And Leo shouted across the grass, apropos of nothing whatsoever, in the way that children do:

“Mom!

Did you know Arthur didn’t even have a dog when we came to his house?”

And I said, “I did know that.”

And he said, “He said he was thinking about it.”

And I said, “He wasn’t.”

Leo thought about this for a second, and then he laughed, and went back to the dog.

Nobody in that garden except me knew that a seven-year-old had looked at his shoes on a step at eight o’clock at night because he thought he had said the wrong thing to a stranger.