“Half the other people have already left, and if we leave it for them it won’t get done. The landlady has only got my name. Right now you’ve got to drop me downtown. I have to see Mr. Sing. Pick me up on the way out with the first load. We ought to be able to do it in two trips.”

Carlotta gripped the wheel. Sam reached to the wires and touched something beneath the dashboard. There was a stutter, a wheeze, a loud bang. The engine caught and gasped.

Carlotta grinned at me. “We named it Mr. Jones.”

Sam hopped out in front of the Chinese painting studio, waved cheerfully as he went inside. Carlotta showed me how to touch the wires and then wrestled the car out into traffic. It was slow and loud. The dust from the upholstery coated my tongue, the inside of my mouth. The windows wouldn’t roll down. Carlotta drove barefoot, her long legs fuzzy with hair. The leather of her dress was pale and soft and slid easily over her flesh. She killed the car in front of Sam’s house. My hands were sticky from sweating on the wires.

Carlotta looked at me shyly. “You don’t have to help with the cat shit. He just thought it was a funny story.”

“It’d take you a week to do it alone.”

The newspapers in the living room came up in stiff pieces. When we crumpled them they broke and tore. The bottom layer was sunk into the carpet. We got knives from the kitchen and scraped on our knees. Nobody else was home. Carlotta had shut Angelica in a bedroom, and she howled while we worked.

“I think it’s the piss that smells so bad. The shit dries out and doesn’t seem to smell.”

“Ugh.”

We carried the newspapers outside and laid them next to the piles of garbage at the back door. We scraped up the stony puddles beneath the bathtub and behind the kitchen stove. The smell didn’t go away.

“Do you think we ought to move the sofa out and see what’s behind it?” Carlotta asked.

“No.”

I opened the door to the basement. It was pitch-black down there. The smell was the same, except it was also damp. I closed the door.

Carlotta was crouched under the kitchen table, scraping the linoleum. Her long haunches were up by her shoulders. She rocked back on her heels and smiled at me.

“I think I’m pregnant.”

“Oh.”

She stabbed absently at the floor. “I’m two weeks late. Anyway, I hope so.”

“You want to be?”

“Yes. I stopped taking pills after the first time Omar and I fucked. After that, I wanted his baby.”

“That’s good. I was afraid you were going to ask me for the address of an abortionist.”

“No.”

“How does Sam feel?”