He cut her off. “She is nice.”

“I know she is.” Ruth was surprised she had said anything. It occurred to her that she was trying to protect him, but she was too used to self-examination to fall for that. She knew this feeling, though she hadn’t been subject to it for many years. It quite shocked her. She was jealous, not of Nora but of Annie. She admired Annie, but Annie required something absolute in the feelings of others for her.

“Hey.” Sitting down with his food, he changed the subject, “Pela and Olenka got hold of me again yesterday. They lie in wait for me when I’m coming back from school. Olenka thinks I’m a horse. So they get hold of me in the street, tell me they just want me to help them carry their groceries, and I end up cleaning their whole kitchen. Pela keeps telling me what a bad job I’m doing, and Olenka keeps whinnying and shaking her head.”

“No!”

He nodded with a mouthful of eggs. “And when I’m done Pela brings in these big cans of paint and tells me to wash and paint the walls. I’d been there almost three hours already.”

“God, they’ll never change.”

“Anyway, just a warning. I told them I’d do it this weekend, so they’ll probably come around here looking for me.”

“Hope they do,” Ruth said. “I’ll give them a flea in their ear.”

“Lew won’t talk about them. Is it true they adopted his mom?”

“Yes, poor Bella. The sisters—used to be three of them—went out shopping one day and saw a crowd of people at the train station and all these kids lined up under a big banner from the Children’s Aid Society of New York. They picked little Bella out like she was a watermelon.”

“Annie told me once they treated her bad?”

“Badly,” she corrected, and for a moment tiny ardent Bella appeared before her, as she had appeared that day at her door, just married and looking for a friend. She had experienced who knows what deprivations, but had that remarkable expression: intense, grasping, remembering, as if the world were reminding her of a wonderful dream she just had, looking at you as if you had been, last night, a tree heavy with peaches in the desert. But that poor girl had married the desert. Worse than a nightmare, Clyde was like a void in hope. Raj, she saw now, had something of Bella’s look, though it was neither hopeful nor hopeless. You might be a peach tree in the desert, but he was prepared for those peaches to be ashen; that could not hurt him.

“The sisters made her life hell,” she began.