Whatever went on behind the Shores’ closed bedroom door, it went on quietly. Annie, on the couch, grinned uneasily, afraid always she would hear something. She tried to distract herself with the books Max gave her to read. They were not the sort that Eva pored over, making notes on a pad. Eva said to Max, “Why are you giving her all that stuff!”

Annie read several Thomas Hardy novels but balked at The Return of the Native. The dialect irritated her. She read Tender Is the Night twice. Eva picked it up off the floor next to the couch and turned it over in her hands. “I don’t know what Max is thinking of,” she said, shaking her head.

When the Shores went out in the evening, Annie took care of Thomas. Along with a small weekly amount she gave Eva for food, it was a way of repaying them. Once he woke, and she and he built towers and stockades in the living room until he lay down and went to sleep beside the blocks. She carried him to his crib, thrilled at the lightness of the small body in her arms, and at the thought of the paralyzing power he exerted during his rages. She covered him and turned on the little night lamp near the crib, then stood dreaming. She would become a nun—in an Italian cloister, vistas of Lombardy poplars, a stone cell, a wooden table, a hard cot, her hours ruled and redeemed by chapel bells.

The Shores did not ask her to go to party meetings, not even those open to nonmembers. She was glad of that. Fern Diedrich, the woman who’d driven her to San Diego, stopped in once for some purpose. “You again!” she said to Annie. Fern looked peculiar. Her glance moved restlessly from table to chair to couch to lamp, never resting on a face. She called Eva “Comrade,” and talked feverishly of the murder of Trotsky—an event about which Annie had no knowledge—which had taken place a couple of months earlier. Fern laughed dryly and coughed. “Your fate catches up with you, even in Mexico!” she said. Max looked sardonic. “Fate? Why, Fern! What kind of word is that for a Marxist!”

The night Annie had arrived, coffee grounds in her hair, she had told Max about Walter, talking for hours about Walter’s friend, Junior, the coffee cup hitting her on the head, the way Walter spoke to her. “He’ll never let me be whatever I am…he doesn’t like me, you see. He can’t stand me…”

“You mustn’t go back,” Max had said. Eva had long been asleep. Max made up the couch for Annie.

In the two weeks before she once more found a job—she had told the Greek she wasn’t coming back that next morning—she tried to locate Johnnie Bliss. She went to the boarding house where he’d lived.