Amy was three. She watched her parents pack up and then they followed the moving van to their new home. They drove there in the big silver Chrysler, and Amy clamored to stand in her usual place, between her parents on the big front seat, fixated by the vertically-grooved all-chrome dashboard with the artfully-concealed glove compartment that never held gloves. She nagged to stand there but she was put in the back seat with her new baby brother, stuck like a piece of stale candy in the corner farthest from the basket that held squirmy little Mark. Amy’s mother said Mark wasn’t the good sleeper Amy had been. But he had lots of black hair.

They moved to Glen Cove to their first real home. This time her parents purchased. It was a new house, three bedrooms and two baths, an all-electric kitchen and an attached garage, on a curving dead-end street of similar new houses. A year after they moved in, the pasture land behind their back yard was subdivided and developed into split-level homes, and Amy resented that. She envied the new residents for their stairs but scorned them for being latecomers, and not for years did she understand that her family and neighbors had encroached on the original farm worse but earlier than the split-level dwellers (and the farm owners had encroached on others who had trespassed on the commons of possibly indigenous people, and so on, as repetitive as a house of mirrors or the label with the picture of the pixie gazing at the bottle with the label with the picture of the pixie gazing at the bottle…)

Their house was near the bulb of the dead end. Going out, the street curved to the right and rose to an intersection. Then the road arrowed down to a thoroughfare, and if you turned left at the thoroughfare (or just before it and through a field of wild berries), there was a Bohacks grocery store and a row of shops. When Amy was older she would walk to that little shopping center, cutting with her friends past the old farmhouse that served as the family doctor’s office, plowing diagonally through the berry field among the scratchy gold twigs and the purplish fruit. But for the first few years Amy only approached those stores from the car, and their shapes reminded her of Mark’s favorite toy: a string of painted wooden wheeled duck-and-ducklings that he was supposed to pull behind him when he toddled, but that he liked to suck on while he sat, instead.

If the little mall had a name it didn’t lodge in Amy’s memory. Her family titled the hill instead; they called the steep street Bohacks Hill and every winter when the first snowfall stuck and that street was closed till plowing, Amy’s father would pull out their sled and they’d all walk to the intersection at the top of Bohacks Hill, where her mom would watch while the rest of the family triple-deckered down that bright white slope. The clean swish of the runners was a sound Amy would love for the rest of her life.

She was almost eight before she was allowed to walk to the shopping center without an adult. Even then she wasn’t permitted to make the trek alone, and her younger brother didn’t work as escort in part because her parents said he was too young, but mostly because Amy wouldn’t have him. Mark had commenced sibling hostilities three years earlier, and since then Amy only played with him when she had no one else, like when they were left with a sitter or on vacation.

She’d carry the memory of his first attack forever. She was five and he was two. She’d been sitting on the red velvet hassock in front of the TV set (the required six feet away from its radiance), watching “The Howdy Doody Show,” when from out of nowhere (motivation-wise), Mark bit her right in the middle of her back. She’s not even sure how his teeth got a grip on that place between her shoulder wings, but they did: he bit bright and fast and hard, like a bird. It hurt. It shocked.

Amy made friends with some girls on the other side of her back fence, and it was with them that she ambled to the store. She first met Nancy and Jill at school, then she noticed them on the walk home, and finally they spoke and entered each other’s houses, where Amy got to see close-up those half-flights of stairs to their livingrooms and kitchens. She thought they were fun. But she remembered her mother’s frequent complaint, when she or Mark were sick and their mom had to race around caring for them, that she needed roller skates to keep up with their demands, and Amy knew her mother could never handle it if their house had steps.