For the first year or so Thierry lived with them, he and Vanessa seemed genuinely in love. He was an attractive man, physically. Even Rat could tell, and grown-ups didn’t hold much interest for her. He was long-limbed and so tall Vanessa barely came up to his chest. He had glossy black hair and curly black eyelashes and by afternoon, his cheeks and chin had a blackish sheen, too.

His brown eyes sparkled like a sunlit stream, giving him a somewhat deceptive air of vivacity. (When he was drunk or had smoked too much dope, they went little and bloodshot, which better expressed his true character, to Rat’s way of thinking.)

He would stare at Rat’s mother with those light brown eyes, as if he wanted to eat her up. And she stared back, scarcely breathing, her cheeks flushed pink.

Rat had never seen her mother so into anybody before, or anybody into her mother, and the experience was unsettling. At night, Rat blasted the radio in the bedroom so she and Morgan couldn’t hear the noises coming from Vanessa’s room. Rat didn’t understand why copulation sounded so much like murder, but it made her grateful to be a kid for a while longer.

Because Vanessa was so happy—because everybody said she hadn’t been this happy since Souad died—Rat wanted to keep an open mind about Thierry.

He definitely brought some order to their home. He mended the broken windowpane on the front door, and installed a new showerhead in the shower.

Thierry’s biggest project was the backyard, which he reorganized with one corner for a laundry line, another for an outdoor table and chairs, and at the far end, a kennel for Vesuvio. The second winter of Thierry’s moving in, he planted a little kitchen garden, so they could eat their own vegetables.

He was a good cook. For him, cooking was a form of self-respect, a way of being a family, and it bugged him that Vanessa would just open a can of stew or shove a frozen pizza in the microwave. When Thierry cooked dinner, there would be a roast chicken or a couscous, salad from the garden. Once he even baked bread. Rat hadn’t tasted homemade bread since Mémé Catherine. When Rat told Thierry his bread tasted great “if you liked sawdust,” he sulked for about a week, and never baked again. He was thin-skinned, for someone who’d had such a rough life.

Thierry always told you how much he loved kids, but it was a dark harassing sort of love. Whatever task Thierry had set himself, he’d try to draft Rat and Morgan and the Cabreras into an auxiliary workforce. His way of nagging you to help, or carping that you’d done it wrong, set everybody on edge. Invariably, by the time they were finished the afternoon’s project, all the kids would be seething.