “Because Koong-Shee is running away with Chang. Chang is her father’s secretary. He’s very poor, and her father wants her to marry another man—a rich man.”
    “Does she?”
    “No, she escapes with Chang. They go and live in the little house there across the lake, and for a while they’re very happy.” Fritz hesitated, thinking of Lisa and Joe. They hadn’t been happy for very long, either.
    “Then what happened?” Ms. Holben asked quietly, as if she knew something bad was coming.
    “The rich man was very angry when he couldn’t marry Koong-Shee. He set fire to the little house across the lake. And they died.” She gave a soft sigh. “The end.” She looked at Ms. Holben. Ms. Holben was looking at the plate.
    “No, I don’t think that’s the end,” she said. “See here? These two birds flying high over the lake? I think those are Koong-Shee’s and Chang’s souls. I think they’re changed now, but they’re still happy and they’re free.”
    Fritz looked at the birds again. “That’s not what the lady in the China Room at the museum said.”
    “Maybe she didn’t know that part of it.”
    Fritz looked at the birds again. Maybe she didn’t. And it made sense. Why else were those two big birds there?
    “I’ll have to think about it,” Fritz said, and Ms. Holben smiled. “While you’re thinking, maybe you’d better tell me how much trouble you’re in.”
    She looked at Ms. Holben guiltily, but she didn’t answer.
    “Does Joe know you’re here?”
    “No.”
    “Don’t you think you ought to tell him?”
    “He’s working