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“Yes,” I said, and Robert had looked at me as if I’d lost my mind. “Where are we going?” he’d said again, more insistently. The woman ignored him, glided over his words with her own as though she was used to doing it. “I’ve got a nice snack for you in the back,” she said cheerily.
    She was kind, that woman, although she talked for three hours straight about her show dogs, corgis, just like the ones the queen of England had. She was nervous, but she’d brought some juice, some crackers, and an apple for Robert, and a blessed thermos of coffee for me. Robert got carsick twice, throwing up on the shoulder of the highway while I rubbed the sweet spot between his shoulder blades and the dog breeder called, “Hurry up, hurry up!”
    “How did you get into this work?” I’d asked after Robert had fallen asleep again, after the woman had finished feeding me the false biography to go with my new name, finished filling me in on the made-up life in Wilmington, Delaware, and Robert Crenshaw, Sr., the estranged husband who was an accountant. “How do you know Mrs. Bancroft?”
    She’d turned on the radio. “Didn’t they tell you not to talk about any of that?” she said.
    “They didn’t tell me much of anything.”
    “That’s for the best,” the woman said. “There’s a box of doughnutsin the back. Here’s your house key.”
    I don’t know what I’d expected when I opened the door of No. 7 Poinsettia Way, its aluminum painted dark brown, its peephole glowing like a glass eye. I was just glad to stand still, to stop moving, to stop running. “Where are we, Mom?” Robert had said for what seemed like the hundredth time, and what could I say to him? We’re home? His home was on the bay in Brooklyn, his room carpeted in a blue so thick and vivid that it was like walking through the sky, his shelves and drawers filled with everything he’d ever wanted: stuffed bears, battery-powered robots, plastic Supermen, electronic games, so that he could sit in his room for hours and not go out where things were scary. Out on the streets, his father said. Out in the kitchen, I thought, where there were loud voices and sharp noises and sometimes crying, too.
    Numbers were singing in my head. 153 49 5151. That was Elizabeth M. Crenshaw’s Social Security number. $1,256. That was how much had been in our joint checking account, and half of it was in a wad at the bottom of my purse. And Gracie’s phone number. If only I could talk to my sister, the way I had in the half-light of our bedroom when we were girls, the streetlamps shining in a divot of yellow across our twin beds, the car wheels a hiss outside on the city streets. I’d never hidden anything from Gracie, at least until after I was married. She was six years younger than I was, my baby as much as my mother’s, probably more, me pushing her around the neighborhood in my old stroller when she was a toddler, telling her the names of things, singing “Old McDonald,” always interrupted by people making comments about her burning bush of curly hair, like mine but brighter, wilder. If only I could talk to Grace the way I did when we were older, lying in the darkness,listening to her questions, answering them as best I could. How come the nuns can’t get married? How old were you when you got your period? How many feet in a yard, yards in a mile? What’s our address now? Eight apartments I’d lived in with my parents before I’d married Bobby when I was twenty-one, in six of them I’d shared a room with Gracie. There was never any discernible reason for why we moved; we never moved up, or even down, just from one shabby two-bedroom in Brooklyn to another. As suddenly as the weather changing, we’d get dressed one Saturday, the first week of the month, and load the couch and the easy chair and my father’s oxygen into a U-Haul and lie down to sleep that night a dozen blocks away. What’s the point of hanging pictures, my mother always said, the sound of