“Is Daddy in town?” Marya asked. Her voice always came out louder than she meant. She was afraid her mother would suddenly turn to her and see something she was doing wrong, but at the same time she wanted her mother to look: she hated it when adults didn’t take notice of her: when they looked right through her.

But her mother was wiping the baby’s messy face with a paper napkin and didn’t seem to hear.

Marya didn’t think she was in any danger of falling asleep at the table if she was aware of herself sitting there, the bowl of cereal in front of her. But people were talking nearby—people she didn’t know. In another room. Inside the rain. Men’s voices, a woman’s raised voice, the slamming of car doors, car motors running.

She woke and her heart fluttered because her mother hadn’t seen her: because now there was a stink in the kitchen and her mother had to change the baby’s diaper.

There was sugar on Davy’s cereal but he wanted more, so Marya let him have more, then she poked her finger in the sugar bowl herself and sucked it. She had on two sweaters but she couldn’t stop shivering. It was too early, it was still night, where was her father, why wasn’t the car in the driveway if they were going out . . . ? They would have to get a ride with old Kurelik, or maybe his son. Marya’s father got very angry when her mother asked the Kureliks for a ride, or if she could use their telephone. . . . “I don’t want anybody knowing my business,” Marya’s father said, and Marya’s mother said, fast and mocking, “Nobody gives a damn about knowing your business, don’t flatter yourself.”

But it wasn’t true. Even Marya knew that people talked.

“DON'T YOU START crying,” Marya’s mother warned her. “Once you get started you won’t be able to stop.”

She wasn’t drunk because she didn’t smell of drinking but she swayed and lurched on her feet, and when she zipped up her jacket a strand of hair caught in the zipper and she didn’t notice—just left the zipper partway up. When she lifted the baby she grunted and staggered backward, as if his weight surprised her, and Marya thought, She’s going to drop him and I will be blamed.