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hands.
    Mom fluffed her hair with her fingers to get it to dry and looked around at the breakfast taking shape.
    “Well, this was awfully nice of you,” she said to him.
    “I hope you’re hungry,” he said.
    She cruised around the kitchen looking at some mail on the counter and then at a cellophane bag of overripe bananas. She tossed them into the trash. “I was going to make banana bread,” she said. “I don’t even like banana bread.”
    “No one really likes banana bread,” Hayden said. “You know who makes banana bread? The few people in the world who feel guilty about black bananas.”
    I watched the corner of Mom’s mouth go up in a little smile. For the record, the only time I ever saw my mother smile at Buddy Wilkes was the time we saw him pulled over to the side of the rode by Officer Beaker, the red light on the patrol car spinning slowly, telling everyone who passed that Buddy had finally been caught at something.
    It seemed like Hayden was just going to be one of those few, few, few people who just kept getting better the more you saw ofhim. And even Mom, who could see danger in an unwashed apple, could tell that.
    I had to wake up Juliet for breakfast. She was the same lump in her bed I remembered from when she lived at home and had stayed out late the night before. And when I called her name and threw one of her stuffed animals at her butt, I heard a muffled “Goddamnit, Scarlet” from way down in the covers, just like the old days too. But when she sighed and sat up, she looked different to me. It felt like the past but not the past, because she looked like a woman, somehow. Maybe because I expected her to be a woman now, but maybe not just that. Her face looked older, like she’d been somewhere and back, and not just to Oregon, either. She rubbed one eye with her hand and said, “Oh yeah,” as if her life had just returned to her, the way it does sometimes when you first wake up. I wasn’t sure, though, if it was her old life that was returning or her new one.
    I was aware that there were two sides of the bed, now, too, and that Hayden had slept in that bed, with his head on that pillow. It was very husbandly-wifely. There was a small pile of loose change on the end table, a paper clip, a beat-up peppermint candy wrapped in cellophane, as if he’d emptied his pockets before bed. His backpack was on the floor, unzipped, and I could see some of the contents inside. The blue stripes of a pair of boxers, the open zipper of Levi’s, the cotton of a dress shirt stuffed way down inside.
    “Hurry up,” I said. “Hayden made breakfast.”
    Juliet sighed. “Hand me that, I can’t reach,” she said to me, gesturing to her bag on the floor by the bed. I handed it to her and she sorted through it, pulling on a pair of underpants and then her jeans. I wondered if Hayden slept naked too.
    “Eggs are getting cold.” Mom popped her head in the door. Sheprobably felt uncomfortable down there alone with Hayden.
    “Look at this,” Juliet said. She showed Mom her gaping zipper—the impossible space between the jeans’ button and the buttonhole. “Look.”
    “It’s still mostly water, not baby,” Mom said.
    “Hurry up, people,” I said. No one seemed to be very considerate of the fact that this great guy had just made all this nice warm food. Besides that, I felt weird talking about the odd things my sister’s body was now doing. Mostly water … I wanted that talk to stop right there. I’d put endless sun lotion on that back, braided that hair, handed those arms a towel, but her body seemed unknown to me then, capable of private and unimaginable things.
    As we finally left Juliet’s room, I noticed something else there too, on Juliet’s side of the bed. On the small round table that held her old CD player and that candleholder shaped like a butterfly that Buddy Wilkes had given her one birthday, there was another fat chunk of paper—a note, folded and folded once more. From Hayden again,