I must have been Kayla’s age, but I could smell Leonie, too, smell her breath, the red cinnamon gum she chewed as she sang past my ear. Even when I grew older and she stopped giving me kisses, every time somebody chewed that gum, I thought of Leonie, of her soft, dry lips on my cheek. Kayla doesn’t care, even if the songs are patched together from my memory, pieces of a puzzle that almost fit: Old MacDonald has a llama, and there’s a cow on the bus, mooing as the wheels go around and around, and the itsy bitsy spider is crawling with a pout. I make up pantomimes for all of it, but Kayla’s
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