Chapter 51

* * * *

More than twenty years later, I could still recall how cooperative, how genuinely sympathetic my captain had been, at least when it came to Archie. He’d let me use the squad room as a daycare that day and many others that followed. By the second week of the 1998 school year, I had moved my lunch hour to three in the afternoon. When I did have crossing guard duty, at the foot of School Hill—major creativity in New Mill Town street naming, by the way—I would take my uniformed Mini Me along.

When I looked at Archie now, he was smiling, just like me. Was it possible he was dreaming about the same thing that came to my mind?

* * * *

“Hold up your stop sign.” My father, quite handy with wood and tools, had made a tiny replica of my full size one for Archie, who wore the uniform my mother had made for him every chance he got.