“You’re going to wake your sister. Do you want to sleep here on the couch awhile?”

He hesitates, shrugs. “Not especially.” A grown-up expression, and one he hasn’t learned from her. Maybe from Becky, the girl who lives in the twin building opposite theirs and who, as the babysitter, spends more waking hours with Teresa’s children than Teresa herself does. Becky took them to see Mary Poppins, and Teresa was the one who then had to snap at Matt when he tried to mount the railing of the cement staircase outside the apartment.

I’m not the villain. She wants to say this to her son and write it in the letter to the Ragazzinos, but she can’t, and it makes no difference to Matt; he’s already wandering back toward the bedroom, his white shirt fading into the dark outside the candle’s perimeter.

This may sound strange to you, but I remember the feeling of his calloused fingers closing mine around the handle of a sickle. He set a woven loop of straw on my head and draped a sheet over my torso. He told me there were going to be children in the painting, that they would be at my feet, adoring me.

She’s part of a typing pool for an auto insurance company. She doesn’t make much, but for a while after he took off, Dermot was mailing her cash—sixty, sometimes eighty dollars a month—without a note, wrapped in butcher paper, as if he’d taken a job somewhere cutting meat, though she’s certain he’s gone back to his parents and is probably selling cars in the family business. The first envelope he sent had their return address in Utica, New York.

She knows the Ragazzinos own a car dealership and a few other businesses in Utica. By Dermot’s own description, his stepfather and uncles are a tough Italian family, a business family. Dermot is blond and has no Italian blood at all; he’s the product of his mother’s first marriage, to an Irish electrician. But he acts Italian when he’s angry. “Trust me,” he told Teresa when they made plans to elope. “You don’t want to meet my family.”