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wasn’t clear on what it was like to ask for it. I had learned at my mother’s knee that help was for the weak—and how vitally important it was to stay strong at all times, even when the earth was crumbling beneath your feet. Atyour husband’s funeral, for example. With your two-year-old in your arms.
    Even my mother had marveled at the way I held that stoic smile on my face as friend after friend of Danny’s dissolved into tears.
    “He was a good guy, Libby,” one after another said, their faces collapsing. Then we’d hug, and somehow I found myself patting their shoulders instead of the other way around. Only later—kids asleep, dishes done, laundry folded—did I lose it. Only when there was absolutely no one around to offer any comfort. A fact that might have made a good topic for therapy, if I believed in that sort of thing.
    I smiled at Jean. My aunt: therapist and goat lady. How was it possible she and the woman who raised me shared any genes at all?
    “You must be good at keeping secrets,” I said at last.
    “Honey,” she said, putting her arm around my shoulders for a quick squeeze, “I’m a vault.”
    Before bedtime that night, Jean bathed the kids in the claw-foot tub.
    As Abby started to undress, I realized that I hadn’t warned Jean about the scar down the side of Abby’s leg from the accident. It was about ten inches long and still pink, and I worried that Jean might gasp at the sight. But I underestimated her.
    “Cool scar,” Jean said as Abby wriggled out of her leggings.
    “Thanks,” Abby said.
    “I’ve got a scar, too,” Tank said then, pointing to the spot on his chin where he’d once hit the sidewalk.
    “I’ve got one myself,” Jean said as the kids stepped into thebathwater. “Though it’s not as impressive.” She pulled up her sleeve to show them the dot from her smallpox vaccination.
    “It looks like the moon when it’s full,” Tank said.
    “Mine looks like a river on a map,” Abby said.
    Jean nodded. “It sure does. Like the mighty Mississippi.”
    Eavesdropping a little, I bustled in the kids’ room, unpacking their PJs, their favorite books, and framed family photos. Every single time my mother and I had moved when I was growing up—once a year, at least—my first order of business was to make things homey. Just the way hiding under the bed on moving day was always my last.
    Jean’s place didn’t need much work to feel homey, but I needed to go through the motions. I set out stuffed animals. I fluffed pillows. I inspected the room for deadly spiders. I sized up the width between the iron bars on the headboard to decide if I needed to worry about broken necks. And then, at last, I borrowed a piece of wire to fasten shut the dormer window in case one of my kids might suddenly take up sleepwalking, climb out the window, and plunge to his or her death.
    Jean obliged me without comment, but I couldn’t help but defend myself in my head. These things happened all the time. Mothers heard these stories constantly: normal, likable, unsuspecting parents who just went to answer the telephone and came back to find their children killed in unimaginable ways.
    I knew the kids had been safer in my mother’s beige condo in the middle of the city, from which dangers like rattlesnakes had long been purged. If I dragged my children out to the country and one of them got, say, eaten by a bear, I’d have no one to blame but myself.
    Did they even have bears in central Texas? I’d have to Google that later.
    By the end of the kids’ bath, it was already an hour past bedtime. We skipped toothbrushing, and even skipped the vitamin E that we always rubbed on Abby’s scar at tuck-in time. I was ready for the day to be over. The kids had forgotten it was New Year’s Eve, and I had no intention of reminding them. Last year I’d reset the microwave clock and let the kids count down to “midnight” at about seven-thirty. But this year they were so tired I didn’t even have to