When Bliss was a little girl she lived in the poor section of the city, and from that time she remembers best playing with her two best friends, two black girls, Rose and Pearl, who were about two years older. The three of them spent a lot of time jumping rope, and even now Bliss remembers with fondness the sounds of the rope slapping the sidewalk, and the glint of sun on bits of glass and granite, and the shadows swooping, legs and rope crisscrossing but staying free, and sometimes she remembers snatches of the chants Rose and Pearl made up for the jump rope, some of them, well, most of them pretty naughty.

On this pretty fall afternoon Bliss sees Rose for the first time in six or seven years. The young black woman is pushing a child in a stroller. “Rose, you remember me?” Bliss says shyly. Rose needs a hint. “Jump rope days in South City?”

“Why it’s little Blister,” Rose confesses. “But all growed up. What you doing these days?”

“Shopping,” Bliss says, and she waves the sack she’s been carrying. “Is that your baby?” The round-headed infant hasn’t a trace of hair, and his eyes are squeezed with sun. “Is it a boy or a girl?”

“He’s my Charlie,” Rose says. “He’ll be a year next week. This is his first trip to the big mall. Looking for birthday stuff.”

“Hey,” Bliss says. “Neat.”

“Yeah,” Rose says.

“Well, nice to see you,” Bliss says cheerfully.

“Yeah, you too.” Rose begins to roll the stroller.

“Hey,” Bliss calls, “How’s Pearl? Do you still see her much?”

“Pearl’s dead,” Rose says. “Four years ago. One of those stray bullets, you know.”

“Oh God, how awful!”

“Happens all the time in South City, Bliss. Pearl’s not the only girl with blood in the cracks of our hopscotch court.”

“Did you see it happen? Do you still live there?”

“No, thank God. Mom moved us out most of a year before Pearl got hit. Stayed with some cousins. Met a boy, Tyler, and we got married. You know how it goes. So I didn’t see Pearl die. I didn’t hear about it for a year or more. I think my mom knew, but she didn’t tell me. You know, it’s funny, I don’t think I’ve thought about Pearl in over a year. Even when I saw you I didn’t think about Pearl. I guess I’ve put her out of my mind.”

“I think about those days all the time,” Bliss says.

“We were pretty good, weren’t we?” Rose says. “Say, if I remember there’s a McDonalds just around here. Wanna stop for some coffee?”

They take two small coffees to a cement bench on the edge of the park across the street. “I don’t really drink coffee,” Bliss says. “I don’t know why I ordered it.”

“You’re not grown up yet,” Rose says.

“I used to drink iced coffee.”

“I don’t think McDonald’s has iced coffee.”

“My father made it for me,” Bliss says. “He put all these ice cubes in a blender, and then he’d pour over the hot coffee. That was my favorite part. Watching the ice crack. And the sound it made. Then he’d put in some milk and a little vanilla ice cream and a few drops of rum. Then he’d blend it all real quick. It was so great. I’d make some at home, too; course we didn’t have any rum. I’d drip in some chocolate syrup instead. I liked the rum better.”

“Umm,” Rose says. “So your parents split up?”

“Yeah,” Bliss says. “About five years ago he left to marry some rich woman from Kansas who liked his photography more than mom did. But two years after that he rammed his car into a tree and died. My mom wouldn’t go to the funeral, but the woman from Kansas invited me, and my mom said that I should go because even though he was a mean little shit he was still my father. I told her that he wasn’t my father anymore, but I went anyway. I drove in the car with the woman from Kansas and their little girl. They didn’t really say anything to me. I mean the little girl was too small to talk, but it was strange because she didn’t even gurgle. Or maybe I just couldn’t hear anything. The funeral procession drove through this glade not that far from our house. Maybe glade isn’t the right word but that’s how I think of it—it’s a shaded curvy road between two parts of the forest preserve. The rest of the drive to the cemetery was on regular streets. The funny thing was that one of the trees in this glade was the one Daddy crashed into, or maybe I just imagined that. I don’t really remember much about the funeral except some men I’d never seen before hoisted up the coffin, and when they set it down near the grave they all took off their gray gloves and tossed them into the coffin. Later that summer I’d ride my bike through the glade all the time, and sometimes I’d have these weird thoughts, like maybe my Daddy swerved into the tree to avoid some girl on a bicycle because he thought it was me. Probably he was just trying to avoid a squirrel, but as I pedaled around the curve I always wondered what it would be like to be hit by Daddy’s car, or what it’d be like for him to smash that tree. Once I was stupid enough to say some of this to my mom, like was he trying to avoid a pedestrian or something, and she said Daddy was just drunk out of his mind and never knew what hit him, and if he was trying to avoid anything it was just life, and that was about the only thing he was any good at. So I didn’t say any more about it, but I found the tree, and sometimes I’d park my bike kind of hidden in the bushes and I climbed the tree, the one that killed my dad. It was an easy tree to climb, big branches way up, and they hung out over the road. Some afternoons that summer I’d hang out all day in that tree. I’d think really weird thoughts like about the little girl who was my half-sister only I didn’t think of her as a sister when she was sitting across from me, I didn’t think much of anything then, but in the tree I’d think of her, try to think of her face, and I’d wonder whether she was in any way like me, if we shared something I didn’t know about just because she came from some of the same seed, and I’d watch the cars slip by underneath, and I’d think about closing my eyes, falling asleep, falling out of the tree, and cracking right through the windshield of some car. And once I think I actually fell asleep on one fat limb, and I dreamt that my dad crashed into the trunk, and his head shattered into the glass, cracking it like one of those iced coffee ice cubes, and his head splintered open and out burst millions and millions of ants. It was really sickening. I mean I felt so awful I could barely climb down that tree. I felt like ants were all over me, inside and out. It was horrible. I biked home almost blind with fear, and when I got to my yard I just kind of rolled off the bike into the yard. Anyway that’s the last time I went to the glade.”

“That is pretty horrible,” Rose says. “Maybe it’s a good thing I never really had a father.”

“Well, you get over them,” Bliss says. “You want some of my coffee? It’s still pretty hot.”

“Sure,” Rose says, and Bliss pours half her coffee into Rose’s empty container.

“What are you going to get him for his birthday?” Bliss asks.

“Well, he’s still a little little for a jump rope,” Rose says.

Bliss laughs. “You should get him one anyhow; in twenty years it’ll be a collector’s item. Worth thousands of dollars.”

“For a jump rope? You got to be crazy.”

“One of the kids at school has some baseball cards his Dad bought him when he was six or seven. He says they’re worth ten thousand dollars. Seems like jump ropes should be worth more than baseball cards.”

“I don’t know,” Rose says, “Our jump ropes were just old pieces of clothesline.”

“I never really thought about it,” Bliss says. “So what do you think Charlie will get for his first birthday?”