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was going back to work soon? she asked.
    It’s too early, said Michael. She needs time.
    She’s not even doing anything, said Julie. She just sits back there. She just smokes cigarettes and watches TV. She always did, but she used to mix it up some, at least. She’d go rent movies, or go smoke on the porch, or just all kinds of things.
    She’s getting better, Michael said.
    He was looking at the window of the house when he said it, the long-dark and long-empty living room in the front where Julie and Tabitha had once tracked mud or sat on the couches reading the Childcraft encyclopedia and practicing the piano, badly. Julie knew he was looking at that window even with him standing behind her, the sourish smell of his breath a halo in the air.
    It’s just one kid dying, seriously, she said. She’s got a spare.
    Not if you’re not around, said Michael.
    So I’ll be around, said Julie.
    Michael put his hands on her shoulders to give her a push. His fingers touched her skin where Robbie’s mouth had been. She twisted away, hunched forward over her knees and her eyes lost in the grass.
    Stop it, she said.
    Stop what? Michael said. You’re a good kid; you both are.
    He went to his car and sat in the drivers’ seat. He was turning the FM dial; she knew it. She sat on the swing with the branch breaking above her until the sunlight on the yard faded to orange and the silhouettes of children rollerbladed across the asphalt.
    You both were , she hissed at him.
    She found a pack of bacon, foil-wrapped, at the back of the freezer, wilted broccoli, pasta shaped like Julie’s favorite cartoon cat from twelve years ago. She cooked it all up and grated cheddar cheese over it and mixed it up with olive oil and ketchup. She filled a brown glass bowl, set it on a tray stolen from a Luby’s, carried it before her down the hallway. Beneath her mother’s door the carpet pooled with blue cathode-ray light and the opening bars of The Eyes of Lucy Jordan .
    Mom, she called. Dinner.
    The bedsprings creaked. Linda’s lighter flicked three times from behind the door: quick-quick-slow.
    Dinner, Mom, she called.
    Could you leave it for me? croaked Linda.
    I’m going to leave it on the floor, said Julie. Is that all right?
    A flash of cheap burning paper; Skydancers again, as cheap a cigarette as you could get.
    Sure, honey, said Linda.
    Mom, said Julie. Is Mother’s Day coming up?
    No answer but another flick of the lighter.
    I don’t think so, ventured Linda.
    Because I want to get you something really nice, said Julie, ignoring her. Like a carton of Dunhills, or Djarums. I want to give your lungs a real treat, okay?
    Could you not be a bitch to me, honey? croaked Linda. Please?
    Okay, said Julie. Happy Mother’s Day, okay? If it’s coming up.
    No answer, again.
    She sat at the kitchen table and read the comics from the past three days and clipped Funky Winkerbean to paste in her composition book. She held up the newspaper with the rectangular hole in it up to her face, like a mask. The newsprint rubbed off on her cheeks. Then she got up and called Robbie’s house. There was no answer.
    I’m going out, she called to Linda, too quietly for Linda to hear.
    I went out , she wrote in black Sharpie on the cut-up newspaper. She left it on the kitchen table for herself to find tomorrow, in the morning.
    The campus drag: used CD bins, stained tables before fruit smoothie dens, plastic busts draped in burnt orange. Two bookstores, one failed, the other failing. On one end of the block, the Renaissance Market with its folding tables, its street musicians, its homemade pewter necklaces, its shriveled city trees in pinewood planters. On the other end of the block, the Institute of Temporal Illusions.
    The Institute was housed in a long, two-level storefront made of cheap white plaster. Green plants with broad leaves grew in faux terra cotta pots in front of its wide windows. From the shallow basement came the smell of fried pork vermicelli and