Mr. Leith

She was 11, which at that time was a child. She went and stood near her mother and said, “Mr. Leith is cute.” Her mother was at the sewing machine. Every mother sewed, had a f lower garden, had a box of recipes and wrote hers out for the others on her own cards. Or maybe not every single one. No, some didn’t have to, or didn’t know they had to.

Lucy was not going to. She was going to do whatever she wanted. She only said Mr. Leith was cute because of her older sisters, who used the word every day on the school bus and at the dinner table and in their room — they were twins and got to share a room. Not so long after that, Lucy would go right past them both, to words