I say that because it matters to how people hear this story, and it also does not matter at all to how it felt.

She was mine from about the second month.

That sounds dramatic.

It wasn’t.

What happened was that Patricia — who is a good woman and who was, at forty-three, completely unprepared for a fourteen-year-old — called me one Sunday in November and said, “She won’t talk to me and she won’t eat and I don’t know what I’m doing,” and I said, “Send her over Saturday, I’ll put her to work.”

And she came over Saturday, and I put her to work, and she came back the next Saturday without being asked.