She got restless waiting. She tore little strips of a magazine cover, one after another, as narrow as she could get them, then she put the magazine back; nobody was watching. She went across the foyer and asked one of the clerks for a dime—just stood there until a woman noticed her, a woman with fluted pink glasses and tiny creases beside her mouth—maybe the same woman who had given her the dimes before. Marya didn’t smile, she didn’t wheedle or even complain that she was hungry, she just asked for a dime, and she was given it, as easy as that, so she treated herself this time to an ice-cream bar from the vending machine. Though the chocolate wafers were stale, the bar tasted even better than the peanut stick: she devoured it in five or six bites.

She left the building when nobody was watching and stood on the steps, not minding the rain. Traffic circling the square, a Greyhound bus with its headlights on, a farmer’s pickup truck that looked like the one her father had junked in the field. . . . She stood watching, staring, seeing no one she knew, expecting nothing. Gusts of wind blew the rain slantwise across the pavement. Then it lifted and the rain seemed to disappear. Then it came back again, stronger. Marya shivered in the cold but she didn’t think it was because of the cold, she was really trembling with hunger.

The secret thing was, she still had Kurelik’s box of cherry cough drops. There must have been four or five candies left, wadded up in the waxed paper, and all for Marya, only for Marya.

Two

TWO

He instructed her to hold still. Not to move. Not to move. And not to look at him either. Or say a word.

Marya froze at once. “Went into stone,” as she called it. And stared at the grimy, partly broken windshield of the old car. And said nothing.

It was only Lee, her cousin Lee, who liked her. Who liked her most of the time. Who meant her no harm. “Stop teasing Marya,” her aunt used to shout at him, “stop teasing Davy: you’re going to hurt him.” But that was in the first months, back when they’d just come to live on the Canal Road and Lee really hadn’t liked them; when he’d whispered one morning to Marya that her mother “better ought” to drown her and her brothers than leave them with people who hated them. Afterward, though, Lee didn’t mind them so much. It was a way of getting on his father’s good side, to pretend to like his young cousins.

He was twelve years old, Marya was eight. He didn’t mean to hurt her and he never really hurt her unless by accident.