A young boy skated down the sidewalk on roller blades. Two girls sat on a front porch having a tea party with their dolls. A group of kids were shooting baskets in front of somebody's garage. An older couple rocked to and fro in a porch swing. Had her mother or father grown up in one of those houses, in a world not all that different from her own? Was her mother or father sitting in one of those houses right now? Was that teenage boy riding a bicycle her cousin or even her half-brother? Jake turned down a street with trees so big they formed a canopy overhead. The houses here were small and old. He pulled up in front of a yard bursting with a kaleidoscope of disorderly flowers. "You know," he said, "you don't have to go in." The first words he'd spoken since they'd left the restaurant were brusque but with an underlying note of concern. Or maybe she just wanted to hear that underlying note.
