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good way for me to feel. In my seventh month I wrote two hundred words about various little pregnancy humiliations, hormonal imbalances, my appalling increase in sentimentality, a sudden fondness for Hallmark cards and cows. I sent it to the Connecticut Star. The features editor liked it and invited me to write another. The "Agitated Observer" was born.
    "I'm going to start charging you if you don't watch it," Becky said.
    She had, in fact, been the inspiration for the piece coming out in the paper that afternoon.
    "So," she said, "how's Elijah?"
    "Doctor says he has to have heart surgery." In addition to his many other physical and developmental problems, Elijah had a small hole in his heart. We'd known surgery was coming, but just last week we'd gotten the news that the doctor wanted to do it soon.
    "God, I'm sorry," Becky said.
    "He says it's not that big a deal. They make this kind of repair all the time."
    "It'd be a big deal if it were his child."
    She had a point. "I feel like the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dike. Every time we plug one leak, another spurts. That poor kid has more specialists than a barrel of eighty-year-olds."
    "Maybe so, but you're amazing about it, Dinah. Really."
    "You just do what you have to do, right? He is frustrated, though. Me too. I just wish I knew how to help him. At least the tantrums have eased up, and he's been doing a little better in school lately, but when they do circle time, he still wanders over to the window. They paste pictures, he's at the sandbox. He needs so much one-on-one help. I suppose all the kids in the class do. I guess I should be grateful he can walk in the first place. Three of the kids in that class are in wheelchairs."
    Her son Brian and Elijah were the same age, but Elijah was in special ed, and his class was full of children with handicaps, most far more devastating than his collection of relatively minor physical ailments and developmental disorders.
    She nodded, touched my hand. "As I said, you're amazing."
    "Thanks," I said. "Now, of course, my mother doesn't think so. Good old Charlotte. She's been campaigning for some special school she knows about out on Long Island. They're the only ones who know how to work with kids like him."
    Becky laughed. "I doubt there are many kids like him. Elijah is unique."
    "That he is," I said. "Even if he won't be a rocket scientist."
    I would never have made such a comment to anyone other than Sam except Becky. I was much too defensive. But she'd been incredibly supportive, right from the beginning, and it had been pretty obvious almost immediately that Elijah had a lot of problems. He didn't roll over until he was almost seven months old, didn't sit up until he was ten months old, then sat there unmoving like a little frustrated Buddha for months, screaming. He never crawled, didn't walk until two and a half. Now he was five, and although he could walk and run, if a little awkwardly, his vocabulary was limited, and it was unclear just how much he could learn, how far he would go, and whether he'd need supervision and support the rest of his life. The future was a great big question mark.
    "What the world needs is more cuties like Elijah," Becky said. "And fewer rocket scientists."
    I smiled. "Thanks, Beck. Would you please inform my mother?"
    After lunch we walked back over to Henry Lehr. The dress was a slip of a thing, with spaghetti straps.
    "You could carry it off with those long legs," I said.
    "How much could it be?" she said. "Three hundred?"
    "You wish."
    "Dinah?"
    I turned. Ellen Shoenfeld was standing there, wearing her tweed coat. Underneath she probably had on one of her tweed suits, too; she always dressed formally, with stockings and heels.
    "How are you, Mrs. Shoenfeld?"
    "Very fine." She snapped the words; her accent is heavy, German.
    "This is my friend Becky Sullivan. Ellen Shoenfeld. Mrs. Shoenfeld is in my writing class at the Jewish Community Center." She was the only person in the class I