She would lie listening to her mother’s cries, pips of birdsong as if broken out of her. Then long silence. She would not listen to his chuffing, his entreaties. Then again, finally, the pips blown out full, terrible cries of unbearable pain. Pain Joey could not imagine but felt appropriate and did not know why. After she heard the door close after him she would wait some more and then go out through the blanket curtain to her mother, who would be settled back against the bedstead or sitting up at the table in her robe, her face slack, her eyes open without seeing and nothing beyond this to explain the torture. As if it had left with him. With nothing to explain the ways she’d taken part.

“In a way those were the good times,” she told him. “That first year, year and a half, when she still had hope. But somewhere in there she allowed herself to see what that cocksucker lawyer was up to. Maybe she just learned it bit by bit. But she wasn’t the only stone widow in that town so she might have heard things more directly. And then things kind of came to a head with me and she made some choices and changes.”

“What happened with you?”

“I got into some mischief. She moved us out of the hotel and into a rooming house down there near where you were staying and worked a deal with the landlady to sweep and clean the slop jars and such each morning and then went off to work up at the bakery. Evenings she did piecework in the set of rooms we had fourth floor up under the eaves. Broiled in the summer and froze in the winter but it was cheap. And part of the deal was the bitch owned the place was to watch out after me. She and me came to understand one another real quick over that; she didn’t want to do it and I didn’t want her to. I went my own way and whatever I did it was up to me not to let Mama hear of it.”

“What was the mischief you got into in the first place?”

She rolled onto her side to face him, both still lying to watch out the window but with a blanket pulled sideways off the bed to cover them over. “I pooped in a sack and carried it uptown along with some farmer’s matches I’d gotten somewheres and climbed the stairs to Evan McCarson’s office and set the bag alight there before his door and then rapped on the door so someone would come out—him, I thought—and stamp out the fire.”

“That’s an old trick.”

“I guess so. It was new to me. And I made the mistake of standing watching and waiting.”

“You didn’t run off?”

“I wanted to see the look on his face.”

“How’d that go?”