Dolores Pruitt looked at her for a long moment over the tops of her reading glasses.
"And what does Eli say?"
"I haven't told him yet."
"And Mark?"
Laura looked away, toward her own house across the street, the blue shutters she'd painted herself, the crooked mailbox Mark kept promising to fix. "Mark's in Florida."
"That isn't what I asked, honey."
"I'm going to tell Mark. I'm going to tell both of them. I just need to know if you'd be willing first, before I talk to anybody. There's no point bringing it up if there's nowhere for him to go."
Mrs. Pruitt was quiet. A blue jay screamed from the maple tree in her yard, and she watched it without seeming to see it.
"I'd be willing to have Eli," she said finally. "I'd have Eli any time. He's good company. Better than most." She took off her glasses and folded them in her lap. "But I'm going to say something to you, Laura, and I hope you'll forgive an old lady for butting in. I've watched that boy stand at the end of my driveway for five years now. He's been talking about this trip since March. He told me about the pelicans. Twice."
"I know."
"So you know what you'd be asking him to give up."
Laura's throat closed. She nodded.
"All right," said Mrs. Pruitt. "Then I'll say yes, and I'll trust you to do right by him. But you tell him the truth. You hear me? Whatever you decide, you tell that boy the truth. He can handle a lot more than people think. What he can't handle is being lied to. Most of us can't."
Laura walked back across the street feeling like she had been slapped and also like she had been given permission, and she did not know which feeling was stronger, and she did not want to look closely enough to find out.
She did not tell Eli the truth.
That night she sat on the edge of his bed while he read and she tried, three separate times, to begin. Each time he looked up from his book with that open, waiting expression he got when he was in a good mood, and each time she said something else. Did you brush your teeth. Do you need a new pillowcase. Goodnight, sweetheart. And she went downstairs and sat at the kitchen table again, and she began, without quite deciding to, to build the lie.
It would go like this. On Friday, the day before they left, she would tell Eli that Grandma's beach house had turned out to be smaller than Aunt Rachel thought, and there wasn't room for everyone, and Grandma had asked if the older kids could take turns, and this time Eli would stay with Mrs. Pruitt, and next year it would be his turn. She would tell him Mrs. Pruitt had specially asked for his help with the feeders. She would promise him that next summer, just the four of them, they would go to the Outer Banks on their own and he could see all the pelicans he wanted.