A colored girl with a frosted streak in her hair came out of nowhere to her rescue. “You push on one side and I’ll push on the other,” she said.

“Thank you,” Gaby gasped. Between the two of them they managed to reach Phillips Street.

“You saved my life! Won’t you come in for a cup of tea?”

“All right,” the girl said.

They carried in the groceries and took off their coats and dropped them on the couch. The girl wore faded blue jeans and an old sweatshirt. She had high cheekbones and lovely velvet-brown skin. She looked about seventeen. “What’s your name?” she asked.

“Oh. I’m sorry. I’m Gabrielle—” She stopped, hung up about whether to say Pender or Silverstone.

The girl didn’t appear to notice. “That’s very nice.”

“What’s your name?”

“Janet.”

Gaby was standing on tiptoes, reaching for the teapot. “Not Dorothy’s Janet?”

“I have a sister named Dorothy.”

“But we’re friends!”

“Oh?” the girl said, almost without interest.

Gaby brewed tea in the kitchenette for the first time and opened a package of cookies and they sipped tea and had several cookies apiece and talked. Janet lived on Joy Street. “The name was one of the reasons we moved there. Into this big huge house.”

Gaby laughed. “You make it sound enormous.”

“It is.”

“How many rooms?”

“I’ve never counted. Eighteen, maybe twenty. We need the space. I live with an unusually large family.”

“How many people?”

She shrugged. “It varies. Sometimes people go away and sometimes other people come and stay on. I don’t know how many we have right now. Quite a few.”

“Oh,” Gaby said, comprehending.

“It works out quite well,” Janet said, helping herself to another cooky. “Everybody just does his own thing.”

“What kind of thing?”

“You know. Make posters. Or flowers, or sandals. Anything you want.”

“What do you do?”

“I dig. I’m a digger. I go out and bring back food.”

“Where do you get it?”

“Oh, everywhere. Markets and bakeries. They give us stale stuff and spoiled vegetables and things. You’d be surprised how much good is left when you cut away the spoiled parts. And people around here get to know us and give us some things. There are five other diggers in my family. We do fine.”

“I see,” Gaby said faintly. In a little while she took the cups and things and placed them in the kitchenette sink.

“I’d better go return the cart,” she said.

“I’ll bring it back. I’m going there anyway.”

“Oh, no, really . . .”

“You don’t trust me to bring it back?”

“Of course I do.”

“All right, then I will.”

Gaby went into the kitchenette and put a jar of peanut butter and two jars of jam and a loaf of bread and—who knew why?—one of the avocados into a bag. “I’d like to give you these,” she said to the girl, feeling ashamed for no reason she could understand.