Mary looks at the photograph again. She imagines Roach in her father’s studio over the Chinese noodle factory. All day and all night the sound of the machines drummed underneath the floor. Flour rose like steam through the airshaft. Her father created his best work in that space. She wasn’t allowed to go inside unless he invited her.

Once, she went to the studio after locking herself out of their house and found him asleep in his cot with his arms around another man. The man was young, in his twenties, with a chest as smooth and hairless as a ten-year-old boy’s. Lying so still side by side, their bodies looked as if they had been arranged for composition, the way an artist would display a bowl of fruit. Mary backed out slowly, her heart pounding, and the man opened his eyes. She was not supposed to be there, and the man in the bed seemed to know this, watching her lazily. Her father shifted in his sleep. The man did not move. Mary looked at him for a moment longer and then she closed the door.

Her father never brought his lovers to their house. He never introduced her to any of them. Since he became ill, he seemed to have forgotten that they had never discussed this.

“Look.” Her father points at his leg. The skin is as thin as rice paper. Capillaries spread across in dark thin lines, intersecting like lace. The veins are thick and blue. “I’ve been thinking of donating my body to science.”

“Please don’t talk like that, Pop.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to think about you on a dissection table.”

“I want to be useful,” he says. “I’m sick of doing nothing.”

Mary does not answer him. She has been caring for her father this way for a year. Living in the bedroom she left when she was eighteen. Visitors come when she is working. Dealers and friends of her father who, when she graduated from art school, politely declined to represent her work. At the time, her father had been furious. He wanted her to study in Italy for a year, but she knew, even then, that she would never be an artist; at least not an artist like him.

“How’s Mercedes?” The nurse is their fallback conversation.

“She talks to her friends in Spanish on the phone. As if I don’t understand.” Mercedes is the only nurse in the area who can keep the hours. She is competent and resourceful and always on time, but neither of them likes her. Her father believes she is artless, and Mary is bothered by the way Mercedes touches him, as if he were a chair or a lamp.

“You don’t speak Spanish.”