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napkin confetti; I’d been shredding napkin after napkin without even noticing. My father reached across the table, touched the tip of my nose, and caressed my cheek.
    “I am telling you this, Keesy, for your own good. One must live in reality and not always with her head in the clouds. I want my daughter to be strong like me and firm in the world.”
    Despite Poppa’s cautionary tale, I only got dreamier as the summer soared by, and story upon story started to take shape in my head. Peter not only asked me to talk about my stories, he helped me build a story that was just ours. The story was called “Danger Tiger”: it was about a winged tiger that went around rescuing people. I don’t remember much about it, just that Peter played different characters, some of them villains, while I played only one character, Danger Tiger himself. Danger Tiger was a he ; I insisted on this, otherwise he would be called Danger Tigress . I didn’t know why, but I enjoyed playing male characters when I talked about stories with Peter; Peter, in response, often took on the roles of female characters, with a silly high-pitched voice, which was good for laughs. I was glad that my mother was too busy writing in her Fact Book or just lazing in her lawn chair, watching us, never joining in our stories. I was also glad that Inès worked full-time and that the boys were often off skateboarding, visiting the arcade, or watching TV in the attic. Peter once mentioned to my mother that it was a good thing I’d come along, because Ricky and Miguel were getting older and they didn’t want to spend that much time with him: he even joked that getting everyone together as a family on the weekends, even if it was just to go to the Forty-fifth Street pool, was like getting a group of monkeys to sit down for tea. I played ball with Paws as they sat in lawn chairs, talking. Peter said, “The boys are in that stage where they’re obsessed with their friends. Ricky is going into fifth grade and Miguel into eighth, so I guess it’s normal. I used to get lonely before you and Margaux started coming over. You two have brought a lot of joy into my life.”
    Mommy looked up from the Fact Book and swatted at a summer fly. “Thank you, Peter. You’ve been an absolute godsend yourself.”
    Peter smiled, but then looked unhappy. “It’ll be sad when she starts school in September.” He lit a cigarette.
    “We can still come,” Mommy said, casually waving her hand. “We’ll be here by three, the latest. And we can stay as late as we want. Louie’d be glad to have another night off from cooking. More time for the bar.” She paused, and then said, “But it will be stressful, with school starting. It’s so hard . . . what with getting Margaux’s uniforms, you have to go to a special store, and then for the shoes, a different store. And then the textbooks! Peter, every year you have to cover the textbooks with contact paper, and Louie gets mad if I ask him to do it, and it’s not easy! You have to cut it a certain way, and I’m not that good with crafts, not anymore.”
    “I can help you with Margaux’s schoolbooks,” said Peter. “When the time comes, bring me the textbook covers; I’ll show you a simple way of doing it.”
    “Oh, I wouldn’t want to bother you . . .”
    “It’s no problem, really, Sandy.”
    Mommy said Peter’s yard was the most relaxing place on earth, more tranquil than even his living room. Her favorite thing to do was to pet Paws; I don’t think anyone petted him more than my mother. “No rest for the weary,” she joked, and when Paws finally drifted away to see Peter or me, she would resume scribbling in the Fact Book. The little spiral notebook was now completely full, so she had resorted to writing in the margins and on the back and front. Eventually, Peter gave her a new notebook, persuading her that two separate books would not be too much to keep track of. So she began anew her recordings of local news and