He’d been smiling but his smile slipped. Then he smiled more broadly: that his sister might know anything was something he could believe for only seconds at a time. “No,” he said. “Real hats. My friend Matthias. He’s, like, a genius.”

That perfect, round beard: it looked like a hatter’s apparatus, come to think of it. A form for the crown of a derby, a tool to bring up the nap of the felt.

“I’ll give you more money,” Mistress Mickle told him.

“That’s not what I’m saying.” He had his hands in his greasy mechanic’s jacket—he who had never been a mechanic. “I don’t need your money.”

“Oh?”

“No,” said Jonas. “That’s why I invited you here. To show you. I don’t need you anymore. Your help, I mean. Look! I’m standing on two feet.” He added, “I think she’s pregnant. She is pregnant.”

“Who? Oh, Irish.”

“Siobhan,” said Jonas. “Yes.”

“So you’ll want the money, then.”

“Listen to me! That’s why hats.”

“Hats,” said Mistress Mickle.

Bickering into the New Year. Typical. They’d heard no countdown, but the turning of the calendar was unmistakable—the syncopation of bottle rockets replaced by whumps, thunderclaps, the crackling aftermath: beauty. Ordinarily Mistress Mickle was afraid of both loud noises and house fires, but the fireworks over Rotterdam—no, she realized, not over Rotterdam, the fireworks over this particular neighborhood—she goggled at them. Nobody was sighing in unison, as in the States. There wasn’t time to sigh. Every inch of the sky was stitched with flash. Fingers were being blown off, and heart attacks induced, and underneath the explosions you could hear dogs of all sizes bark in agonized registers—but how could Mistress Mickle not marvel? She’d never seen anything like it.

She thought of the invisible woman at the science museum, that mannequin who showed her various systems through her Lucite epidermis: circulatory, nervous, respiratory, reproductive, lit up in turn. The fireworks lit up Mistress Mickle: the blond ones her nerves and the white ones her bones, the red ones her heart, the blue ones her capillaries. They cured her. She was not just fine but better. Soon they’d finish, and she’d be new. But they didn’t finish. They kept going. Cured, afflicted, cured, afflicted, cured, until she realized there was no waiting for the end. The Dutch would set them off till the dark was done. Maybe Jonas was right: maybe this was the year he’d stand on two feet. Hope saturated her.

“It’s so good to see you,” she said to him. She’d learned through the years that saying made it so, at least sometimes. “Really, Jone.”

“This is going to be the greatest year of my life,” said Jonas, and she said, “Yes, it will, I know it.”

Not blond but ginger ale. Not ginger ale but champagne.