“Did you check on the dresser, behind my stethoscope?” Dad calls from the garage.

We’re dressed up nice and pretty and we’re ready, waiting and obeying the imaginary dividing line between us, the back seat’s invisible boundary….

Yes, she did. The keys weren’t there. And we have got to go. “Dey not dere! We have to go!” Underneath her blouse, she attractively breaks out into small beads of sweat.

Below her, my father is puttering around an overpopulated garage, scavenging through his workbench, plucking out our neglected My Little Ponies that have been replaced by trendier pastel Cabbage Patch Kids — blue-eyed, top-heavy bald Caucasian dolls that smell like baby powder and plastic. Dad’s digging though the hammers, the jam jars full of nails; digging behind the Dutch bike, the wheelbarrow and the storage bins, looking for the infant car seat.

“I set the keys there last night,” he calls out, “right before we went to bed. Now where the heck is that baby booster?”

Dad finally discovers the cushiony egg burrowed behind the doghouse. He dusts it off and brings it over to the car — a boxy, beige Buick — in the driveway where my sister Sabina and I await. We’re being very good girls, buckled ourselves onto the hot leather seats, not fighting, which is rare. We’re dressed up nice and pretty and we’re ready, waiting and obeying the imaginary dividing line between us, the back seat’s invisible boundary. I understand the importance of today, and so does Beanie. Special occasions require our maturest behavior.

I am five and wearing a huge yellow dress. It’s satin, from Jacobson’s Department Store in Lakeview Square, the brand new mall that they tore down the most beautiful wheat field in the whole world to build. After the golden field was killed it spewed teams of deer into our yard and our neighbors’ yards, and soon after that, dead ones started to appear on the side of the highway more and more. We got used to it.

Beanie is six and a half. The dress I’m wearing belonged to her until just recently, when she outgrew it. It’s still too big for me, but I’ve always loved it so Mom let me wear it today, even though I look like I’ve just been swallowed up by a tulip, but still. Also, my bangs are too short and crooked because earlier in the week I found some scissors and gave myself a haircut, but that’s another story. The car is parked the driveway and is running, which is why Mom can’t find the damn keys.

Some time later after she had us, after the dust had settled, Mom looked back at her old motherland Poland. It was in a terrible economic state during a horrible political period and she wanted to do something to help…

What Bean and I don’t ever really think about is that once, Mom was a little girl, too, just like us. Once she had small kitten feet and ran without shoes on the carpet of a mountain’s base. She picked wild strawberries, collected sticks and played games like housekeeping station. Once Momma didn’t have two little children of her own to look after, and she didn’t even think about it. But all that was at a different time in a different country, and then she grew up. Things got bad, so she left. My mother became an American woman; she got married and had two pretty brown-haired daughters in the United States of America.

Some time later after she had us, after the dust had settled, Mom looked back at her old motherland Poland. It was in a terrible economic state during a horrible political period and she wanted to do something to help, or give something back because after all, she was living comfortably in a house with not one but two refrigerators, not one but two cars; just thinking about Poland gave her swells of grief and pity. Then, an idea. She would bring people in. She invited different people, her college friends like Jeanette, Viata, Vera, Lucia and Ducia to come live with us in the States until they could strike off on their own, like she did. But soon, this charity felt more tedious and like a chore. Mom wanted to do something bigger, make a more permanent change to help someone. She wanted to save a life more fully. Save someone completely helpless, like a little baby. She would save a child.