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brothers and the heron. “He’s just got it backward.”
    Raleigh stood patting Dolly until Esther Green came by pushing her baby, Rodney, in his stroller to watch her husband play ball. Rodney was just about the homeliest thing I’d ever seen, but Esther seemed to like him.
    Raleigh liked him, too. He liked all babies. He’d rushover to pick up Rodney, cuddling and cooing and making faces to get Rodney to smile. The way Raleigh held Rodney reminded me of how he’d cradled that hurt heron.
    Nadine wrinkled her nose.
    “That Raleigh gives me the creeps,” she said. “I wouldn’t let him anywhere near
my
baby.”
    I stared at her, too shocked to say anything. The old Nadine would never have said something so mean. Raleigh couldn’t help being the way he was.
    When Rodney started to cry, Raleigh put him over his shoulder and jostled Rodney up and down, patting him gently on the bottom until he stopped crying.
    I felt my eyes sting. Even Raleigh knew how to take care of a baby. Why hadn’t my own mama been able to do it?
    “What’s the matter?” Nadine asked.
    “Nothing,” I answered, blinking fast. “Let’s go.”
    Besides me not being allowed to play baseball on Sundays, Nadine couldn’t believe that I didn’t get an allowance. I hadn’t even known what an allowance was until I’d met Nadine. Nadine didn’t have any chores, and she still got an allowance, and if Mrs. Tilton asked her to do a chore, Nadine could usually get out of it by faking being sick. Mrs. Tilton would ask her to pick up her socks, and Nadine would groan and say her stomach hurt “something terrible.” Mrs. Tilton would feel Nadine’s head, cluck “Poor baby” a few times, and make her some chamomile tea.
    Hannah would never have fallen for that. I’d tried once, on a day when we were to have a vocabulary test, moaning and saying I felt sick. Hannah hadn’t said a word, just set the bottle of castor oil up on the cookstove to warm, and I’d scuttled off to school. I didn’t dread vocabulary tests nearly as much as I dreaded castor oil.
    Nadine had her mother wrapped around her little finger, but she and her mom had fun, too, little things like making cookies and cupcakes, and big things like taking trips to Montreal to eat out, visit the botanical gardens, and shop for new dresses. I didn’t like cooking, and hated dresses with a passion, but I envied the time they spent together. Mrs. Tilton had invited me along once, last summer, but Hannah and I’d had hay to get in. I was hoping they’d invite me again this summer. I’d never been to Montreal. Nadine said everyone spoke French up there. If I went with them, I’d try out a little of the Quebecois French I’d learned from listening to the kids at school.
    Nadine’s father could be really fun, too. Besides teaching us how to build a campfire, he’d taken us fishing (Nadine hated worms and cleaning fish, but I didn’t mind), showed us how to do jackknives and back dives off the raft, and even taught us Morse code. He taught us how to dance, too. Nadine and I were more interested in the jitterbug and swing than in slow dances (who wanted to hold hands and dance close with a boy, anyway?), but when I watched Nadine stand on her daddy’s feet while they waltzed aroundthe kitchen, I felt tears prickling my eyes and had to bite my lip. What would it be like to dance with
my
daddy? I wondered.
    Some nights, when we were lying out under the stars, Nadine and I played “What’s your favorite thing?”
    “Favorite food?” Nadine would ask.
    It was always hard to pick just one.
    “Sugar on snow,” I decided. “Green apples, too.”
    Eating green apples always made Nadine’s mouth pucker up, and she didn’t like it that she wasn’t here in the spring when we were sugaring, so she’d never tasted sugar on snow.
    “Well, mine is peach cobbler and pecan pie,” she said. She knew I’d never had those, either.
    “Favorite smell?” I asked next.
    “The ocean,”