Isabel’s mother was telling mine all about the latest developments in the Missing Kids world. My mother was trying to listen and at the same time she was making a mess of the chocolate cream pie she had not let cool long enough. Meanwhile Jan Cook was rearranging the plastic forks and plates Mom had set out, and her husband Wendell was pouring drinks for other arrivals. Rose Lewis was asking everyone if they had seen Savanna, her evil daughter. As usual, the child had failed to obey her parents’ lame instructions: “Savanna, stay in sight, now,” they would say, and immediately become distracted. I didn’t want to make that my problem, but the year before she had found some colored markers and ruined a sweater Mom loved. Craftily, I looked in the kitchen were Mom keeps penny candy in a drawer and was able to shepherd Savanna back out into the yard. Neither her mother nor her father noticed.

The yard was full and I had started to try to talk Isabel into hiding in my room with me, when the Joneses arrived. They looked the same as they had the night – the two different nights -- I spied on them through a window. Corey was in new stiff Lee jeans and a flannel shirt over one of those long-underwear-type thermal shirts, his hair pulled back into a braid and topped with a wool hat. At some point he had trimmed the beard back a little so he no longer looked like a 19^th-century mountain man. In fact, he looked nice. Mrs. Harris would disapprove of a vague word like “nice,” but it fit. He just looked nice, instead of slightly scary. Alma was wearing her usual old lady garb: knit pants and K-Mart running shoes with a formless blouse in a greenish-blue that almost went with the pants, with complicated makeup, and hair that I recognized from movies set several decades in the past. Her jacket looked as if it belonged to her husband – too big and the shade of brown found only in men’s departments. For some reason, she was carrying her equally incongruous and overly-large purse, and she looked around for a place to put it, then pulled the long strap over her head instead.

I was surprised to see them, but I shouldn’t have been. When my mother had first befriended Alma, I had overheard them talking biscuit recipes one day and thought I had walked into the wrong house. But since then Alma was over almost every day for her cooking lessons. My father and Corey had bonded, too. Dad helped him pour the cement for the little green house’s fresh sidewalks, and Corey had visited a few times to help Dad with his computer. Corey still seemed like the hermit, or the out-of-it hippie; he never talked to me when I walked through. Sweet Olivia was the shy one in our group at school, and I knew she hated it when people tried to “make” her talk. I pretended I couldn’t see Corey and we were both happy.