“What’s a boy like you going to do with girlie pearls?” I replied, my voice thick with scorn. “Or are they for your girlfriend?”
Bobby Del Monte studied his scrunched, ratty cap and held still. There’s a kind of person who slows the clock. Who holds too still. Bobby. He hovered at Rose’s door, deciding what to do about me.
“Oh, fine,” I said, and stomped my foot like a petulant child. Grunting and huffing, I reached for the clasp at the back of my neck.
“Don’t,” he said, and he took my empty hand and returned it to my side.
“Crikey,” I blurted. “Guess you want a kiss.”
“No.” He laughed. “No, ma’am.”
“What, then?”
He considered the question. This boy, he moved so slowly. “Just this morning, I was saying to William here, manners are what makes the world go. Good manners,” he said. “Now, you’ve said thank you, not really putting your heart in it. That’s a fact. Second fact: those pearls. You’d rather trade a dozen socks full o’ dimes than see me walk outta here with that necklace, I get that. Now, my side? I did notice on the way in, you’ve got a couple of stalls out back. Monster, he needs a place where soldiers won’t be nosing. They want to use that horse up. I won’t let them. So, here’s the deal and it’s a fair one: I’d stay out of your way. I’m up at dawn, helping with the orphans and earning some scratch elsewhere doing odd jobs. I don’t come home till after dark. I feed myself. We could call it even, two months’ rent, for returning Miss Rose to the nurse of her dreams. Two months and the bottle,” he said, picking it up from where I’d set it on the floor. “That, and a first-class thank-you. I’ll take that too.”
“You mean, you’d live in the stall alongside the horse?”
“I’ve stayed in worse,” he said. “In the stall next to him will be fine.”
I was surprised, delighted, but wasn’t about to show it. “I’ll need a few days to talk it over with my people.”
“Your people?” he asked, looking over my shoulder. “Where are they?”
“Come back in a few days and I’ll give you my answer.”
“I’ll be back at the end of the week,” Bobby said. “But first, don’t you have something to say to me?”
I smiled. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, Anyway.”
The minute the door closed, Pie burst from the kitchen to tell me it was a god-awful idea to allow a boy—an orphan from nowhere—to stay with us.
But Tan nodded to let me know he was fine with the idea. He’d put his eye on that big horse.
Rose in the House
I’d scrubbed and settled her room. Beaten the rugs and pillows, washed the windows with vinegar. Where the panes were missing, I patched the gaps with paper. Her pink bathroom shone with my fervor; her drawers of silk corsets and stockings were tidy with sachets of lavender. There was no extra water or clean linens or cut flowers, yet Rose had all of these things—I made certain of it. The bed changed, clean cotton dressings for her burns. I handled it all. Pie and Tan stayed back—on my strict orders. Much as she longed to, Lifang didn’t dare set foot on the second floor.
All was ready. All except me.
First off, I bathed her. I filled a basin with my day’s water ration and sponged the dried blood from her scalp, her face swollen and purple, the nose pressed to one side, the landscape of cuts and bruises. I changed the dressings on her burns. I was careful, careful as I could be. When she groaned, low, cattle-like, I froze, fearing I’d harmed her worse. I saw all her parts, and all those parts I bathed, as if she were my baby. I cleaned her down there, where she was dark, almost purple. I thought: I’m purple there too. All the mystery that made me, made me dark like her.
I wound the Victrola and played it hour upon hour, happy tunes, for a celebrant who never woke.
Tan arranged for a Dr. Howell to set her arm and leg in plaster-of-paris casts. The doctor had been a regular at The Rose. He came the next day, and each morning that followed, to work off what must have been a considerable debt.
The blow to her eye was serious but she had other injuries. Here and here, Howell showed me, where timbers from the roof had crushed her leg and arm and face. There was swelling on the brain and the swelling needed to lessen before he could remove the eye, which, without the gauze, bulged from the swollen socket.
Dr. Howell gave her less than a twenty-five percent chance.
“Please,” I whispered, never finishing the sentence. Please don’t die.
Those first days I did whatever was needed. But I didn’t sleep in the same room with her. I had my cot in the attic, and for a few hours each night, I fell into a bottomless hole. As if I were the one dying.
I woke with Rogue behind me, asleep against my knees, and a view of the Singer sewing machine. Black, with a walnut case. Its narrow bench seat held boxes of buttons and another box of loose needles, pins, and bobbins. Its wrought-iron foot pedal was shaped like a fleur-de-lis. Its underbelly was a world of black covered wires and gears. Every cord and gear and bobbin played an essential role. I thought: That machine is me.
When Rose awakened, if she did, I decided I’d write my name underneath the Singer, where no one would ever see. I’d write: Vera.
I was just a girl. A scrawny, sharp-tongued girl. When I wasn’t fretting over the money we didn’t have and couldn’t get, or fighting a silent war of wills with Lifang,
