Saint Maybe

2. The Department of Reality

When the baby woke from her afternoon nap, she made a noise like singing. “La!” she called. But the only ones who heard were Thomas and Agatha. They were coloring at the kitchen table. Their crayons slowed and they looked at each other. Then they looked toward their mother’s room. Nowadays their mother took naps too. She said it was the heat. She said if they would just let her be she would stay in bed from spring till fall, sleeping away this whole hot, muggy summer.

“La!” Daphne called again.

They couldn’t pick her up themselves because last week Thomas had dropped her. He’d been trying to feed her a bottle and she had somehow tumbled to the floor and bumped her head. After that their mother said neither one of them could hold her anymore, which wasn’t at all fair to Agatha. Agatha had turned seven this past April and she was big for her age besides. She would never have allowed Daphne to wiggle away like that.

Now Daphne was talking to herself in a questioning tone of voice, like, Where is everybody? Have they all gone off and left me?

Agatha’s page of the coloring book had an outline of an undressed man full of veins and arteries. You were supposed to color the veins blue and the arteries red. A tiny B and R started you off and from then on you were on your own, boy. Tough luck if you slipped over onto the wrong branch accidentally and started coloring the red parts blue. It was just about the most boring picture in the world but Agatha kept at it, even when the veins narrowed to black threads and she didn’t have a hope of staying inside the lines.

Thomas’s page was boring too, but at least there were more shapes to it. His undressed man had different organs — pipes and beans and balloony things. He got to do that page because the coloring book was his, but then he pretended the organs didn’t exist. He smeared over them every which way with a purple crayon, giving the man a suit that ended jaggedly at his wrists and bare ankles. “Now you’ve gone and ruined it,” Agatha told him.

“I did not. I made it better.”

“You’re bearing down too hard, too. Look at what you did to your crayon.”

He looked. Earlier he’d peeled the paper off and now the crayon curved sideways in the heat from his hand, like their mother’s poor bent candles in the napkin drawer.

“I don’t care,” he said.

“Your last purple crayon!”

“I didn’t like it anyhow,” he said, “and this coloring book is stupid. Who gave me this stupid coloring book?”

“Danny gave it to you,” Agatha said.

He clapped a hand over his mouth.

Danny hadn’t given him the coloring book; it was Grandma Bedloe. She’d picked it up at the Pantry Pride one day when she went to buy their mother some food. But Thomas always worried that Danny was listening to them up in heaven, so Agatha said, “He bought it as a special, special present, and he hoped very much you would like it.”

Thomas removed his hand and said loudly, “I do like it.”

“Then why’d you mess all over it?”

“I made a mistake.”

Daphne said, “Oho! Oho!”—not laughing, as you might imagine, but starting to complain. The next step would be real wailing, all sad and lost and lonely. Thomas and Agatha hated that. Thomas said, “Go tell Mama.”

“You go.”

“You’re the oldest.”

“I’m not in the mood.”

“Last time I went, she cried,” Thomas said.

“She was having a difficult day.”

“Maybe this day is difficult too.”

“If you go,” Agatha said, “I’ll give you my patent leather purse.”

“I don’t use a purse.”

“My plastic camera?”

“Your camera’s broken.”

Daphne had reached the wailing stage. Agatha started feeling desperate. She said, “We could stand next to the crib, maybe. Just talk and smile and stuff.”

“Okay.”

They got up and went down the hall, past the closed door of their mother’s room and into the children’s room. It smelled of dirty diapers. Daphne was sitting in that superstraight way she had with her fingers wrapped around the crib bars, and when they came in she grew quiet and pressed her face to the bars so her little nose stuck out. She had been crying so hard that her upper lip was glassed over. She blinked and stared at them and then gave a big sloppy grin.

“Now, what is this nonsense I’m hearing?” Agatha said sternly.

She was trying to sound like Grandma Bedloe. Grownups had these voices they saved just for babies. If she’d wanted, she could have put on her mother’s voice. “Sweetheart!” Or Danny’s. “How’s my princess?” he would ask. Used to ask. In the olden days asked.

Best to stick with Grandma Bedloe. “Who’s this making such a hullabaloo?”

Daphne grinned wider, with her four new crinkle-edged teeth shining forth and her lashes all wet and sticking to her cheeks. She wore just a little undershirt, and her diaper was a brownish color — what their uncle Ian would call Not a Pretty Sight.

“Give her her pacifier,” Thomas suggested.

“She gets mad if you give her a pacifier when she wants a bottle.”

“Maybe she’s not hungry yet.”

“After her nap, she’s always hungry.”

Daphne looked back and forth between the two of them. It seemed to be dawning on her that they weren’t going to be much help.

“Just try her pacifier,” Thomas said.

“Well, where’d it go?”

They reached in between the bars and patted the sheet, hunting. Some places the sheet was damp, but that might have been the heat, or tears. The smell was terrible.

“Found it!” Thomas crowed. He poked the pacifier between Daphne’s lips, but she spat it out again. Her chin began quivering and her eyebrows turned bright pink.

“Phooey,” Thomas said. He picked up the pacifier and jammed it in his own mouth, and then he backed off till he was sitting on the edge of his bed with his arms folded tight across his chest.

“Maybe we could feed her in her crib,” Agatha said.

Thomas made noisy sucking sounds.

Agatha went to the kitchen and dragged a gallon jug of milk from the refrigerator. She set the jug on the table and took a cloudy nursing bottle from the jumble of unwashed dishes next to the sink.

Daphne was back to “Oho! Oho!”

First Agatha tried pouring very, very slowly, but milk got all over the table and soaked Thomas’s page of the coloring book. When she speeded up she did better. She replaced the nipple and carried the bottle down the hall, de-chilling it in her hands as she walked. Outside her mother’s door she paused and listened but she didn’t hear a sound. It must be a two-pill nap, or even three-pill. She went on into the children’s room.

Daphne’s mouth was an ugly shouting square now and she was red-faced and snotty and sweaty. Thomas had his eyes squeezed shut. “Wake up,” Agatha told him roughly as she passed. She fitted the bottle between the crib bars and held it toward Daphne. “Here.”

Daphne flailed out and the bottle went flying. Off popped the nipple. Milk splashed the decal of the rabbit in pink overalls on the headboard. “Stupid!” Agatha shouted. “Stupid fat old baby!”

Daphne cried harder. “Help me reach this bottle,” Agatha told Thomas, but Thomas had pulled his bedspread up over his head. She turned back to the bottle. It lay on its side toward the rear of the crib, and every time Daphne bounced another glug of milk would spill out onto the sheet. Finally Agatha pressed the two clamps on the railing to lower it. There was Daphne, no longer fenced in, quieting slightly and hiccuping and looking interested. There was the bottle, within easy reach. Agatha found the nipple in a fold of wet sheet and put it back on, and then she tipped the bottle toward Daphne. This time, Daphne accepted it. She drank sitting up, blinking at the first cold swallow but after that making do. One hand clutched over and over on Agatha’s wrist. “Mm,” she said at each gulp. “Mm. Mm.” Agatha suddenly felt the most enormous thirst.

Behind her, she heard the slithering sound of Thomas coming out of his bedspread. She heard the smack as he pulled the pacifier from his mouth. “She sure does stink,” he said.

She didn’t answer.

“You going to change her, Agatha?”

She stood firm, cupping her elbow with her free hand. She did know how to change a diaper. She had often helped her mother — fetched the powder or the washcloth. Yes, she thought she could do it on her own. But still she didn’t answer. She tossed her head to flick her hair off her face. She felt Thomas come up cautiously to stand next to her. He was twiddling the pacifier between his fingers. Just as Daphne let go of the nipple after her last gulp (Squirrel-oh! the nipple said), he reached over and plugged her mouth with the pacifier. Daphne went on sucking. Thomas and Agatha took a step back, but Daphne stayed quiet.

“Soose,” Thomas said happily.

That was what their mother called a pacifier: soose.

Agatha took a clean diaper from the stack on the bureau. She tipped Daphne onto her back and slid the diaper beneath her. The pins were no trouble. This was going to be easy. But the poo was disgusting. She wrinkled her nose and folded the dirty diaper inward. Thomas said, “Yuck!” and went back to his bed.

She carried the diaper down the hall to the bathroom, holding it in a clump far out in front of her. She lowered it into the toilet and swished it around. All the ick started crumbling away. She flushed the toilet and swished again in clearer water, back and forth, dreamily.

Sometimes their mother said “soose” and sometimes she said “soother.” Maybe they were both the same word. People here in Baltimore said “pacifier,” and so did Thomas and Agatha, trying to fit in; but their mother was not from Baltimore. She was from out in the country where they used to live with their father in a metal-colored trailer. Then they all got divorced. This was when Thomas was just a baby. He couldn’t even remember. And then later they moved to Baltimore in Mr. Belling’s long black car. Everything was going to be wonderful, wonderful, their mother said. She got so many new clothes! Their apartment sat over a drugstore that stocked every kind of candy, and when Mr. Belling visited he sent Thomas and Agatha downstairs with a dollar bill each and they could take as long as they liked deciding. Thomas did remember Mr. Belling. He didn’t like him much, though. When Mr. Belling stopped coming, Thomas asked if he could have the Baltimore Colts mug Mr. Belling used to drink his beer from, and their mother started crying. She snatched the mug from the dish drainer and slammed it against the sink until it broke in a million pieces. Thomas said, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I didn’t really want it!” After that their mother had to get a job and leave them with Mrs. Myrdal, but then she met Danny. She acted more like her old self once she met Danny. On her wedding day she said it was all of them’s wedding day. She gave Agatha a little pink rose from her bridal bouquet.

Thomas said Danny was probably their real father. Agatha knew he wasn’t, though. She told Thomas their real father was nicer. In fact Danny was the nicest man she had ever known — nicer than their father, who had never had much to do with them, and certainly a whole lot nicer than Mr. Belling, with his two fat diamond rings and his puckered eyes the color of new dungarees. But she wanted Thomas to feel jealous over what she could still remember. Thomas had a terrible memory. Agatha’s memory was letter-perfect; she never forgot a thing.

Thomas forgot three separate times, for instance, three different days in a row, that Danny had gone and died. Three mornings in a row he got up and said, “Do you think Danny will fix apple pancakes for breakfast?” The first day she could understand, because the news was still so fresh and neither one of them was used to it yet. So she just said, “No, did you forget? He went and died.” But the second day! And the third! And those were weekdays, too. Danny would never have fixed apple pancakes on a weekday. “What’s the matter with you?” she asked Thomas. “Can’t you get it into your head? He had a car crash and he died.” Thomas just took on a kind of closed look. He didn’t seem to miss Danny as much as he missed the pancakes. It made her furious. Why did she have to be the only one who remembered? She said, “He gave Ian a ride home and we had to stay by ourselves. Not answer the phone, not open the door—”

Thomas clamped his hands over his ears.

“So when the phone rang we didn’t pick it up,” Agatha said. “And when the door banged we didn’t unlock it.”

Thomas said, “Nee-nee-nee-nee-nee!” but she rode over it. “Mama had to crawl in a window,” she went on, “and she tore her sleeve and she was crying; she was worried we’d been murdered, and then the phone rang again and—”

“Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”

She just had these urges to be evil to him. She couldn’t say exactly why.

The water in the toilet was so yellow now she could hardly see the diaper, so she flushed once more. Then it felt like someone bossy and selfish reached up and grabbed the diaper away from her. She gave a little gasp and let it go. The water rose calmly higher and higher; it reached the rim. She had never guessed what a scary thing a toilet was. Thick yellow water slopped over the edge and spilled across the floor while she stood watching, horrified.

“Mama!” she shrieked finally.

Silence.

The water in the toilet slid down again.

Agatha stepped out into the hall, shaking, and went to her mother’s bedroom door. She gave a tiny tap with her knuckles and then placed her ear to the door and listened.

They used to go straight in without a thought. They used to play among her bedclothes till she woke. But lately they’d stopped doing that.

(You could almost think, sometimes, that their mother wasn’t there behind her face anymore.)

Agatha went on down the hall to the children’s room. As she walked in, she saw Daphne roll onto her stomach and drop like a stone out of the crib. Agatha flung herself forward in a silent rush and caught her — an armload of bare-bottomed, clammy baby. She sank weak-kneed to the floor. Still busily sucking her pacifier, Daphne crawled away to a jack-in-the-box. Thomas sang to his doll, “My aunt gave me a nickel, to buy a pickle …”

All of a sudden, Agatha seemed to see things so clearly. Daphne’s bottom was stained yellow. Thomas’s shirt was splotched with food. The floor was covered with toys and dirty clothes and a cantaloupe rind on a plate beneath a cloud of fruit flies. Milk was dripping down the wall behind the crib.

She stood up and collected Daphne and staggered over to the crib with her and plopped her down. She wrestled Daphne’s diaper around her, being very, very careful with the safety pins, and then she raised the railing and locked it. “Stay there,” she told Daphne. “Put on a different shirt,” she told Thomas.

“What shirt?”

“I don’t care. Just different.”

He laid Dulcimer aside, grumbling, and slid off his bed. While he was rummaging in bureau drawers, Agatha returned to the bathroom and stirred a towel through the puddle around the toilet. Then she hid the towel in the hamper. She went out to the kitchen and put the milk back into the fridge. “Chew, chew, chew, chew, chew, chewing gum,” Thomas sang, while Agatha spread his coloring book on the windowsill to dry. One by one she plucked his crayons from the pool of milk on the table. They were beginning to dye the milk all different shades, lavender and pink and blue. She dumped them into the waste can under the sink.

“What are you doing!” Thomas asked, coming up behind her. He was wearing a green shirt now that clashed with his blue shorts, and it was buttoned wrong besides.

“Button your buttons over from scratch,” Agatha told him. She unfolded a cloth and started wiping off the table.

“What did you do with my crayons?”

“They were all wet and runny.”

“You can’t just throw them away!”

He started rooting through the waste can. Agatha said, “Stop that! I just got everything nice again!”

“You better give me back my crayons, Agatha.”

Their mother said, “Is it still daytime?”

She was standing in the doorway in her slip. Her pillow had made a mark across one cheek and she didn’t have any makeup on. “I thought it was night,” she said. “Is that Daphne I hear?”

“Make Agatha give me back my crayons, Mama!”

But their mother was drifting down the hall, heading toward Daphne’s “Oho! Oho!”

“Stealer!” Thomas hissed at Agatha. “Crayon stealer!”

She put the wet cloth in the sink. “Sticks and stones will break my bones,” she said, “but names will never—”

“You can go to jail for stealing!”

“Is this my little Daphne?” their mother said, back again with Daphne in her arms. “Is this my sweetheart?”

She sat in a kitchen chair and settled Daphne on her lap. Daphne’s diaper was dry but it was so loose it pouched in front of her stomach. The table was clean but it was damp where Agatha had wiped it. Everything looked fine but just barely, like a room where you walk in and get the feeling something was rustling and whispering till half a second ago. But their mother didn’t seem to notice. She stared down at Daphne with her face bare-naked and erased and pale. “Is this my Daphne?” she kept saying, “Is this my baby Daphne?” so it began to sound as if she really did wonder. “Is this her?” she asked. “Is it her? Is it?” And she looked up at Thomas and Agatha and waited for them to answer.

When the hottest part of the day was over, they got ready for their walk to the typewriter store. This was something they’d started doing just in the past few weeks, but already there was a pattern to it. Agatha liked patterns. So did Thomas. Together they hauled Daphne’s stroller out of the coat closet and unfolded it. Daphne watched from the rug, flapping her arms up and down when she heard the wheels squeak. Maybe she liked patterns, too.

They went to see if their mother was ready, but she was shut up in her bathroom. When she came out, she wore her white blouse that wrapped and tied at the side and her watery flowing India skirt. She blotted her lipstick on a tissue and asked, “How do I look?”

“You look nice,” they both told her.

From the living room, Daphne made a fussy sound. Their mother sighed and picked up her bag. “Let’s go,” she said.

The air outdoors felt heavy and warm, but at least the sun wasn’t beating down so hard anymore. Their mother walked in front, wheeling Daphne in her stroller, and Thomas and Agatha followed. Thomas’s shirt was still buttoned wrong. Agatha’s playsuit bunched at the crotch. She thought she and Thomas should have been dressed up too, if they were trying to make friends with the typewriter man, but that didn’t seem to have crossed their mother’s mind. Sometimes lately there were these holes in the way she did things, places she just fell apart. Like last night, when she got lost in the middle of what she was saying and couldn’t find her way out again. “Do you believe this?” she had been saying. “That I’m back to … back to …” Then she’d just stared. It had frightened them. Thomas started crying and he flew at her with both fists. “Back to nothing,” she had said finally. She was like a record player you had to jostle when it hit a crack. Then she’d said, “I think I’ll go to bed,” although it wasn’t even dark outside and Daphne hadn’t been put down for the night yet.

They passed the house with all the statues in the yard — elves and baby deer and a row of ducks. Agatha wished their own yard had statues, but her mother said statues were common. “Right now,” she said, “the last thing I can afford is looking common.” She talked a lot these days about what she couldn’t afford. Danny hadn’t left them well provided for.

They passed the house that said MRS. GOODE, PALMIST — FORTUNES CHEERFULLY TOLD, but their mother didn’t stop. Agatha was glad. Mrs. Goode was gray all over and her parlor smelled of mothballs. They came to where the shops began, shoe repairs and laundromats. At Luckman’s Pharmacy Thomas and Agatha slowed hopefully, but their mother said, “We’ll go to Joyner’s this time.” She rotated her drugstores because she didn’t want people thinking she bought too many pills. It was a pity, though. Luckman’s had one of those gumball machines with plastic charms intermingled. Thomas and Agatha let their feet drag and sent a longing gaze backward.

Traffic in this area was busier, and the bus exhausts made the heat seem worse. Thomas wore a smudgy mustache of sweat. Each click of their mother’s heels shot something like a little sharp paring knife straight through Agatha’s head.

On Govans Road the long, low front of Rumford & Son’s Office Equipment took up nearly half a block. They stood facing it across the street, waiting for the light to change. Thomas said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if typewriter stores had gumball machines?”

“Well, they don’t, and I don’t want you asking,” their mother said.

“I wasn’t going to ask!”

“Just be very, very quiet, so I won’t be sorry I brought you.”

In the olden days, she didn’t have to bring them places. She’d say, “Oh! I’m going stir-crazy, I tell you.” Or, “I’m getting cabin fever.” She would ask Ian or Mrs. Myrdal to baby-sit, because back then she could afford it. She would go out all afternoon and come home happy and show the children what she had picked up for them — candy bars and lollipops, sometimes even toys if they were small enough to fit in her bag. But now she had to take the three of them everywhere. She took them to her doctor, even, and when she was called inside Agatha had to watch the other two. “Can’t we go back to having sitters?” Agatha would ask, already knowing the answer. The answer was, “No, we can’t. Face the facts, sweetheart: we’re in the Department of Reality now.” Their mother’s favorite thing to say. Agatha hated hearing that and she would cover her ears like Thomas, but when she took her hands away her mother would still be talking. “You think I like having you with me every single second? Think I wouldn’t rather just leave on my own any time I get the notion?”

Their mother loved them, but they kept trying to make her not love them. That was what she told them. “You want me to walk out on you,” she told them, “but I refuse to do it.”

Whenever she said that, Thomas would take hold of some little part of her clothing, down near the hemline where she didn’t notice.

The light turned green and they crossed the street. Their mother’s heels sounded daintier now. When they stepped inside the store, cold air washed over them — lovely, cold, blowing air — and Daphne said, “Ah,” which made their mother laugh. Wasn’t it wonderful how quickly she could change! To laugh like that, her best little husky-throated laugh, the instant she walked through the door! And the typewriter man wasn’t even listening yet, although he came over soon enough. He said, “Why, look who’s here!” You could see how pleased he was. He was a blond, pale man with skin that flushed when he smiled. “What brings you out on such a hot afternoon?” he asked their mother.

“Oh, we were just taking a stroll,” she said. All of a sudden she seemed bashful. “We were passing by and I said, ‘Shouldn’t we visit my typewriter, kids?’ ”

“Absolutely. You don’t want it feeling neglected,” he said.

He beamed down at Agatha. She gave him her biggest smile back, all teeth.

The showroom was filled with desks, and a typewriter sat on each one. Some were big complicated electrics and some were little low-slung manuals. If it were up to Agatha, they’d have a manual. Those looked easier. But her mother’s was electric, with keys that chattered loudly almost before you touched them.

They had first come to this store in the spring, shortly after Danny died. Their mother had decided to be a secretary. “I have endured my very last of the Fill ’Er Up Café,” she told them. “This time I want an office job.” So one afternoon they had walked to Rumford’s, where their mother asked a lady with squiggly hair if she could use a machine to learn to type. “Do what?” the lady said. Their mother had explained that she wanted to sit at a desk for just exactly twelve days and teach herself out of a book called Touch Typing in Twelve Easy Lessons, and she promised that all three children would be as quiet as mice. “Hon,” the lady said, “this is not a secretarial college.”

“Well, don’t you think I know that?” their mother cried. “But how do you suppose I could manage a real secretarial college? How do you expect me to pay? Who would watch my children?”

“Hon—”

“This is all I’ve got to go on, don’t you understand? I need to find a job of some kind, I need to find employment!”

Then the typewriter man came over. “What seems to be the trouble here?” he asked, and the lady looked relieved and said, “This is Mr. Rumford, the owner. He can tell you,” and she walked away. Mr. Rumford had been much more sympathetic. Not that he let their mother carry out her plan (he was really just the owner’s son, he said, and his father would have a conniption), but he admired her spunk and he suggested that she rent, instead. She could rent from this very store and practice in the privacy of her home. Their mother said, “Oh! I never thought of that,” and she took a Kleenex from her pocket and blew her nose.

“Know what I recommend?” the man had said. “An electric. Look at those pretty fingernails! You don’t want to ruin your nails, now, do you?”

Their mother tried to smile.

“A manual, you have to pound down hard,” he told her. “That’s why you see those professional stenographers with their squared-off, ugly, short fingernails.”

Agatha hid her own hands behind her back. Her mother looked up into the typewriter man’s eyes. She said, “But wouldn’t an electric be more expensive?”

“Pennies a day! Just pennies.”

“And heavy, too. I mean an electric must weigh a lot more. And I’m not … I’m all on my own. I don’t have anyone to carry things.”

“Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll bring it by myself, after work.”

“You would do that?”

“It’ll be my pleasure,” he told her. “Let me show you the machine I have in mind.” And off he went, leading them through the rows of desks.

The machine he had in mind was a blue metal hulk with a cord so thick that when he brought it that evening, the only outlet they could plug it into was the one behind the refrigerator. He had to move the refrigerator and pull the kitchen table over so the cord would reach, and then he was red in the face and their mother made him sit down and have a beer. While he was drinking his beer, he showed her the special features — the electric return and the keys that would repeat. “This is just so nice of you,” their mother told him. “I know Mrs. Rumford must be having to keep your supper warm.”

“I’d be mighty surprised if she was,” he said. “We’re in the process of a divorce.” Then he placed her fingers in the right position on the keys — what he called “home base”—and taught her to type a sad mad lad, which made her laugh. When he left he gave her his card so she could call him with any questions.

That night she whizzed through the first five lessons in a single sitting. Agatha woke in the dark to hear the clacking of the keys, and when she came out to the kitchen her mother said, “See how far I’ve gone! At this rate I’ll be an expert in no time.” Agatha went back to bed and slept better than she had in weeks.

The next morning the kitchen table was covered with sheets of typing—pat rat sat hat and pop had a top. Agatha poured Coca-Cola into a glass and added a spoonful of instant coffee (her mother’s favorite way to get herself going) and carried it into the bedroom. Her mother was asleep in her slip with an arm hanging over the edge of the mattress, so it looked like one of those times when she would have trouble waking. But she opened her eyes at just the clink of the glass on the nightstand and she thanked Agatha very clearly. She spent that morning on Lessons Six through Eleven while Agatha, who this once was allowed to skip school, watched over Thomas and Daphne. Lesson Twelve was not important, their mother decided. That was only numerals, which she could go on doing hunt-and-peck unless she had to work for an accountant or something, which she certainly wasn’t planning on. She was planning to work for one of the downtown law firms, something at a nice front desk with flowers in a vase, she said, where she would answer the phone in a la-de-da voice and type letters clickety-click while the clients sat in the waiting room waiting. She demonstrated how she would look — nose raised snootily in the air and fingers tripping smartly as if the keys were burning hot. She was still in her bathrobe but you could see she was going to be perfect.

Around lunchtime that day they walked to Cold Spring Lane and bought a newspaper. They used to have home delivery but now they couldn’t afford it. Once she was hired, their mother said, they’d have home delivery again and they would sit around the breakfast table reading their horoscopes before she went to her office. Agatha had a thought. She said, “But Mama, who’s going to stay with us?”

“We’ll work that out when we come to it,” her mother said, tipping the stroller up onto a curb.

“Work it out how?”

“We’ll manage, Agatha. All right?”

“You wouldn’t just leave us on our own, would you?”

“Have I ever, ever left you on your own?”

Agatha opened her mouth but then closed it. Thomas looked over at her. His eyes filled with tears.

“Stop it,” Agatha told him.

He stood in the middle of the sidewalk and his face crumpled up.

“What in the world?” their mother asked. She turned to stare at him.

“He’s just … feeling sad,” Agatha explained. She didn’t want to remind her about Danny.

At home, their mother had spread the paper across the coffee table and circled every secretarial ad — dozens of them. The problem, she said, was not finding a job but choosing which one. “If I’d known how easy this was I’d have done it years ago,” she said. Then during Daphne’s nap she took the paper off to the bedroom telephone. For a while her voice murmured: “Da-dah? Da-da-dah? Da-de-dah-da …” Finally a long quiet spell. Thomas and Agatha looked at each other. They were watching soap operas with the sound turned off. Thomas took his thumb out of his mouth and said, “Go see.”

So Agatha went to tap at the door. No answer. She turned the knob and peered through the crack. Her mother was sitting against the headboard with the telephone on her lap. She was staring into space.

“Mama?” Agatha said.

“Hmm?”

“Did you find a job?”

“Agatha, do you have to keep pestering me? Isn’t there any place in this house where I can be private?”

“Maybe there’ll be something tomorrow,” Agatha said.

“Well, even if there is,” her mother said, “I’ll lose out the minute I tell them the truth. These people just want you to lie. They practically beg you to lie. ‘I’ve got thirty years’ experience,’ they want me to say. Even though I’m not but twenty-five.”

“Should I bring you a Coke, Mama?”

“No, just let me get on with this. I’m going to try a couple more.”

Now what they heard from the living room was louder and firmer, though still no easier to make out. “Dah-da. Dah-da-da.” And when she came to stand in the doorway, she was smiling. “Well,” she said, “I’ve set up an interview.”

They could tell it was something they should hug her for.

That evening she practiced her typing — little rushes of clacks separated by pauses when she had to make capital letters. She let Agatha phone Passenger Pizza even though they couldn’t afford it. And the next morning she took them to stay at Grandma Bedloe’s while she went to her interview. Grandma Bedloe said, “Doesn’t Agatha have school today?” but their mother said, “Her head was hurting.” She gave Agatha one of her secret looks — not a wink but more of a twinkle, without a single muscle moving. Then off she went to the bus stop, wearing the rose-colored suit she had married Danny in. Grandma Bedloe said, “She is way overdressed.” This worried Thomas, you could tell. His thumb homed in to his mouth and he glanced at Agatha. But Agatha had seen how perky their mother looked spiking down the front steps with her hair flouncing over her shoulders, so she wasn’t concerned. Anyhow, of all people to talk! Grandma Bedloe in her slacks and a man’s plaid shirt, with the skin beneath her eyes grown so loose and droopy and pleated since Danny died.

When their mother came back, she was walking more slowly. “How’d it go, dear?” Grandma Bedloe asked.

“Fine,” their mother said.

“You got the job?”

“We’ll have to see.”

“When will they let you know?”

“It may be a while,” their mother said, and she didn’t seem to move her lips as she spoke.

She wouldn’t stay for lunch. She said she had to get Daphne home for her bottle. “This is why I think your Aunt Claudia’s so smart to breast-feed,” Grandma Bedloe told the children, and their mother spun around from settling Daphne in her stroller and said, “Well, I don’t breast-feed. All right? I never breast-fed a one of them and I don’t intend to start now!”

Grandma Bedloe said, “Why! Lucy? All I meant was—”

“Some people can let themselves get saggy and baggy but I don’t have that luxury. I can’t afford to take anything for granted in this life, I’ve learned. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that. You think I enjoy this? Watching my weight and painting my nails, never letting my guard down, always on the lookout for split ends?”

“Split ends?”

“Oh, forget it. Thanks for keeping the children,” their mother said, and she took hold of the stroller and pushed it through the door.

On the way home, she wouldn’t talk. Or she talked, but only to herself. “Snob!” she whispered once. She stalked behind the stroller awhile and then whispered, “Conceited!” Agatha thought at first she meant Grandma Bedloe (who had never acted like a snob that she knew of and was not a bit conceited). But then their mother said, “Just tell me what words per minute have to do with anything!” So Agatha knew it must be someone at the interview.

At home, their mother left Daphne in her stroller in the middle of the kitchen while she phoned the typewriter man. “You can come and fetch this machine of yours,” she started right in. “Pick it up and haul it back. I’ll be glad to see the last of it. What? This is Lucy Bedloe. You brought me a Smith-Corona day before yesterday.”

He must have said something. She paused. Unsmiling, she made a short laughing sound. “Oh, really. What a thing to say,” she said.

Another pause.

Another laugh, this time a real one.

“You surely know how to brighten up a person’s mood,” she said.

Then she sat down on a kitchen chair and told him about her awful morning, this woman in charge of hiring who’d acted SO uppity and hoity-toity … So anyhow, she said. Would he please come and get his machine? She should have realized she wasn’t the type for an office.

He came after work and he stayed for supper. She made him an omelet. She set two of the least bent candles in the center of the table. “This is delicious,” he said after his first mouthful.

She said, “Oh, no, really, you caught me without any groceries. You should see what I usually fix.”

What she usually fixed was Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, but Agatha knew she didn’t mean it as a lie. It was more like a politeness. Trying to help her out, Thomas and Agatha kept their eyes on their plates and ate extra neatly.

He took the typewriter away with him when he left, but he told their mother not to feel discouraged. “Want to know what I think?” he asked. “I think someone’s going to jump at the chance to hire a gal like you. All you got to do is bide your time — that and keep your skills up. Sure you don’t want to hang onto this machine?”

“I can’t afford it,” she said.

“Tell you what: I’ll hold it for you. You liked this model, didn’t you? I’ll hold it in the showroom a while in case you change your mind.”

“Well, that’s very thoughtful,” she said.

So now she had her own machine at Rumford & Son’s, which they went regularly to visit. And at first she really did type on it. She sat down at the desk and showed the man she still remembered her pat rat sat hat. But then she started just talking about her typewriter. She asked how it was getting along without her and he said it looked mighty lonesome and she laughed and changed the subject. Today, for instance, she discussed the weather. She said how some people had all the luck, working in an air-conditioned building; how at home she slept with nothing to cool her off but a fan; how she had to slide out of her negligee halfway through every night on account of the heat. She scooted the stroller a few inches forward, a few inches backward, forward, backward, over and over, speaking in her slow, scrapy voice and every so often laughing when the typewriter man said something funny.

Thomas crawled under a desk and told Agatha it was his house. The typewriter on top was so little and cute that Agatha started punching the keys. She had to punch really hard because it wasn’t electric, and Thomas complained about the noise. He said, “This is my house. You go somewhere else.” Agatha pretended not to hear. She typed agatha dean 7 years old baltimore md usa. Thomas shouted, “Stop that racket on my roof!” and reared up and bumped his head. When their mother heard him crying she broke off her conversation and turned. “Oh, Thomas,” she said, “now what?” But the typewriter man didn’t seem cross. He said, “Why, what’s this? Two customers in need of my assistance,” and he helped Thomas out from under the desk. “Something I can show you, sir? Some question I can answer?”

Thomas stopped crying and rubbed the top of his head. “Well,” he said. He thought a moment. He said, “You know how people have those blood veins one in each arm?”

“Blood veins, ah …”

“So how come any place you prick will bleed? Wouldn’t you think there’d be places that don’t?”

“Ah, well …”

“I apologize for this,” their mother said. “They promised they’d behave. Come on, children, I’m taking you home.”

“No, Mama! I behaved!” Agatha said. She didn’t want to leave the air-conditioning.

But her mother said, “Nice talking with you, Murray.”

“Hurry back, okay?” the man said, and he walked them to the door. Agatha could tell he was sorry to see them go.

Out on the sidewalk their mother started humming. She hummed “Ramblin’ Rose” while they waited for the traffic light, and she took them to Joyner’s Drugstore for Lifesavers. Just trailed her fingers across the candy counter, brush-brush, nothing to it, and dropped the two rolls in her bag. Then she twinkled her eyes at Thomas and Agatha. They giggled and she instantly looked elsewhere as if she’d never met them.

While she collected her prescription, Agatha rocked the stroller because Daphne was starting to fuss. Thomas dawdled up and down the aisles, hunting dropped coins. At Luckman’s he’d once found a nickel and put it in the gumball machine, but all he got back was gum. He’d been hoping for a set of silver plastic handcuffs the size of finger rings.

The pharmacist saw them to the door, saying, “Still hot out there?” Thomas and Agatha smiled up at him, remembering to look attractive — Thomas not sucking his thumb, Agatha not letting her mouth flop open — but their mother said, “Mmhmm,” and wheeled the stroller on through without a glance. You never could be sure, with her, who you had to be nice to and who you didn’t.

Standing at the front window and holding back the curtain, Agatha watched for the first star. In the summertime she had to be alert, because the sky stayed light for so long that the stars would more or less melt into view. Agatha knew all about it. She waited at this window every night. Sometimes Thomas waited too, but he wasn’t nearly so faithful. Also he said his wishes aloud, no matter how often she warned him not to. And he wished for definite objects — toys and candy and such — as if the sky were one big Sears, Roebuck Christmas catalog. “Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight … I wish for a front-end loader with real rubber treads on it.”

Agatha, on the other hand, wished silently, and not even in words. She wished in a strong wash of feeling, instead. Let everything turn out all right, was the closest she could put it. Or, no, Let us be safe. But that was not exactly it either.

She looked from the sky to the street and saw Ian and Grandma Bedloe coming up the sidewalk. Ian carried a picnic basket covered with a red-checked cloth, and Grandma Bedloe carried a cake tin. Agatha loved Grandma Bedloe’s cakes. She made one last sweeping search for her star and then gave up and ran to answer the doorbell.

“Hello, dearies,” Grandma Bedloe said, and she kissed Agatha first and then Thomas. It was just since Danny died that she’d started kissing them. It was just since Danny died that she’d dried out so and shortened, and begun to move so stiffly. But the stiffness was rheumatism, she said: her knees acting up. A matter of humidity.

“See what we brought you!” she told them. “Devil’s food cake and fried chicken. Where’s your mother?”

“She’s having a nap.”

“A nap?”

She glanced over at Ian. He wore his most faded jeans and a plain white T-shirt; he must have just got off work. Agatha thought he resembled those handsome teenaged hoodlums on TV. She wished the girls at school could see her once in his company, but it never seemed to happen.

“I hope you haven’t had supper yet,” Grandma Bedloe said. “Has your mother started anything cooking? How long has she been in her nap? Does she usually nap at this hour?”

Each question brought her further into the house. She pressed forward, passing Thomas and Agatha, heading for the kitchen, where she set the cake tin on the table and turned to look around her. “Oh, my, I’d say she hasn’t started cooking,” she said. “Goodness. Well. Try and make space for that basket on the counter, Ian. Agatha, dear, shall I put a few of these dishes to soak while you wake your mother?”

“Or we could eat without her,” Agatha said. “We could let her rest.”

“No, no, I’m sure she’d want — where’s Daphne?”

“In her crib,” Agatha said.

“She’s napping too?”

“No, she’s just … Mama just set her there a while.”

“Well, let’s go get her!” Grandma Bedloe said. “We can’t leave our Daphne all alone, now!” And off she went, with Thomas and Agatha following.

In the children’s room, Daphne poked her nose between the crib bars and cooed. “Hello, sweetness,” Grandma Bedloe told her. She picked her up and said, “Somebody’s sopping.” Then she looked at the supplies lined against the footboard — a filled nursing bottle, a plate of darkening banana slices, and one of the breadsticks Daphne liked to teethe on. “What is all this?” Grandma Bedloe asked. “Her lunch? Her supper? How long has she been in here?”

“Just a teensy while,” Agatha said. “Honest. She just did get put down.”

“Well, I’m going to change her diaper and dress her in some nicer little clothes,” Grandma Bedloe said. (It was true that Daphne’s undershirt didn’t seem very fresh.) “You and Thomas go start your suppers.”

So they went back to the kitchen, where Ian was unpacking the basket. He didn’t ask what parts of the chicken they preferred. Agatha had been going to say the keel, a word she’d heard last week at a fast-food place. “I’ll have the keel, please.” Whatever that was. She figured it might make Ian stop and notice her. But he served each of them a drumstick without a word and went to the refrigerator for milk. He filled two glasses and thought a minute and then bent forward and sniffed. Then he took both glasses to the sink and poured them out. Agatha pinched a piece of crust off her drumstick and placed it in her mouth, meanwhile waiting to see what other drink he would offer. But he didn’t offer anything. He just pulled out a chair and sank down onto it.

“Aren’t you going to eat too?” Thomas asked him.

But he must not have been listening.

“Ian? You can have our mama’s share. I bet she won’t be hungry.”

“Thanks,” Ian said after a pause. But he didn’t reach into the basket.

Grandma Bedloe was talking to Daphne. “Now, doesn’t that feel better?” she was saying. “Let’s go show Mommy.” She knocked on their mother’s bedroom door. They heard her turn the knob and walk in. “Oh, Mom-mee! Look who’s come to see you, Mommy.”

Their mother gave one of her sleep-moans.

“Lucy?” Grandma Bedloe said. “Are you all right, dear?”

Poor Grandma Bedloe. She didn’t know their mother had to wake on her own. Finally she came back to the kitchen, carrying Daphne in a white knit romper that showed off her curly black hair. “Does your mother tend to sleep like that till morning?” she asked.

Agatha said, “Oh, no.” She was glad to be able to tell the truth. “She’ll get up again! Don’t worry! She wakes up after dark and then she’s awake all night, just about.”

Grandma Bedloe settled Daphne on her hip. She said, “I certainly hope …” Then she said, “I wouldn’t blame her a bit, understand …” Finally she said, “Tell me, Agatha, do you think she might be taking a little too much to drink?”

“Drink?”

“I mean, alcohol? A beer or two, or wine?”

“No,” Agatha said.

“I hope you don’t mind my asking. And you know I wouldn’t blame her. We all like a little cocktail now and then!”

“Mama doesn’t,” Agatha said.

“Well, that’s something,” Grandma Bedloe said with a sigh.

Then she started pestering Thomas to eat his chicken. She claimed he was skinny as a sparrow. Come to think of it, he was kind of skinny. But she was wrong about the cocktails. Their mother never drank at all. She said drinking made her say things.

She also said that dead people don’t really leave us; they just stop weighing anything. But Agatha didn’t know who was right there, her mother or Grandma Bedloe, because when she’d asked Grandma Bedloe why they had needed six people to carry Danny’s coffin, Grandma Bedloe said, “What do you mean?” Agatha said, “Couldn’t just one person do it? With just the tips of his fingers?” Grandma Bedloe said, “Why, Agatha, he was a full-grown man. He weighed a hundred and seventy pounds.” Then she had turned all teary and Grandpa Bedloe told her, “There, hon. There, hon.”

“He used to say he was getting a paunch, and he’d have to start watching what he ate,” Grandma Bedloe wept. “He never dreamed how little time he had! He could have eaten anything he wanted!”

“There, honeybee.”

Now it occurred to Agatha that what had weighed so much was the coffin itself. Maybe that was why they’d needed six people.

After supper Grandma Bedloe tidied the kitchen while Ian played Parcheesi with Thomas and Agatha. He held Daphne on his knee and gazed down at the board with a sort of puzzled expression. When Thomas miscounted on purpose, he didn’t even notice. “Cheater!” Agatha told Thomas. “He’s cheating, Ian.”

“Really?” Ian said.

“He should be up in front of you where you could take him off next move.”

“Really,” Ian said.

He had been a lot more fun in the olden days.

When Grandma Bedloe had finished the dishes she came to stand in the doorway, wearing a flowered apron of their mother’s that Agatha had forgotten about. “Ian,” she said, “I cannot in all good conscience walk out and leave these children on their own like this.”

Ian shook the dice in one cupped hand and spilled them across the board: a four and a six. “You hear me, Ian?” his mother asked.

Agatha watched their faces, hoping. They could stay, she wanted to tell them. Or they could take the three of them home with them. But then what about their mother?

“Maybe you could bring her too,” she suggested to Grandma Bedloe.

“Bring who, dear?”

“Maybe you could bring us all to your house. Mama too.”

Ian moved one man four spaces. Then he reached toward another man.

“If you wrap her in a blanket, she can walk pretty good,” Agatha said. “Stir coffee into her Coca-Cola and make her drink it and then hold her hand; she can walk anywhere you want her to.”

Ian’s fingers stopped in midair. He and Grandma Bedloe looked at each other.

Just at that moment, footsteps creaked in the hall and here came their mother, tying the sash of her kimono. It was the shiny gray kimono she hardly ever wore, not her usual bathrobe, so she must have known there were visitors. Also her hair was brushed. It puffed around her shoulders and down her back, dark and cloud-shaped, so her face stood out brightly. She gave them all her best smile. “Oh! Mother Bedloe. And Ian,” she said. “This is so embarrassing! Caught napping in the shank of the evening! But I took the children on a long, long walk this afternoon and I guess I must have worn myself out.”

Grandma Bedloe and Ian studied her. Thomas and Agatha held very still.

Then Grandma Bedloe said, “Why, my heavens! Pushing a stroller, on a day like today! Of course you’re worn out. You just sit yourself down and let me bring you some supper.”

Agatha let go of her breath. Thomas was smiling too, now. He had a smile like their mother’s, sort of dipping at the center, and he looked relieved. And Grandma Bedloe was moving toward the kitchen, and Ian reached again for his Parcheesi piece. Everyone was relieved.

So why did Agatha suddenly feel so anxious?

It was past their bedtime but their mother hadn’t noticed yet. She was perched on a stool in the kitchen, reading a cookbook and munching one of the drumsticks Grandma Bedloe had left on the counter. “Beef Goulash,” she read out. “Beef with Pearl Onions. Beef Crescents. Agatha, what was that beef dish Grandma Bedloe told us about?”

“I don’t remember,” Agatha said, switching to a yellow crayon.

“It was rolled up in Bisquick dough.”

“I remember she talked about it but I don’t remember the name.”

“Bisquick dough sprinkled with herbs of some kind. She had it at their neighbors’.”

“Maybe you could call and ask her.”

“I can’t do that. She’d want to know who I was making it for.”

Her mother set down the drumstick and wiped her fingers on a paper towel before turning another page. “Beef a la Oriental,” she read out.

“Couldn’t you just say you were making it for the typewriter man?”

“These things are touchy,” her mother said. “You wouldn’t understand.”

That hurt Agatha’s feelings a little. She scowled and kicked her feet out. By mistake, she kicked Thomas. He was drowsing over a plastic cup of grapefruit juice. He opened his eyes and said, “Stop.”

“Always serve a man red meat,” her mother told Agatha. “Remember that for the future.”

“Red meat,” Agatha repeated dutifully.

“It shows you think of them as strong.”

“What if you served them fish?”

“Men don’t like fish.”

“They like chicken, though.”

“Well, yes.”

“If you served them chicken, would they think you thought they were scared?”

“Hmm?” her mother said.

Thomas said, “Mama, Agatha kicked me.” But his eyes were closing again.

“Well, here goes,” their mother said, and she reached for the phone.

“You’re calling Grandma Bedloe?” Agatha asked.

“No, silly, I’m calling Mr. Rumford.”

She dialed in that special way she had, very fast and zippy. She must know the number by heart. She had called two earlier times that Agatha was aware of — one morning while he was at work, just to make sure he didn’t have anyone else; and then one evening, hanging up when he answered. Also they’d gone in person to see where he lived. They’d ridden the bus out to Ruxton in the company of nothing but colored maids; they’d peered through the window at his red brick house. “Deserted,” their mother had said in a pleased, flat voice. “And no one has tended those shrubs in ages.” Then they rattled back to town all by themselves, having left the maids behind.

“Hello?” their mother said into the receiver.

Her forehead was suddenly creased.

“Hello, is this … who is this?”

She listened. She said, “You mean the, um, the wife Mrs. Rumford?”

Then she said, “Sorry.” And hung up.

Thomas said, “Agatha kicked me, Mama.”

Their mother closed the cookbook and stared down at it. She stroked the cover, the golden letters stamped into the cloth.

“Mama?”

“We’d better go to bed,” Agatha told Thomas.

“You’re not the boss of me!”

“It’s time, Thomas,” she said, and she made her voice very hard.

He slid off his chair and followed her out of the kitchen.

In the children’s room, Daphne was asleep. They undressed in the dark, using the light from the hallway. Thomas wanted his cowboy pajamas but Agatha couldn’t find them. She said he’d have to wear his airplane pajamas instead. He climbed into them without an argument, staggering around the room as he tried to fit his feet through. Then he said he had to pee. “Use Mama’s bathroom,” Agatha told him.

“What for?”

“Just do.”

She’d kept him away from the other one all evening. She worried the toilet would flood again.

She lay down in bed and pulled the covers up and listened to her mother moving around the house. Every sound meant something: the TV clicking on and then off, a drawer in the living room opening and then closing, the clang of a metal ashtray on the coffee table. Their mother smoked only when she was upset, holding the cigarette in some wrong-looking way with her fingers sticking out too straight. Agatha heard the scrape of a match, the pushed, tired sound of her breath whooshing forth.

Where were the pills? The popping of the lid off the pill bottle?

At least when she took pills she didn’t fidget around like this.

Thomas appeared in the doorway — a black-and-gray shape against the yellow light. He crossed not to his own bed but to Agatha’s. She had more or less expected that. She grumbled but she slid over to make room. His hair smelled like sugar browning in a saucepan. He said, “She didn’t come kiss us good night.”

“Later she’ll come.”

“I want her to come now.”

“Later,” Agatha said.

“She didn’t read us a story, either.”

“I’ll tell you one.”

“Reading’s better.”

“Well, Thomas! I can’t read in the dark, can I?”

Sometimes she noticed how much she sounded like her mother. Same sure tone, same exasperated answers. Although she failed to resemble her in any other way. At a family dinner last winter Grandma Bedloe had said, “What a pity Agatha didn’t inherit Lucy’s bone structure.”

“Once upon a time,” she told Thomas, “there was a poor servant girl named Cinderella.”

“Not that one.”

“Once upon a time a rich merchant had three daughters.”

“Not that one either. I want ‘Hansel and Gretel.’ ”

This was no surprise to Agatha. (He liked things that rhymed. Nibble, nibble, like a mouse, who is nibbling at my house?) But Agatha hated “Hansel and Gretel.” There wasn’t any magic to it — no fairy godmothers, or frogs turning into princes. “How about ‘Snow White’?” she asked. “That’s got Mirror, mirror, on the wall …”

“I want ‘Hansel and Gretel.’ ”

She sighed and resettled her pillow. “All right, have it your way,” she said. “Once upon a time Hansel and Gretel were taking a walk—”

“That’s not how it starts!”

“Who’s telling this: you or me?”

“First there’s their parents! And dropping breadcrumbs on the path! And the birds eat all the crumbs and Hansel and Gretel get lost!”

“Keep your voice down!” Agatha hissed.

Daphne slept on, though. And in the living room their mother’s footsteps continued. Pace, pace. Swish of kimono. Pace, pace.

The night after Danny’s funeral, she had paced till morning. (Back then she didn’t have her pills yet.) The next day when Agatha got up she found the ashtray heaped with nasty-smelling butts and her mother asleep on the couch. Danny’s picture stood on the coffee table nearby — the one she usually kept on her bureau. He was laughing under a beach umbrella. His eyes were dark and curly and full of kindness.

Agatha never thought about Danny anymore.

“I have to pee,” Thomas whispered.

“What, again?”

He slid out of bed and hitched up his pajama bottoms. “It was too much grapefruit juice,” he said.

Agatha leaned against her pillow and folded her arms and watched him go. The cigarette smoke from the living room made her nose feel crinkly inside. Wasn’t it strange how dead butts smelled so dirty, but lighted cigarettes smelled exciting and promising.

Something nagged at her mind, a bothersome thought she couldn’t quite get hold of. Then she noticed what she was hearing: the flushing of the toilet. Oh, no. She threw back her covers and started out of bed.

Too late, though. Thomas shrieked, “Mama! Mama!” and their mother cried, “Thomas?” Her bare feet came rushing down the hall. Her kimono made a crackling sound like fire.

Agatha decided to stay where she was.

“Oh, my God,” her mother said. “Oh, my Lord in heaven.”

She must be standing in the bathroom doorway. Her voice echoed off the tiles.

“What did you put down that toilet?” she asked.

“Nothing! I promise! I just flushed and the water poured everywhere!”

“Oh, my Lord above.”

Agatha wondered if the toilet was still running. She couldn’t hear it. She imagined the house flooding silently with the murky yellow water from Daphne’s diaper.

“Just go, will you?” their mother said. “Go back to bed and stay there. And don’t you dare use this toilet again till I can get hold of a plumber, hear?”

The word “plumber” sounded so knowledgeable. Yes, of course: there was a regular, normal person to take charge of this situation, and that meant it must happen to other people too. Agatha pulled her covers up. She watched Thomas enter the room and trudge to his own bed. He walked like an old man, huddled together across the back of his neck. He lay down and reached for Dulcimer and hugged her to his chest.

It wasn’t like him to be so quiet. Maybe he had guessed the toilet was Agatha’s fault.

She said, “Thomas?”

No answer.

“Thomas, is the water still spilling over?”

“Doe,” he said, and the stopped-up sound of his voice told her he was crying.

“You want to come sleep in my bed?”

“Doe.”

In the hall she heard their mother’s bare feet heading toward her bedroom, and then a pause and then hard shoes clopping out again — or maybe boots. Something big and heavy. Clop-clop toward the kitchen, clop-clop back down the hall. The swabbing of a mop across the bathroom floor. Well, so. It would all be taken care of.

Agatha relaxed and let her eyes fall shut. She might even have slept a few minutes. She saw sleep-pictures floating behind her lids — a black cat hissing and then Ian rattling his dice and all at once flinging them into her face and causing her to start. Her eyes flew open. The lights were still on, and the radio was playing a Beatles song. Ice cubes clinked in a glass. The cloppy footsteps came down the hall, and there was her mother outlined in the doorway. From the ankles up she was thin and fragile, but on her feet she wore two huge shoes from Danny’s closet. She came over to Agatha’s bed, shuffling slightly so the shoes wouldn’t fall off. “Are you awake?” she whispered.

Agatha said, “Yes.”

She realized that Thomas must not be. His breathing had grown very slow.

Her mother sat on the edge of the bed. In one hand she held a glass of Coke and in the other her brown plastic pill bottle, uncapped. Probably that was what had rattled in the dream; not Ian’s dice after all. She tipped the bottle to her mouth and swallowed a pill and then took a sip of Coke. She said, “Do you believe this? Do you believe a person would just have to fend for herself in this world?”

“Won’t the plumber come help?” Agatha asked.

“Everything is resting on my shoulders.”

“Maybe Grandma Bedloe knows a plumber.”

“It’s Howard Belling all over again,” her mother said, which was confusing because, for a second, Agatha thought she meant that the plumber was Howard Belling. “It’s the same old story. Unattached, they tell you. Separated, they tell you — or soon about to be. And then one fine morning they’re all lovey-dovey with their wives again. How come other people manage to have things so permanent? Is it something I’m doing wrong?”

“No, Mama, you didn’t do anything wrong,” Agatha said.

Her mother tipped another pill into her mouth and took another swallow of Coke. The ice cubes sounded like wind chimes. She raised one foot, her ankle just a stem above the clumsy shoe. Agatha thought of “Clementine.” Herring boxes without topses, sandals were for …

“No wonder men aren’t afraid of things!” her mother said. “Would you be afraid, if you got to wear gigantic shoes like these?”

Yes, even then she would be, Agatha thought. But she didn’t want to say so.

Her mother bent to kiss her good night, brushing her face with the soft weight of her hair, and then she rose and left. Her shoes clopped more and more faintly and her ice cubes tinkled more distantly. Agatha closed her eyes again.

She tried to ride away on the beat of rhymed words—herring boxes without topses and Johnny over the ocean, Johnny over the sea, Johnny broke a milk bottle, blamed it on me.

Nibble, nibble, like a mouse, she thought. Who is nibbling at my house?

She kept repeating it, concentrating. Nibble, nibble … She fixed all her thoughts upon it. Like a mouse … But no matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t push back the picture that kept forming behind her lids. Hansel and Gretel were wandering through the woods alone and lost, holding hands, looking all around them. The trees loomed so tall overhead that you couldn’t see their tops, and Hansel and Gretel were two tiny specks beneath the great dark ceiling of the forest.