Little by little, she’d started to love him and now she couldn’t stop. He had become essential to her. She had so much affection to bestow and her own children were there and Bunny was here and they’d forgotten her and Bunny hadn’t and it was such a comfort to have him close, to have him cry for her when she stepped out of the room just for a moment to fetch something and had to sing to him from wherever she was in the house so he could hear her voice and know she was there; that she hadn’t left him.

She couldn’t help wanting to do things for him the way she’d done them for her own children, like putting cereal in his bottle even though she knew Mrs Clay didn’t like it, or feeding him with the silver spoons from the velvet canteen in the dining room because they had a pattern of three small clubs like on a pack of cards and at home in Port-au-Prince they had a metal spoon that had just that same pattern on it that Stanley had liked to chew on when he had a tooth coming, the cold metal on his hot gums.

She couldn’t help wanting to dress Bunny in the soft green sport-shirt she’d bought him instead of in the collared cotton tops he was supposed to wear. It was what she’d have dressed him in if he’d been hers. She hated the collared cotton tops, it was like dressing him in a cardboard box. It made her feel guilty, the nine dollars she’d spent to buy Bunny the shirt instead of sending every last cent home to her grandmother and Stanley and Webster and Yolisha, but the truth was she felt like she loved Bunny now as much as she loved her own children and sometimes it seemed to her that she loved him even more than she loved them. It made her feel guilty but she couldn’t help it, and having lost her own children, it seemed to Cheryl that she could never, now, be made to give up Bunny. Having Bunny close did so much to fill up the big empty space in her heart that when 7:30 came round in the evening and Mrs Clay came bursting in through the door and she had to hand Bunny over and say goodbye she could hardly stand it. He was the only thing that made it possible for her to do this, to live this way.

Out in the driveway Beecham leaned again on the horn and Nancy, finally, picked up her briefcase and her coat and her big leather purse. She kissed Bunny. She breathed in his sweet milky perfume and gave Cheryl her biggest warmest smile and told them both to have a great day and then she left.