“I used to take the train down to the city on my days off,” Quinn says. She knows Alice is trying to distract her. She puts one hand on Alice’s arm and loops her other arm around her waist. She still doesn’t like her. But they’re out here together. She thinks maybe if she talks long enough about her daughter, Maddie will appear. “This lady,” she says, “used to watch Maddie when I worked, but I never knew what I was supposed to do with her all that other time. I had a good stroller someone gave me, one of my old coworkers at the restaurant got it from her rich cousin. I took the train down to Manhattan. Off-peak. When the conductor came by I’d nurse Maddie and, if it was a guy, he’d just say no worries, he’d come back, but he’d never come back. I took her to the Met because you got to pick how much you paid and I’d pay a dollar. The ladies at the desks sometimes would look at me funny, but what the fuck did they know about my life. I spent hours in there. I’d never been to a museum, at least not one like that. I wanted her to have all that stuff inside her. Like, I thought it would just stick. I thought maybe then she’d think she was a person who had a right to stuff like that. It sounds dumb, maybe, but you know that big room with all the sculptures and the light? In the front, when you first walk in, there are these little-kid statues chasing birds that always freaked me out. But I’d sit in there, take her out of the stroller and face her forward on my lap. I thought she liked it. I guess it’s like your job to think your kid is smart; she couldn’t even talk yet, but I was pretty sure she got it. I thought she’d explain it to me when she got big. She’d babble a lot at the hieroglyphics, the big old portraits. Those weird ones? Jean Dubuffet? She had opinions. Just like she still has opinions.” Quinn almost smiles. “Fuck,” she says. “Fuck fuck.”