Ginger noticed the broken fence because something looked wrong with the morning.

She was sitting on the back steps eating a piece of toast when she saw it. One section of the old wooden fence leaned toward the alley, leaving a crooked opening between two posts. Yesterday, the boards had stood in a straight line. Today, one was on the ground and another hung sideways from a single nail.

Ginger put down her toast and went to investigate. The night before had been windy. She remembered lying in bed listening to branches scrape against the house and hearing something bang outside. Her mother had said it was probably just the wind rattling the gate. Now Ginger wondered if the bang had been the fence giving up.

She crouched beside the fallen board. The wood was rough and gray, and one end had split where the nail had pulled through. Ginger pushed against the leaning section with both hands. It moved much too easily. “Well,” she said, “you’re definitely broken.”

She looked through the opening. Ginger had seen the alley hundreds of times. It ran behind all the houses on the block, dusty and uneven, with trash cans, telephone poles, weeds, and tire tracks pressed into the dirt. There was nothing mysterious about it. But somehow, looking at it through a hole that wasn't supposed to be there made it seem different.

Ginger stepped through.

She turned around and looked back at her own yard. From the alley, everything seemed slightly unfamiliar. She could see the back of the house, the clothesline, the garden, and the steps where her toast still waited on the plate. Even her bedroom window looked strange from this side.

Ginger walked a little farther down the alley. Behind one neighbor's house stood a rusted wheelbarrow filled with weeds. Behind another was an old metal washtub turned upside down. A black cat watched her from the top of a shed and disappeared the moment Ginger looked directly at it.

Then she heard something scratching.

Ginger stopped. Scratch. Scratch. Scratch. The sound came from behind a pile of boards near another fence. She moved closer, slowly, expecting the black cat to leap out.

Instead, a small brown nose appeared beneath the bottom board. Then two frightened eyes.

It was a dog.

He was little, with wiry brown fur and ears that seemed much too large for his head. Somehow he had squeezed halfway beneath the fence and gotten stuck. His front half was in the alley, but his back half was still in the yard.

“Oh, you’ve made a mess of things,” Ginger said.

The dog wagged his tail on the other side of the fence.

Ginger knelt beside him and tried lifting the board, but it barely moved. She pulled at the dirt beneath it with her hands instead, scraping away little handfuls until the hole was deeper. “Try now.”

The dog wiggled.

Nothing.

Ginger dug some more. “Again.”

This time the dog squirmed forward, kicked both back feet wildly, and suddenly popped free. He landed against Ginger, knocking her backward into the dirt. For a second they stared at each other.

Then the dog licked her nose.

Ginger laughed.

A voice called from the other side of the fence. “Buster?”

The dog's ears shot up.

“Buster!”

He barked.

A woman appeared at the gate a few moments later and hurried into the alley. “There you are!” She scooped him into her arms and looked at Ginger. “Did you get him out?”

Ginger nodded and showed her muddy hands. “He was stuck.”

The woman thanked her, and Buster twisted around in her arms to look back at Ginger as they disappeared through the gate.

Ginger headed home. When she reached her own broken fence, she stopped on the alley side and looked through the crooked opening again. Her yard no longer seemed strange. It was simply home.

She stepped through and found her father standing near the back steps, looking at the fence.

“What happened here?” he asked.

“The wind broke it.”

He examined the fallen board. “Looks like we have some work to do.”

Ginger looked at the opening. “Could we wait a little while?”

Her father raised an eyebrow. “Why?”

Ginger glanced toward the alley. She wasn't quite ready to close it yet.

Her father studied her muddy knees, her dirty hands, and the smudge across her cheek. “What have you been doing?”

Ginger picked up her toast. A little dust had blown onto it.

“Nothing much.”

From somewhere down the alley came a single bark.

Ginger smiled.

Her father looked toward the broken fence, then looked at Ginger.

“We’ll fix it after lunch.”

Ginger brushed the dust from her toast and sat back down on the step.

That seemed like plenty of time.