Donna was waiting when Matt came home. The boys were in bed and, speaking of miracles, asleep. Donna hugged him. “I heard.” She didn’t say from whom. She looked at his bandage, not underneath it, and pressed her temple hard to his, opposite the wound. She smelled of sage.
Before he could reply, she slipped from his arms and turned to the Rafferty girls, offering drinks, blankets, taking their threadbare coats. The teakettle cried from the kitchen and she swept back bearing a tray of mugs of chamomile and honey with a drop of whiskey in each. Ellen and Hannah accepted. Claire refused the tea, asked for water instead. Sandy Sforza waited by the front door, out of the way. Matt got her a beer. She drank half as Donna woke Peter and hustled him to his brother’s room—the oldest gives the most, Donna said when Peter groaned. The girls would have Peter’s bright green room, with its narrow bed and a low bookshelf that bore only textbooks and a heavy rubber sphere for ullamal. The bed slept one; Donna made Hannah a pallet on the floor with good blankets and a stiff pillow. Claire took the couch.
“You’re okay,” Sandy said. Matt didn’t know if it was a question, but he answered yes anyway. “I can’t stomach the rest of this.” She passed the beer back, gave him an open half hug to spare her ribs where Corbin had hit them.
Donna waited until they were in bed, lit by one candle and the city outside their window, to let her mask slip and the worry show. She rolled against Matt beneath their thin sheet, draped her arm across his belly, and squinted at his bandage. “He did that with a cane?”
“He was out of his head. When Sandy stepped in, he went for her. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“The boys will tell everyone,” she said. “You haven’t fought in a long time.”
“Haven’t had to. How was work?”
“The usual,” she said. “Sums and more sums, and sums for dessert. Will the girls stay with us long?”
His back hurt. Not because of the fight; his back had been hurting lately, was all. “I know quarters are tight.”
“They can stay as long as they need,” Donna said. “I wanted to know if you saw them going back to their father.” She said the last word as if she doubted it applied.
“He’s worse than I knew.” Which was a lie. He’d just not seen how bad. Drank with him plenty, and worked beside him, beside the girls, for years both before and after the mother left. He rolled the sheets off him onto Donna so he lay bare to the darkness of their closed room. “I love you,” he said, and kissed her.
“Of course you do,” she said. He got out of bed. She didn’t ask why. If she’d asked, he would have said he needed a glass of water. That would not have been a lie, but it would not have been the complete truth. He did not know what he needed.
He tied the belt of his robe and opened the door to the living room slowly so the sound of the latch did not wake Claire. He padded past the couch. She curled strangely on the cushions under her sheet, her head propped against the armrest so if her eyes were open she could see the front door, and Matt’s. But her eyes were closed, and she was still.
He poured a glass of water he didn’t want to drink. By habit he went back to the living room to sit, then saw Claire beneath the blanket, and turned back toward the kitchen. “You don’t have to go,” Claire said. Her voice was low, but she wasn’t whispering. She sounded as flat now as she had in Sandy’s wagon. “This is your house. You can sit.”
“This might be my house,” he said, “but it’s your room for now.”
She shifted on the couch.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I knew he was an angry man.”
She sat up, keeping the blankets tight to her neck like a barber’s smock. “He’s sick.”
“I knew he drank. Looked like he kept the business together okay. That was all.”
“I kept the business together,” she said. “And took care of him when he came home. Made sure the girls were out of the way when he got angry.” Girls, she said, as if she wasn’t one. Maybe she wasn’t. Maybe she hadn’t had room to be.
The front door, he noticed, was ajar, as was the door to Peter’s room where the girls were sleeping. He swore. Water sloshed onto his hand; he set the glass down and reached for his shoes. “What’s happened?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Ellen’s gone to the roof to talk to the moon. She does that sometimes. Listen.”
He did. Donna had left the kitchen window cracked to let the apartment breathe. Outside, wind slipped between fire escape bars and kicked cans down the street. Above its whistle he heard singing.
He started to say, she’ll wake the neighbors, or, people are trying to sleep. “She’s good.”
“Yes,” Claire said. “I thought she made it all up at first: the moon and the prayers. I had the same dreams, but that’s all I thought they were. She was lonely. I thought she was cracked—she couldn’t handle him, she couldn’t toughen like me or hide like Hannah. But she sings to the moon, and maybe the moon sings back. What do you make of that?”
“I don’t know,” Matt said.
“Mr. Adorne,” she said. “When will you go to work tomorrow morning?”