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doctor. Bubber was with the nanny and the minivan was being towed. Everything was being looked after. Did she want an ambulance, after all? No, she did not. Les Weathers had volunteered to take her away to the doctor, and then they were gone. The neighborhood had closed over her bald head the way water in a lake closes over a rock that’s thrown into it. People did what they knew how to do. When all the arrangements had been made, the bald head that had been sitting on the neck of Sunny Mann would not be visible to anyone anymore.
    They could try to remember her the way she used to be, when she set the dates for holiday-themed outdoor-decor installation and removal. No Christmas before Thanksgiving. No Halloween after November 2. No Fourth of July until July. All very reasonable. The neighbors wondered if the astronaut husband would still coach the Lego League. They wondered if the Christmas party was still on. The phone tree. The craft swap. Everything. How could they ask her if she was okay? There is a terrible awkwardness to talking to someone who is wearing an obvious wig, when you have no idea why. Did they feel stupid? Betrayed? Or did they just feel frustrated that they couldn’t go on treating her as a close personal friend?
    “So,” said Les Weathers, “how long have you been bald?”
    “My whole life,” said Sunny.
    “Does Maxon know?” he asked. His hand moved from the steering wheel down to his knee, and then back up to the steering wheel. Then he fiddled with the gearshift.
    “Of course Maxon knows,” she said.
    “What about Bubber?” asked Les Weathers.
    “What about him?”
    “Does he know?”
    *   *   *
     
    A FEW WEEKS AGO, the family had been getting ready for lunch in the kitchen. Bubber sat at his miniature table. Sunny had pulled out the silverware drawer for him and he was playing with spoons and stacking them up with one fork between each one. Maxon stood there explaining gravity to Bubber by dropping things on the ground. Bubber stared at his forks and spoons. He always would stare at something unrelated, when he was being told something. The therapists told his parents that he could still use his peripheral vision. Maxon held a pencil up in the air and then let it fall from his bony fingers.
    “Can you tell me what gravity is?” he asked Bubber.
    “Hot,” said Bubber. “Gravity is hot.”
    Sunny giggled behind the refrigerator door, where she was getting lettuce for a sandwich. Maxon said, “Gravity is a force that every object has; all mass has gravity.”
    “It’s an attraction,” Sunny put in. “Heat is hot. Gravity is an attraction.”
    “When something has gravity,” Maxon went on, “it makes other things come toward it, and the bigger the thing is, the more gravity it has, and the more things come toward it.”
    Bubber opened his mouth and then closed it. He began to disassemble his spoon and fork tower. Then he quickly said, “Jupiter has the biggest gravity. Jupiter is the biggest planet. It is a gas giant. Jupiter has the mass of three hundred Earths and a volume of more than a thousand Earths.”
    “Even Mommy has gravity,” Maxon continued. “See?”
    The dog, Rocks, walked toward Sunny, sniffing for food.
    “Look, I’m pulling Rocks over here to me with my gravity,” said Sunny. She picked up the dog and stuck him to her pregnant tummy.
    “Mommy is Jupiter,” said Bubber without looking at her.
    “I’m not Jupiter. Why do I have to be Jupiter? Why can’t I be something cute like Venus?”
    “Uh-oh.” Maxon jerked himself across the floor, pretended to be yanked suddenly toward Sunny. “I think Venus’s gravitational field is getting me too.”
    Sunny and Maxon jutted together and began to rotate on the axis of her belly with the dog mashed between them, like two tall people dancing drunk. They careened into the front room, crashed into a chair, and started laughing. Now Bubber was out of his chair and coming toward them.
    “Bubber, no! Save