At midday, the kids come home from school. When they’re close he can hear them on the street outside. Laughing. This makes him happy. Walking home in the sunlight, they bring the sun in with them. But inside they go quiet. Paul is the son’s name. Irene, the girl’s. Josef calls her Täubchen, “little dove.” Täubchen is quiet but alert. Her gaze is always on him, and when he returns it she is slow to lower her eyes. He tries to coax her out of her reserve with jokes. Is she too dainty for housework? he asks, as she pores over her schoolbooks at the kitchen table, where Edith is peeling potatoes. He has to fight back the urge to laugh when he sees the offended look she gives him. “How ’bout it, Täubchen, still working on that arithmetic?” he asks a half hour later. “Don’t you have to go to Maikelowski’s and pick up some bread?”

“Michalowski,” she corrects him. Mi-scha-lov-ski, not Mike-a-lov-ski.

He laughs and looks at Edith. “She always knows best. She’s going to drive her husband nuts one day!”

Täubchen doesn’t show any response. But he can tell she’s pleased by what he said.

“You could go get the bread yourself,” says Edith.

“Gladly. Well, off I go to Maikelowski’s, then.”

Later he hears the kids saying, “I haff ta go ta Mikealowski’s.”

He can’t speak decent German anymore. He hadn’t realized.

On the fourth day he’s allowed to hand Edith her tools, though it might only be because, him being a man, she doesn’t dare deny him his natural connection to tools. She kneels by the old wing chair, a gray work apron tied around her waist. The tools lie in a circle around her.

“May I help?”

She looks up, surprised. “I don’t need any help.”

“I know that, Edith. But maybe you’d like some company?”

“I don’t know,” she says, but he’s already kneeling down next to her.

“I can hand you the tools.”

This, even though they’re all lying there within reach. She frowns. But he hands her the scissors, then a pair of pliers, then the scissors again, and looks on attentively as she removes the worn upholstery with a single cut. Then he helps her pull the fabric off the chair, their arms brushing together for a brief moment. “You’re the surgeon and I’m the nurse,” he says, trying to come up with some way for her to think about this whole thing, even if it’s only to break the awkward silence. A sheepish smile flits across her face.