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Mom came home from her job at Woolworth’s one afternoon and found that I, having returned early from the community center, sat mesmerized by TV-news film of the war and the raging riots. I was only nine, but I think even before I started to recognize the tumult in the world, I already had an awareness of how unstable life could be, born in part from my father’s inconstancy but also from the fact that, in spite of my mother’s undeniable talent and drive, her quest for a career as a singer encountered setback after setback. The L.A. fires, the explosions in Vietnam, the gunfire in both places, the dead bodies in streets foreign and domestic, the crimes of Lucas Drackman and the death-to-come of a girl named Fiona Cassidy, Mr. Lorenzo standing up from the dinner table and dropping dead of a heart attack, the two trash-talking thugs who followed Mom and me through the park earlier in the summer, Speck, Whitman: All of it came together like many different winds joining forces and spinning into one tornado, so that, sitting there in front of the television, I suddenly felt that everything I knew and loved might be blown away, leaving me alone and vulnerable to threats beyond counting.

Riveted by the spectacle of destruction on the screen, I said, “Everybody’s killing everybody.”

Mother stood watching the TV for a moment and then switched it off. She sat beside me on the sofa. “You okay?”

“Yeah. I’m all right.”

“You sure?”

“It’s just … You know. All this stuff.”

“Bad news.”

“Real bad.”

“So don’t watch it.”

“Yeah, but it’s still happening.”

“And what can you do about it?”

“What do you mean?”

“The war, the riots, the rest of it.”

“I’m just a kid.”

“I’m not a kid,” she said, “and I can’t do anything about it, except sit here and watch it.”

“But you turned it off.”

“Because there’s something else I can do something about.”

“What?”

“Mrs. Lorenzo’s all alone, so I asked her to dinner.”

I shrugged. “That’s nice.”

She turned on the TV but muted the sound. People were looting an electronics store, taking TVs and stereos.

“There’s something you need to understand, Jonah. For every person who’s stealing and setting fires and turning over police cars, there are three or four others in the same neighborhood who want no part of it, who’re more afraid of lawbreakers than they are of the law.”

“Doesn’t look that way.”

“Because the TV only shows you the ones who’re doing it. The news isn’t all the news, Jonah. Not by a long shot. It’s just what reporters want to tell you about. Riots come and go, wars come and go, but under the tumult, day after day, century after century, millions of people are doing nice things for one another, making sacrifices, mostly small things, but it’s all those little kindnesses that hold civilization together, all those people who live quiet lives and never make the news.”

On the silent TV, as the face of an anchorman replaced the riots, I said, “I don’t know about that.”

“Well, I do.”

The anchorman was replaced by a wind-whipped rain-lashed town over which towered a giant funnel cloud that tore a house apart in an instant and sucked the ruins off the face of the Earth.

“When weather’s big news,” my mother said, “it’s a hurricane, a tornado, a tidal wave. Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the time, Mother Nature isn’t destroying things, she’s nurturing us, but that’s not what gets ratings or sells papers.” She switched off the TV again. “What do you want to be, Jonah—news or nice?”

“Nice, I guess.”

She smiled and pulled me against her and kissed the top of my head. “Then help me get ready for Mrs. Lorenzo. You can start by setting the table for dinner.”