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Carrie. She’s your foster mother and my mother.”
    No matter what the stranger who’d stopped her on the street had suggested.
    Tara released Danny’s hand to take one of the grocery carts in front of the store, careful to keep him in sight. During the time it had taken Tara to get to her mother’s house the night before, Danny had wandered close to the street to follow a butterfly.
    “C-Carrie is getting pretty,” Danny announced. He had a good vocabulary, although his speech was halting and not quite clear. He also stuttered occasionally. Once school started again, he’d be in speech therapy.
    “Right again,” Tara said. “Carrie’s at the beauty shop. That’s why I picked you up from swimming.”
    Her mother had insisted Danny take the lessons, maintaining that anyone who lived in an area surrounded by water should know how to swim.
    Danny scrunched up his face. “Don’t like swimming.”
    That was an understatement. Today had been lesson number two and Danny had yet to agree to get into the water. Afterward the instructor had advised Tara to suspend the lessons until he had a change of heart.
    “You can’t know you don’t like it until you try it,” Tara said.
    “Know it now,” Danny insisted.
    “Oh, yeah?” Tara asked. “What if I refused to learn how to drive because I thought I wouldn’t like it? Then how would we get to the grocery store?”
    Danny looked thoughtful. “Walking.”
    “Good answer,” she said, laughing. It served her right for asking a question with such an easy answer. “Dan the Man strikes again.”
    Danny giggled at the favorite nickname, and she bent down and gave him a hug. He loved hugs. He’d also been laughing more and more in the three weeks since he’d come to live with her mother. It was a welcome change from the sad little boy who’d kept asking where his real mother was.
    She waited for Danny to precede her through the automatic door into the store. “Stay close,” she told him.
    He moved a step nearer to her.
    Tara stopped at a table of navel oranges at the front of the produce section and tore a plastic bag off the roll. “You want me to buy a couple extra for you?”
    “Don’t like oranges.”
    “I love them.” Tara injected enthusiasm into her voice. She picked out four oranges and dropped the bag into the cart, then pointed to the refrigerated section containing precut bags of vegetables. “How about some baby carrots?”
    “No,” he said. “No c-carrots.”
    Her mother was in the process of ensuring that Danny ate healthy foods. Like a lot of Down syndrome children, he was on the chubby side. Diet, however, was only one factor. Many children like Danny weren’t active early in life because they had decreased motor skills. Add stunted growth to the mix and weight problems resulted. In Danny’s
case, they were compounded because he loved to eat with a rare passion.
    “I’ll give you a hint about what I need next.” Tara turned the cart with difficulty, noticing for the first time she’d chosen one with a bum wheel. “Cluck cluck cluck cluck.”
    “Chicken!” Danny said.
    “Right you are.” She maneuvered the cart to the top of one of the long aisles and got ready to push it to the refrigerated section in the back of the store.
    “Tara!” Mrs. Jorgenson, who’d been her mother’s neighbor for as long as Tara could remember, headed toward them with the help of a cane. Otherwise, she was in admirable shape for a woman of eighty-plus, with a trim figure and dark blond hair without a trace of gray. “How nice to see you. You, too, Danny.”
    “Who are you?” Danny asked.
    “You know Mrs. Jorgenson, Danny,” Tara said. “She lives in the white house across the street from you.”
    “Old lady in white house,” Danny said. Tara winced.
    “That’s me,” Mrs. Jorgenson said cheerfully. “I’ll be eighty-seven on my next birthday.”
    “I’m ten,” Danny said.
    “Lucky you,” Mrs. Jorgenson said. “Where’s your mother,