Lugging her vacuum into the Glassers' home, Bonnie felt something at the nape of her neck—the merest tickle of trouble.

"Bonnie here, hello..." she called, stretching the word, eyes on the key in the lock.

Her customary greeting gave homeowners a chance to cover up or break off activity if they'd forgotten she was coming. On a typical summer day at the Glassers', Wyatt might release Reid from a headlock. Ava might scoop that slime she never tired of making from glue and borax into a Tupperware.

Not today. Today the kids were nowhere to be found.

The father, Rick, set down a cellphone and beer stein to relieve her of the heavy stainless-steel vacuum.

"I've got it—no, no." The tails of a flannel shirt bounced at his waist. "How are you this fine morning?"

Bonnie said she was well, thanks for asking. She hung her coat. "Where did you hide those kids?"

"Oh, they're afoot."

"I'm sure they are." Smiling, she noted a yeasty, bitter smell. "Doing some cooking?"

"Brewing." Rick raised his stein. "New IPA for Tramp Bar. Hops're fresh off the truck from Oregon, the good stuff."

He sipped, then offered Bonnie the stein as if a snort of alcohol during work hours was nothing.

She declined. "I'll get the sheets off the beds."

He took a second, longer pull. Bonnie didn't say a word or—she thought—let disapproval into her face, but he explained, "Hey, opening night's two months away. Gotta get my ducks in a row."

He winked conspiratorially. Last week, he'd asked her to put his empty bottles in the corner of the garage where—Bonnie knew, they both knew—his wife, Val, wouldn't see them while pulling into the garage.

Helping conceal Rick's drinking had always been part of the job—even before he undertook Tramp Bar, the combination brewpub-kids' trampoline park he was launching in October. Bonnie had no qualms about it. She was fairly sure he didn't know what Val kept at the bottom of her tampon bag either.

Now Bonnie headed upstairs to strip the beds, expecting to encounter rowdy kids. Hoping, even. The forty-minute drive over the Shawnee River from Franklin Falls, where Bonnie lived, was murder on her back, and the laughter of children was one of the few tonics she'd identified over the years.

Reaching the second floor, though, she heard none.

"Bonnie here, hello...?" she called at Wyatt's bedroom door.

Inside, bed squeaks and furtive whispers.

"One sec!" answered Wyatt, the oldest at eleven.

Bonnie waited with crossed wrists. A drawer slammed. Someone said, "Ow, stop!" Then the three Glasser children emerged, smallest to tallest, looking back over their shoulders into the room.

Whatever they were up to, Wyatt recovered quickly. "Thank you for sewing my baseball jacket. It zips perfect now."

Bonnie stopped short finding the bedspread corners and smiled. Most boys Wyatt's age slinked right by a cleaning woman old enough to be their grandmother.

"You're welcome," she said. "I was happy to mend it."

As she gathered his pillowcases and fitted and flat sheets, the kids reassembled in Reid's room. Reid was six. He still crawled into his parents' bed after nightmares and so slept in the room closest to the master.

Normally Bonnie took up all the bedding in one go, got everything into the wash before starting on showers. Now she left Wyatt's sheets in a heap and went to the Jack and Jill bathroom adjoining Reid's room. She turned the faucet on as though preparing to wipe the vanity.

Stationed near the light switch, she could hear intermittently through the wall.

"...send us to aftercare." Wyatt's voice, urgent. "I did aftercare once when Mom had her surgery and Dad couldn't pick me up. It's lame. You get Saltines and do worksheets."

The middle child, Ava, said her friends said aftercare was lame, too.

A crash made Bonnie flinch from the wall. It'd sounded uncannily like Reid toppling his train table again.

She replaced her ear at the wall.

Wyatt said, "Reid? You idiot."

Ava said, "But can this really work? How do you even send them a letter? We're just kids, why—"

Wyatt said, "It's easy, you mail it! I looked up his address in the Yellow Pages. And Mom keeps the stamps in her desk."

Bonnie felt a guilty pang, eavesdropping on children like this—and after Wyatt had been so polite.

They were plotting something. So what? Kids plotted. They ordered a dozen pizzas for delivery to their teacher's house, or devised cruel pranks on the dog who lived over the fence.

She retrieved bleach spray from the linen closet and polished the sinks, the counters, carried off between her knuckles stray glasses (blue with toothpaste residue) and coffee cups (half- or quarter-full depending on when in Val's out-the-door routine she'd abandoned them).

Bonnie spent perhaps seventy percent of her time cleaning at the Glassers and thirty preparing to clean—pushing aside, putting away. Which was fine. She got paid the same whether she broke every last cobweb in the great room or spent all three hours scrubbing smeared candy and encrusted cat vomit from the basement carpet.

They lived life differently than she had. Part of this was the times, but societal changes didn't wholly explain. Bonnie cleaned for the Merritts in the next block; the Merritts kept that place immaculate, as tidy when Bonnie arrived as the Glassers' was after she left—and this with the mother tied up all day, homeschooling.

Merritt kids picked up their candy.

Bonnie tried not to judge. After all, nobody knew what worked in parenting. Bonnie had dogged her own kids over homework and every last mislaid Lego, and look what had come of it. Ben earned a living as a firefighter in Minneapolis, but Sandy was twice-divorced and slept in Bonnie's screen porch. Bonnie had scared up three jobs for her in the past year, and she'd lost them all.

Maybe if Bonnie had given her kids more rein—let them chip a tooth off the lip of a swimming pool like Reid last month—they would cope better with adversity. They'd make their mistakes and recover.

Bonnie did not see the Glasser children again until the kitchen, as she wiped spaghetti sauce from the microwave's inner walls. They were helping themselves to Goldfish and yogurt tubes.

"Wyatt," she said, "how's baseball going? The season must be wrapping up."

The boy squeezed his yogurt up. "Nah, we go pretty much year-round."

Bonnie recalled the jacket she'd mended, Roosevelt Riverdawgs embroidered on slick, expensive material. Travel baseball was serious stuff in Franklin.

She said, "Does that mean no football this fall?"

"Uh..." The boy's mouth twisted. "Mom wants me to do another sport, but not football. Me and Reid are trying lacrosse."

"I saw them sticks in the garage."

"Right. Dad's coaching."

Bonnie knew Rick coached Ava in soccer, both boys in basketball, and was an assistant for the Riverdawgs. Now he adds a lacrosse team—at the same time he's trying to start a business?

She called to the study, "I'm impressed, Rick. I had no idea your talents included lacrosse."

Rick breezed in checking his phone and carrying a stack of printouts with a single hand. "Apparently it involves a hard ball and six-foot nets, I read online."

And he was off again, pausing at the island to finish a text—patting Ava's head as she zipped underneath his elbow carrying the borax—then returning to the study.

Wyatt stepped away from his siblings.

"It's the concussion thing," he whispered, eyes quick and dark. "Mom doesn't want us scrambling our brains."

Bonnie was surprised: both that Val would have such a concern, and that she'd voice it to Wyatt. Maybe she hadn't. Wyatt was wily. Maybe he'd overheard her telling Rick.

Valerie Glasser was in pharmaceutical sales, and her largest account was, in fact, the Franklin Federals—the city's beloved NFL team. Val had a bawdy locker room story for every day of the week, and Bonnie'd never heard her discuss the sport in anything but glowing terms.

Ava was helping herself to a mixing bowl from the cabinet. "I'm doing ballet when school starts. The outfit has a cutout in back."

Bonnie was thinking of a proper response when Reid rambled in.

He said, "It shows her butt."

"It does not!" Ava said. "I was just being silly—it won't actually look like that."

The six-year-old made an "L" with his pudgy fingers and danced with one hand on his crotch. Bonnie thought it was from a video game.

Wyatt hissed, "Reid, be appropriate."

Bonnie couldn't help smiling at how the older child's face pinched, just like Rick when he lost his patience.

She finished putting away dishes from the drying rack, then fetched a broom and dustpan and swept around the range. She dumped the heaping, multi-colored pile (pink felt, sand, apricot) into the trash, then started a second pile.

Reid watched her sweep with a cockeyed look. Bonnie tried going about her work, stabbing the bristles clear to the baseboards, but the boy unsettled her. She'd seen this expression before—fascinated, vacuous. He'd looked like this right before gripping the cat's tail and, years earlier, preparing to mash a banana into his forehead.

He asked, "Are you our maid?"

Wyatt turned a livid red and his mouth blared open, but Bonnie spoke first.

"Oh, no. Maids wear aprons and frilly white hats." She pulled at a faded Franklin U sweatshirt of her daughter's. "I'm not fancy like that. I just clean."

Reid's face was blank as the whitest sheet Bonnie had ever pulled from a dryer drum. Wyatt and Ava stood frozen, hands stiffly at their chests as though afraid to disturb passing air.

Nice kids, those two. And they'd get Reid straightened out in elementary.

Bonnie finished the kitchen and started dragging the vacuum upstairs—Rick caught her at the third step and hiked it the rest of the way himself.

After moving soiled socks and a dead tablet, Bonnie vacuumed the hall. Then the master and Val's closet, hanging a silk blouse with tags still on it, then Reid's room, then Ava's. Wyatt's room was last.

Situated at the west end of the house, this room required Bonnie to move the vacuum plug. As she walked around the boy's drawer, cord coiled loosely, her gaze hitched at his bottom drawer.

Paper.

The drawer was only open a sliver, but it was enough to glimpse white paper.

Uniforms, shinguards, hoodies went in this drawer—any item that didn't classify into a higher drawer. Not paper. Bonnie rarely saw Wyatt or his siblings do much with paper—she figured the schools were moving to electronic homework—but when he did, the papers got put away in his desk.

Now she vacuumed that desk side of the room, careful of video game cords. She crinkled her nose as the roller brush passed over the discolored spot by the heat register. She'd have to remind Rick again they needed a special cleaner, something with enzymes.

The Merritts didn't have cats.

Bonnie considered the letter in Wyatt's dresser. She couldn't explain how she knew it was a letter—the very letter the kids had been chattering over earlier—but she did. She knew the same way she'd known the McCoys should not sleep in their house before the furnace got checked for carbon monoxide, and that Mrs. Guerrero's handyman was taking more than fertilizer from the garden shed.

Decades of close observation had given her this: a tickle at the nape of her neck.

Bonnie closed the door to gain full access to the corner. Typically she opened the room back up to ventilate right afterward. Now, finishing the corner, she left the door closed.

She vacuumed by the dresser, pushing the sturdy machine forward and pulling it back along an offset.

Her thoughts were knotted. She liked Rick and Val Glasser. Their hands-off parenting style had endured, what, eleven years without calamity?

Still, there was that tickle.

Bonnie stood the vacuum up by the dresser, its spine locking with a satisfying click.

She glanced at the door, then out Wyatt's bay window, which overlooked mature oaks and maples and fresh-painted bike lanes. Bonnie cleaned in nicer neighborhoods than this, but not many.

With one of the beige orthopedic shoes she wore for back pain, Bonnie teased open the drawer. The letter lay across Wyatt's folded Riverdawgs jersey, face up.

She read the neat cursive and lost a heartbeat.

My, kids have changed.