It was always a crapshoot whether or not the neighborhood association would choose a good weekend for the annual block party, but this year luck seemed to be in their favor. Their neighbor Office Naftzger was there in uniform, and he'd cordoned off the stretch of Ewing Avenue between Woodward and Baxter with traffic cones and even a few mounted police officers. It seemed like every child with a wheeled toy was out in force, tooling back and forth along the temporary pedestrian boulevard, shouting to their friends and waving the leftover Fourth of July American flags Mrs. Spade was handing out.

Ruth hesitated only a moment before approaching Mrs. Hudson's lawn chair, propped just off the sidewalk on the Eubanks' driveway. "Is this spot taken?"

"Please, pull up some concrete," she said, gesturing grandly to Ruth and Sarah with a smile. "Babette's visiting her mother in Boston; she won't mind if we occupy the space in front of her garage. I'm Carole."

Ruth gave her offered hand a little squeeze-shake and smiled back before setting down her cooler and spreading their picnic blanket beside Carole on the stretch of blacktop. Sarah took a tentative toddling step onto the blanket, then sat right down on the corner, patting it in satisfaction. Carole smiled.

"How old?"

"Sarah's nineteen months last week." She pointed across the street, where Timmy was playing a modified game of soccer with his team coach, and where Noah was making a largely unsuccessful attempt at doing jumps off the curb with Timmy's skateboard. "She's my third. Those two are my boys."

"Oh, you're Noah's mother!" Carole smiled again, her face open and guileless. "Finn told me about Noah transferring into his class last winter."

It made Ruth a little suspicious to be in the presence of someone that obviously happy. She had to wonder what Carole Hudson, a widow of the Gulf conflict, had figured out about the world that would make her smile like that.

"Dah," said Sarah, patting a dandelion.

"Flower," Ruth replied promptly. "Is Finn doing soccer camp this summer?"

"I think we can't afford it this year." Carole sighed, shading her eyes as she watched Finn offer Noah a hand up from the ground. "The difference between a daytime sitter and the raise I got at work just isn't adding up. Sometimes I wish I hadn't agreed to be a shift supervisor. But in the fall, definitely."

Sarah held up a handful of grass, the roots dangling from her fist. "Dah."

"Dirt. Yucky." Ruth mimed tossing the grass onto the ground, and Sarah copied her. "Yeah, childcare's a bitch. Aaron's staying home with the kids this summer while I'm in class."

"Your oldest—?"

"Timothy," Ruth supplied.

"Timothy. He's not quite old enough to watch Sarah by himself, is he?"

"Even if he were." Ruth shook her head. "He wouldn't enjoy that. Noah's the caregiver. Timmy prefers to be on his own." That wasn't quite right, but she wasn't about to launch into her own self-diagnosis of Timmy's autistic tendencies with someone she'd just met, even if Carole was a nurse.

There was a happy shout as Timothy scored a goal between the two orange cones they'd appropriated for their soccer game. Carole clapped and called encouragement, just as though she were his own mother. Ruth had to smile.

"Timmy's good at sports," Ruth said, "but until we got him into soccer camp, it was hard to get him out of the basement. Loves fiddling with electronics, taking things apart and putting them back together. Now we can't get him to shut up about his coach. It's Cooper this and Cooper that."

Carole watched the tall dark-haired boy give Timmy a high-five. Timmy's face was shining as he gazed up at Cooper Anderson, not exactly smiling, but clearly paying attention to every word he said. She chuckled.

"Looks like he might have a little crush."

Ruth hid her scowl as best as she could. "Yeah, that's just what Aaron was afraid of."

"Oh, it's harmless." She looked expectantly at Ruth, still smiling. "He's just a boy."

"I suppose."

"Cooper. Doesn't he do commercials for local television? I think I saw him advertising Hummel's Tires and Lube."

"Dah," Sarah said, climbing onto Carole's knee. When Ruth moved to get up from the blanket to retrieve her, Carole waved her back down, helping Sarah balance on her knee and exclaiming over the rock she held. Ruth relaxed another fraction. With any luck, Aaron would sleep through the entire picnic. It might just end up being this easy today. Ruth could almost pretend they were an ordinary family, playing with friends and talking about normal things.

While Timmy's soccer game expanded to include the next driveway over, Noah and Finn shifted their play from skateboarding to ninjas. Noah didn't even look mad when Finn accidentally kicked him.

"He's getting tall," Ruth commented.

"Mmm. His father was over six feet. The doctor thinks he might top out at six-four." Carole took the rock Sarah offered her, then offered it back. Sarah took it solemnly. "He had some trouble in preschool, fighting with other boys? I thought doing holding him back a year before kindergarten might give him a chance to develop some better social skills, but now that I see him next to the other kids in his grade, I wonder if I made a good decision."

"Huh. That's a surprise. Noah tells me what a good kid Finn is, a real rule-follower."

Carole laughed, nodding. "That was the problem. He wanted everybody else to be rule-followers, too. I think now he's figured out how to be friends now without expecting everybody to conform to his outrageous standards of comportment."

She did not say one word about Noah's behavior, nothing like he's not such a good kid or anything. It made Ruth wonder if Carole knew as much as she thought she did.

"We kept Noah home an extra year before starting him in kindergarten, too," Ruth said. "But his birthday's in July, so that was okay."

"Oh, July?" Carole turned to her with a curious smile. "What day?"

Ruth paused just a moment before admitting, "Today, actually."

Carole's eyes widened. "It's his birthday today! So he's—what, six? No, seven! You have to come over so we can celebrate!"

"That's okay," Ruth said, trying not to sound desperate. "My brother, he'll come this evening. And I made a cake."

"Oh. Of course, you already have plans."

That wasn't it, and it wasn't even true, although she did have the cake mix at home, ready for the moment Aaron would leave the house to drink and give them a few hours peace. Just the thought of celebrating at this too-happy woman's home, this experienced nurse who clearly had her shit together—enough to get a raise, even though she didn't have a husband—it was more shame than she could bear.

"Thank you for offering," Ruth added eventually, far too late, but it couldn't go unsaid, not with Sarah still on Carole's lap.

"I'm so glad Finn has found a good friend."

Carole did seem to be honestly glad. And, after all this time, Noah and Finn were still playing together, happily engaged in some kind of pretend battle with imaginary foes. When the mounted officer on the police horse plodded close to them along the sidewalk, Noah swung his fists and feet so ferociously that the horse snorted and shied. Luckily, the officer did not seem upset by this. He spoke with the boys from high in the air atop the horse, and they spoke back with worshipful faces—remarkably similarly to the way Timmy looked when he spoke with Cooper Anderson.

After a few more moments, the boys walked alongside the horse back toward their piece of blanket-covered driveway, looking proud as punch.

"Mom!" Noah hollered. "I beat up a police horse."

Carole and Ruth exchanged amused glances. "Do you boys want a popsicle?" Ruth asked, gesturing to the cooler sitting beside her on the cement.

Sarah stared up at the horse with round eyes. "Dah?"

"Horse," Noah and Ruth said at the same time, and Carole and Finn both laughed.