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us something bad happens.”
    Grandpa patted my shoulder. “We’re not jinxed. We just live on the opposite side of the fence. We’re as strange to him as he is to us.”
    I turned toward the woods again. “You come over and see us!” I yelled. “I’m leaving a gate open for you!”
    • • •
    When I was in the second grade, Neely Tipton made my life a constant, daily hell. He was a year ahead of me, the third-grade bully—a walking, talking stereotype of a future football gorilla—and he made a game of slipping up behind me, hissing “Bony Maloney,” yanking my hair so hard, my eyes watered, then running before I could turn around.
    I knew, of course, that Evan or Hop would cheerfully strangle Neely if I asked them nicely, but one of the lessons I’d already learned, being the only girl in a house full of brothers, was to keep quiet and get even. I was both a girly-girl and a tomboy—the first because Mama was so pleased to have a female child that she exaggerated my differences, the latter because—poor Mama—Hop and Evan treated me like a baby brother who just happened to have long hair and an innie.
    The only problem with Neely was that he moved too fast for me to smack him. I began to get twitchy about it, always looking over one shoulder with a fist curled against my stomach.
    But he learned his lesson one day and he never laid a hand on my hair again.
    It started like every other Neely-dreading encounter. At recess I edged warily out a doorway to the playground. He was lurking behind the open door, and the next thing I knew my head jerked and I flew backward like a calf hitting the end of a rodeo rope. I landed on my back on a concrete stoop and lay there, gasping for air, my jumper hiked up to my panties, the crown of my head burning as if I’d been scalped.
    “Bony Maloney, I
gotcha
,” Neely yelled. Dazed, I propped myself on my skinned elbows just in time to hear Neely’s footsteps crunching quickly on the graveled rain-drip bed beside the building. Then I heard a
whump
and looked over to see Neely bounce off the brick wall and sit down hard.
    Roanie towered over him, cool as a cucumber. “You mess with her again,” Roanie told him calmly, “and I’ll jerk your butthole through your mouth.”
    I stared at Roanie with stunned wonder. Neely began snuffling. I got up, wobbled over proudly, and punched him in the side of the head. Personal revenge, better late than never.
    Roanie looked down at me with his eyes half shut and glittering. Maybe he expected me to ignore him or insult him or run like a squirrel. “Thanks, Roanie,” I said very carefully, because I couldn’t quite forget those head lice he’d had the year before.
    “I seen you, and I heard you, that time at the Hollow,” he said. “You ain’t like nobody else in the whole world.” Then he just shrugged and walked away.
    That was the day I began to love Roanie Sullivan.
        The realization that I was in love was something I weighed against Maloney romantic tradition, which, to me, was majestically powerful but might be bad for a person’s teeth.
    Sean and Bridget Maloney. Romantic Irish names. But there was nothing romantic about the two old people, my great-great-great-grandparents, who stared down at me from massive portraits that hung in the main hallway of our home. I was afraid of them—that gray-bearded Irishman and the solemn, thin-faced Irishwoman with her hair in white ringlets who had birthed twelve children and buried six of them with her own hands.
    Daddy assured me people just didn’t smile for pictures back then. Smiling wasn’t proper, and besides, a lot of old people were missing a couple of their front teeth. But I was convinced that my ancestors thought I wasn’t up to the job of being a Maloney. They’d crossed an ocean. They’d carved a thousand-acre farm out of the Estatoe Valley wilderness. They’d named a town and helped build it. They were giants.
    And they were still close by, under