Clare hadn’t expected to see her mom on Thursday, and certainly not just before lunchtime, standing there by the principal’s office holding Clare’s jacket with a smile that was just too sad and sorrowful to really even be called a smile anymore. Clare had been in Miss Opal’s social studies class, and just as the third-graders were getting to old Lincoln’s assassination and “O Captain! my Captain!” in had walked Missus Gallup from the principal’s office, and after whispering a word to Miss Opal she had pointed to Clare and told her to go ahead and collect her things.

“What are you doing here? What’s wrong?” Clare leaned against the water fountain to address her mom. She hadn’t meant to sound so petulant, so suspicious, but Thursday was her dad’s day and she hadn’t anticipated seeing her mom again until the following Sunday. “Today is Dad’s day,” she said. “Did you forget?”

“I didn’t forget.” Her mom was still smiling, and the longer the smile stayed up there the more alarmed Clare began to feel, as if something terrible had happened.

“What’s wrong?” she asked again. “What happened? Is it Grandma Pearl?”

“No, Clare. I just thought it’d be nice to take you out to lunch for once. I thought we could go into the city, to Giorgio’s, and you could get the spaghetti and meatballs, and then I thought maybe we could go to the park—”

“But I have school,” insisted Clare. “I’m in class right now and then I have math and English after lunch. I can’t go to the park.”

Her mom’s smile failed a little bit. “You can miss a couple of classes for once, sweetie. It won’t kill you. I have some things I want to talk about with you.” She handed Clare her jacket. “Get your things now, won’t you?”

Clare held up her books. “This is everything,” she said.

Giorgio’s had been her family’s favorite restaurant back when Clare’s parents were still together. It was one of those old anachronistic Italian restaurants with red-and-white checkered tablecloths and scattered peanut shells along the stained wood floors. Clare and her parents had gone there nearly every Tuesday night for dinner, and then one night as they were driving back from the city, as Clare looked out the backseat window at the bright lights, at the black water as they drove over the bridge, they told her they had something important to tell her. When they got home they sat her down on the couch. “We’ve come to a decision,” said her mom.

Clare had cried and her dad had bit his lip and looked out the window, unable to make eye contact, and then they’d both looked at Clare’s mom. That had been three years ago, and Giorgio’s was no longer a cozy family tradition to Clare, but a portent of devastating news. As such, she’d reflexively flinched when her mom first mentioned the restaurant, as if her mom had raised her voice or her hand.

Clare’s mother was a beauty—everyone said so. Men fell in love and despaired and went wandering around in a fog for days after, doing hopelessly sentimental things like smelling flowers and staring at the clouds, and because of this she’d developed a kind of insecurity involving anything that wasn’t swayed by her physical appeal. As for the usual descriptions, she had brown hair and green eyes and the most amazing smile you’d ever seen unless it was waiting for you down the hall by the principal’s office.

Clare had taken after her dad. Tall and gangly, with curly hair and pale skin, she’d been the first child in her class to need glasses. Now, as they took their seats at the restaurant, in the back by the bathroom, Clare self-consciously hunched forward with her elbows on the table. At nine years old, she’d yet to adjust to how fast her body was growing. She twisted a curl of hair around her finger as she had a tendency to do when she was nervous and paid no attention as Giorgio himself came out to announce the specials and take their order.

Their host was short, with a respectable girth and balding, smokily black hair and a moustache that, like the rest of his restaurant, was too theatrical to be authentic. Clare wanted to grab it. “Ladies,” he nodded, pulling a stubby pencil from behind his ear, wetting the tip with his tongue, holding it poised above the pad. “Buon giorno. What can I get for you this afternoon?”

“I think I’m going to have the Caesar salad,” Clare’s mom ordered. “And—Clare? Spaghetti and meatballs?”

“No meatballs,” said Clare.

“No meatballs? Since when don’t you like meatballs?”

“I’m a vegetarian now,” said Clare. “Meatballs are meat. I don’t eat meat anymore.”

“She does have a point,” interjected Giorgio. “There is meat in the meatballs.”

Clare’s mom shook her head in dismay. How many other declarations had Clare made that she had failed to notice? The thought depressed her and pushed her forward in her purpose. “I’ll have a glass of wine, Giorgio,” she said

Clare had begun occupying herself with the old Chianti bottle-cum-candleholder set in the middle of the table, peeling the hardened wax from the side of the bottle. She felt like she’d done something terrible that her mom had found out about and this was all leading up to some pronouncement of her punishment, because why else would her mom be so nice? Why else shepherd her away from school and into the city?

“Clare,” her mom began, “the reason I brought you out to lunch today—well there were a couple of reasons. The first was I just wanted to see you, of course. It’s not often I get to see you this time of day anymore!”

Clare shrugged, and her mom spoke her next words as if she’d rehearsed them, as if she was reading from flash cards, taking care to make adequate eye contact and not speak too quickly. If her mom had been giving an oral report in front of Miss Opal’s class the comments would have been, “Excellent job! But try to sound more natural, as if you really know your subject and you’re excited to share it with us!”

“Do you remember Steven?” she asked. “That man from the science museum? Well, he’s become a friend of mine—a very good friend, in fact—and, well, he’s asked me to move in with him.” She paused for effect and to study Clare’s reaction: nothing. This, too, Clare had inherited from her dad. “The thing is—”

“In the science museum?”

“What’s that?”

“Are you going to move in with him in the science museum?” Clare repeated.

“Oh! Of course not, sweetie. Steven lives in Oregon. That’s where his house is, where he’s asked me to move in with him—in Oregon.”

Clare blinked. All she knew of Oregon was what she’d been taught in social studies class—that it was farther away than Reykjavik, Iceland, Havana, Cuba, or St. Johns, Newfoundland; the capital was in Salem; thirty-third state admitted to the Union; the Oregon Trail; the Donner Party. They had eaten people on their way to Oregon. “You can’t go to Oregon,” she said.

“Well, that’s the thing—”

“You can’t!” cried Clare. “You can’t go to Oregon!”

Just then Giorgio came up with their food and the glass of wine, and not until he had gone again did her mom turn back to Clare. “We’ll see each other nearly as much,” she insisted. “You can come visit whenever you like. Steven lives near this wonderful little theme park called The Enchanted Forest and we can go there when you come. They have a haunted house and a mockup of an old English village and—doesn’t that sound fun, Clare? Wouldn’t that be nice?” Her mom was so nervous that she had speared a forkful of salad, raised it up to her mouth, and actually bitten down while she was still talking, so that now she very nearly choked and had to reach bleary-eyed for the glass of wine to wash it down. Clare maintained her posture of willful disobedience, arms folded at her chest.

“You’re not eating, Clare.”

Clare looked down at her plate of spaghetti. She remembered how cold Steven’s hand had been when he’d shaken hers. Also, he’d smelled like onions and he’d kept asking the museum guide ridiculously dense questions about the exhibits. When she looked back up at her mom, she promptly burst into tears.

“Oh, Clare, please—I don’t even know if I’m going yet. I just­—that’s why I wanted to see you today, to talk about it and—oh please, Clare, stop crying—”

Clare couldn’t stop crying. It wasn’t even that she felt like it anymore, but each tear precipitated another, each grisly thought cascaded into the next until eventually Clare saw her mom lying ravaged and unconscious at the bottom of a wooded ravine, and herself, the very embodiment of woe: the most sorry, pitiable caricature of Oliver Twist and Little Orphan Annie all rolled into one.

It was clear that neither was going to get through much more of their meal. Her mom tried for a bite and then signaled to Giorgio for their check. She got their coats and tried to fit Clare into hers, but Clare was making it more and more difficult; as soon as they had left the table, Clare had flung herself at her mom, grabbing hold of her leg, refusing to let go.

“Clare, sweetie, it’s cold outside. We have to put your coat on.” Clare didn’t budge. “Darling. Sweetie. Come on—” It was just then, with Clare clinging to her mom like a possum on a branch and her mom struggling with their coats and everyone—Giorgio included—watching, that her mom’s cell phone rang. Clare froze as her mom wrested the phone from her back pocket.

Clare’s mom glanced at the number, and then before she had the chance to think about it, before she was able to realize what a wholly inappropriate moment it was to take a phone call—from him especially—she answered the phone. “Hello?” she said. Almost instantly she seemed to realize the mistake she’d made. Clare had let go of her waist and retreated to the other side of the coat hanger. “Yeah, I’m talking to her right now,” she said. “Listen, can I call you back later? Now’s not really the best time. No, yeah, I will—bye. Uh-huh, you too.”

After she got off the phone she had no trouble putting Clare’s coat on her. Clare was still crying, but it was low and quiet so that anyone else would have had to strain to hear her, like the sound of a waterwheel several hundred yards off. The bell above the door jingled as they left the restaurant.

Outside it was beginning to get cold; Halloween was a week away and Clare didn’t even have her costume picked out, though she’d narrowed it down to three possibilities—a princess, a fairy godmother, or Raggedy Ann. She supposed she could start as the fairy godmother and then if she decided on the princess after she could just rip the wings off.

She and her mom sat on a bus stop bench across the street from the park. Clare had stopped crying for the most part and aside from an occasional sniffling, she was now disarmingly quiet. Her mom continued on with her speech, explaining everything, but now there wasn’t any difference at all from how she’d rehearsed it. She might as well have been speaking to a mirror; now even she didn’t believe what she was saying.

When she was done Clare said simply, “I don’t want you to go.”

“Well, that’s going to be taken under consideration, Clare,” said her mom. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you—to see what you wanted. But of course there are other things to be taken into account. Like what I want, and work, and what your dad thinks about it all.” She was straining to talk reason to her daughter, and was pleased when she looked down and saw that Clare seemed to be considering this, until Clare repeated, “I don’t want you to go.”

“Clare, honey—”

“I don’t want you to go!”

“Clare!” Before her mom could stop her, Clare had jumped up and run into the street. A taxicab just missed clipping her legs­—a screech of tires, a flash of yellow—but didn’t slow her down. She ran across to the park and into the playground before disappearing behind the trees. With no more than a moment’s hesitation, her mom ran after her. She didn’t think. She didn’t look either way to see if any more cars were coming; the danger now had passed from the street and into the park and the playground.

Before they got divorced, she and Clare’s father would bring her to this park all the time. Usually they’d go in the early afternoon before dinner, and they’d take turns pushing Clare on the swings or catching her as she came off the slide. There was one slide in particular that Clare used to single out, a long, green tube that coiled in a tight spiral, its segments interrupted once each spin by a slash of open space.

When she was younger Clare would giddily climb to the top of the slide and then freeze, too frightened to go down. She didn’t like to be enclosed, didn’t like to lose sight of her parents. “Watch for me when you come around, Clare,” her mom would call. “If you look out you’ll be able to see me, okay?” Finally Clare would point out her legs and stretch out her arms and slide down, and when she reached the bottom her dad would be there to catch her.

When her mom finally found Clare, she was sitting on top of the green slide crying. She held on to the railing with a white-knuckle grip; there was no one else around.

“Clare, sweetie, why don’t you come down from there so we can talk?”

Clare shook her head emphatically.

“Listen Clare, I won’t go, okay? It was just an idea—just a stupid idea I had, and—I thought you didn’t really need me here anymore; I thought it might be nice to try something different for a little while, you know? But I’m not going. I can see you want me to stay here, Clare, and you’re the most important thing. You’re my little baby girl, sweetie, so won’t you come down? Please come down, baby.”

Clare still didn’t move; she looked as if she might be paralyzed.

“Clare, sweetie, come down from there!”

“I can’t!” cried Clare, and her voice shook with shame as she began crying all over again, a trembling, hysterical, blubbering wail that her mom feared would topple her over the edge.

“Darling,” said her mom, her voice now as warm and soft as a lullaby—in fact, all the lines in her face seemed to have vanished in the afternoon shade, and the way she stood there suggested a command, a grace, that had been lacking all afternoon. “Darling, you know how to slide down. I’ve seen you do it a dozen times before. Come on now, just point out your legs and let go.”

Clare shook her head numbly. “You’ll go!” she cried. “You’ll go!”

“I won’t,” insisted her mom. “I promise. I’m going to stay right here and wait for you. See? You can even watch for me when you come around, just like you used to. I’ll be right here.”

Clare sat on top of the slide, continuing to tremble, as if she was overlooking the deep end of a swimming pool, leaning over the very edge of the diving board, seeking some kind of courage, or grace, or even just peace and silence. There, a cold wind blew and she shivered, raising the gooseflesh from her skin. At the same time though and as young as she was, there was a part of her that told herself to keep this; to hold on to this fear, this vulnerability; use it; it would come in handy when she was older.

And then Clare let go. She kept her eyes open, and she watched for what would come around the corner. It went like this: green, green, green, Mom; green, green, green, Mom; green, green, green…