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and a bag of groceries scattered on the ground. “Oh jeez,” I said, “let me help you,” and bent down to grab a can of chicken noodle soup.
    “Could you just take him?” she said, and without waiting for an answer she thrust the baby at me.
    “Sure,” I said, but he was already in my arms. He was heavier thanI expected, and I slid both arms under his padded butt. “Hi, there,” I said. “Hi, little baby.” The other two were screaming so loudly that no one would hear a thing I said, except for the baby, Zack, himself. Who wouldn’t tell.
    I hadn’t held a lot of babies but whenever I did I thought of Nicky, still a vivid physical memory—he’d been a trusting, soft-spined lump on my hip, requiring two arms. I remembered that. And always the smile of joy, as though he’d been waiting for me. How when I took him the responsibility was suddenly fierce: he made no babyish efforts to disguise his dependence. And why would he?
    But this little Zack was erect as a soldier, using me as support, not comfort. He regarded me with great seriousness. “Hey, Zackie,” I said. “You’re an independent soul. Where’d you come from, anyway?”
    I was remembering how it was with babies. That you could look and look at them with abandon, and they wouldn’t object; that they had no personal space; that they literally didn’t know where they ended and the rest of the world began. Even with my face so close to his I was not another person, but a small moving piece of the vast world. A baby could not be offended.
    Baby Zack’s skin was light caramel, his lashes ridiculously long. His eyes were a greenish hazel, baby clear, clear as water. “You’re a handsome dude,” I said, and those eyes, which had been wide and blank as clean plates, suddenly crinkled into a smile. In his mouth I saw two snow-white dots of teeth. Drool glistened on the curve of his bottom lip and then dropped in a long string onto my shirt. “Buddy,” I said. “That’s gross.”
    I made a face at him, which apparently was hilarious, because he laughed, and his laugh, too, was like water.
    When I had to give him back my arms felt abruptly light, as if they’d rise into the air on their own with his weight gone. “You’re a lifesaver, Charlie,” Angela said. “He took to you. He never does that. Watch out, maybe he imprinted.”
    “No problem,” I said. “That would be nice.”
    I went into my apartment. It was dim and quiet. I felt content to be alone again. Then I heard the little thumping footfalls above my head, the rising high voices, and unaccountably I was glad of those too.

Four
    May Bankhead started at Abbott my second year there. I was still teaching freshmen, but she wasn’t in my section. The following year I taught sophomores, and she was. She hadn’t changed much, had only grown taller, but she usually slouched, her slender body almost comically neurasthenic. Sometimes she walked with her long hair hiding her face. But at other times she would stand up and push the hair away, and in those moments she was one of the changelings, she was becoming.
    In class, she was quiet, but when she spoke she was direct and didn’t suffer fools gladly. Occasionally I saw Florence in her, and was sorry.
    Sometime during the summer before May’s senior year, Florence moved out. The whole thing happened quietly. She moved to a house in Amherst, a half hour away, but May stayed with Preston, and eventually Florence went back to Savannah, where she’d been born and all her family still was. It was said she had a boyfriend there, a childhood sweetheart who’d been carrying the torch all this time. I don’t know where that story came from.
    That fall, May was in my senior seminar. The first week, after class, I asked how she was doing. I wanted to let her know I knew, that we could be honest.
    “I’m fine,” she said. Her eyes beetled at me—cold, then abruptly warm: Preston’s trick, which she had inherited, or learned. She tossedher