I would never be Franny.

But I had her machine, and her diagrams, and her notebook, and her apron on the hook, and I had a boy who knew everybody and a fierce woman in a purple coat and a young mother who needed two hands to eat, and among us, I thought, we might keep the net from falling.

And there was this, too, which I did not say aloud but understood clearly for the first time that evening: the net had caught me.

That was the part I had been too proud or too grief-stupid to see.