but Danny had the feeling that everyone had decided to let bygones be bygones. Linda Robinson was diapering Boy Jr., cooing to him, making him wiggle his arms and legs. Danny had never been around babies much. He’d been led to understand that they cried a lot, but so far Boy Jr. had kept quiet as a mouse. There were good babies and there were bad babies, Momma had said, so Boy Jr. must be one of the good ones. Danny tried to remember being a baby himself, just to see if he could do it, but his mind wouldn’t go back that far, not in any orderly way. It was strange how there was this whole part of your life you couldn’t recall, except in little pictures: sunshine flaring on a windowpane, or a dead frog squashed in the driveway by a tire tread, or a slice of apple on a plate. He wondered if he’d been a good baby, like Boy Jr.
Danny was watching the group, feeding fistfuls of Lucky Charms into his mouth and swilling them down with the Dr Pepper, when Tim rose from the table and walked over to him.
“Hey, Timbo. How you doing?”
The boy’s hair was standing all whichaway from his sleeping on the bus. “Okay, I guess.” He gave a loose-boned shrug. “Mind if I sit with you?”
Danny scooched over to make room.
“I’m sorry the other kids tease you sometimes,” Tim said after a minute.
“That’s okay,” said Danny. “I don’t mind.”
“Billy Nice is a real dickhead.”
“He picks on you, too?”
“Sometimes.” The boy frowned vaguely. “He picks on everybody.”
“Just ignore him,” Danny said. “That’s what I do.”
After a minute, Tim said, “You really like Thomas, huh?”
“Sure.”
“I used to watch him. I had, like, this huge layout of Thomas trains in my basement. The coal loader, the engine wash, I had all that stuff.”
“I’d like to see that,” said Danny. “I bet that was great.”
A brief silence followed. The sun was warm on Danny’s face.
“You want to know what I saw in the stadium?” Tim asked.
“If you want.”
“Like, a thousand million dead people.”
Danny wasn’t sure what to say. He guessed Tim had needed to tell someone; it wasn’t the kind of thing you should keep bottled up inside.
“It was pretty gross.”
“Did you tell April?”
Tim shook his head.
“You want to keep it a secret?”
“Would that be okay?”
“Sure,” said Danny. “I can keep a secret.”
Tim had scooped up a little bit of dirt from the base of the tree and was watching it sift through his fingers. “You don’t get scared much, do you, Danny?”
“Sometimes I do.”
“But not now,” the boy stated.
Danny had to think about that. He supposed he should be, but he just wasn’t. What he felt was more like interested. What would happen next? Where would they go? It surprised him, how adaptable he was being. Dr. Francis would be proud of him.
“No, I guess I’m not.”
In the shade of the picnic area, everyone was packing up. Danny wished he could find the words to make the boy feel better, to wipe the memory of what he’d seen in the stadium from his mind. They were walking back to the bus when the idea came to him.
“Hey, I’ve got something for you.” He reached into his pack and removed his lucky penny and showed the boy. “You hold on to that, I promise, nothing bad can happen to you.”
Tim took the coin in his palm. “What happened to it? It’s all squished.”
“It got run over by a train. That’s what makes it lucky.”
“Where’d you get it?”
“I don’t know, I’ve just always had it.” Danny dipped his head toward the boy’s open hand. “Go ahead, you can keep it.”
A moment’s hesitation, then Tim slipped the flattened penny into the pocket of his shorts. It wasn’t much, Danny knew, but it was something, and there were times like these when just a little thing could help. As a for-instance: Momma’s Popov, which she visited when her nerves got bad, and the visits from Mr. Purvis on the nights when Danny could hear them laughing. The roar of the Redbird’s big caterpillar diesel coming to life when he turned the key each morning. Driving over the bump on Lindler Avenue, and all the kids hooting as they shot from the benches. Little things like that. Danny felt pleased with himself for thinking of this, like he’d passed along something he knew that maybe not everybody did, and as the two of them stood together in the morning