“Better take it easy if you don’t want to wear out before the whoop,” said Mags, who was poking holes in a piecrust. She was a plump, wide-eyed, snub-nosed Latina. I would have thought she was about sixteen, if Josh hadn’t told me that her son was twelve. The son, Paulo, was shelling beans at the table. He was tall for his age, dark and thin, and stared at me solemnly every time I appeared.

“That’s all right. I thought I’d stay here.”

“Don’t be a dink. You can’t stay here, and if you did, you wouldn’t have any peace, anyway. Everybody goes who’s not actually dying. If you stay away, they’ll think you’ve got leprosy. Paulo, put those in to boil, gallito. Oh, and slice those peppers into rings for me, please.”

“She’s right,” Josh called, from somewhere beyond the screen door. “You want them to think I did my best, and failed?” He pulled the screen door open and let it bang behind him. His head and shoulders were wet from the pump, and he carried a tub of butter. “As long as you don’t polka, you’ll be fine.”

Their cheerfulness was oppressive. Their assumption that there was nothing that made me different from anyone else in the place except, possibly, my injuries, was alarming. “Nobody will mind,” I said. “I’m not really part of the community.”

Josh turned his head to one side and looked at me, as if he were trying to read me like a thermometer. Then he set the tub down, pulled a stack of flat-bottomed bowls from a shelf, and began to fill them with butter. “If you say you’re not,” he said, “then you’re not. And no one will insist otherwise. But there’s a difference, you know, between being a member of the community and acknowledging that you’re part of that community’s shared experience.

“I know this will sound crazy to you, but showing up tonight — even for a little while — and eating our food and sharing our fire will be taken as an expression of gratitude. No one insists that you be grateful, either, but it would be a nice gesture.”

“I am grateful,” I said, feeling a stirring of distress. “You saved my life.”

Josh’s hands paused over the butter. He raised his eyebrows and opened his mouth, closed it again, then said, “No, never mind. The wrong lecture at the wrong time. Will you come tonight?”

I tried to imagine what I was committing myself to. Would it be more like lunch at China Black’s house, or like the Night Fair? Either one seemed, suddenly, equally frightening. “I’ll come,” I said, because I knew I had to.

“Good,” Mags said. “Then put these in the oven for me, will you? Put a tray under them or they’ll dribble all over. Josh, you better bring those clothes in off the line.”

I took Mags’s advice and lay down in the back bedroom that had changed from the sickroom to Sparrow’s room in the household language. I wondered what would happen if another invalid turned up.