“So you do speak then,” she said, as they walked out to the car.

He nodded and retreated once more into his shyness, pretending to sleep for the whole drive back.

Approaching her house now, she saw him sitting on the porch steps scratching Fifty-Three’s belly. At the sight of her, he snatched his hand away and stood, as if he wasn’t sure he had a right to touch anything of hers.

She cooked him a large breakfast of eggs, ham, and biscuits. When he noticed she wasn’t eating herself, he told her he could make his own breakfast.

“Weekdays it’s oatmeal,” she said.

“Is that the same as porridge, miss?”

She nodded.

He put on a face of comic revulsion, crossing his eyes.

“You can put fruit in it.”

“But I like fruit, miss. Why would I put it in porridge?”

She smiled, which clearly pleased him. He was a nice-looking lad, not gormless like some of those meaty German kids, but alive with guarded looks, the sweetly sly set of his mouth making him seem knowing beyond his years, his slender body jerking and trembling with a twelve-year-old’s misfiring energy. He had the thickest eyelashes she had ever seen, and his hair was so dark it had a blue sheen to it.

All at once it struck her how astonishing it was that he was here. How did she get herself into these things? First the scandal of living out of wedlock with a man ten years her junior; now she had his dark little nephew. She thought about the kind of rumors that were probably spreading: A stranger turns up in town leaving her with this child on the same day her lover kills himself. More difficult still, this Indian boy now sat where Oliver had sat just two weeks ago. How utterly random: one life for another. All at once she felt tremendously alone, and into the vacuum of this rushed her grief for Oliver. She began to clear the food away, though the boy had just started to eat. As she picked up the plate of biscuits, she realized what she was doing. Returning it to the table, she saw that the boy was looking down at his breakfast and had placed his right hand above his eyes like a cap’s brim, as if to give her privacy. His perceptiveness and sensitivity horrified her as she struggled to contain her anger: anger that would surface whenever she became aware of her inability to establish the life and self she wanted, of the immensity of her desire for something. Anger: at Oliver for what he had done, at herself for agreeing to take on this boy, at Haig for entering her life like a virulent and contagious weakness. Damn that damned family. She had never wanted a child, and now, as if from prolonged incubation in this anger and isolation, out of those slow contractions of passionate sadness that had afflicted her ever since she had first been overwhelmed by her desire for a man, had emerged this strange dark boy, blinded by his own hand.