“Eat anyway,” she said.
Ten minutes later, when Mazarine returned to the shop, she asked if she could do something else.
“You don’t quit, do you.” Delphine grinned.
“No,” said Mazarine. Her voice was shy, but firm. Delphine remembered things she’d heard about the girl’s father, a roamer with something of a name for his bad temper. And the mother, pendulously fat in spite of the lack of food and laid up with sick headaches people said was lazy nervousness. The girl probably knew that the mother had run up a bill here, and this could be her way of doing what she could about it. Or maybe she was just trying to impress Franz. Or be close to him on the days he had to work. Maybe, thought Delphine, there would be some of Eva’s clothes from the trunks upstairs that could fit Mazarine. But then again, that might bother Franz. At the end of the afternoon, she gave the girl a package of smoked turkey drumsticks and some bacon, all wrapped together, and also told her casually, privately, that she’d taken money off her family’s bill. Mazarine flushed, but then raised her head and nodded sharply.
Maybe the girl could use some of her things, too. She had a pair of shoes that didn’t fit right, but they might look good on Mazarine. As the girl walked out the door with Franz, Delphine realized that she was starting to rescue Mazarine. Maybe she saw in the girl a capacity for self-sacrifice similar to her own and wanted to call out a warning. I should stop myself, thought Delphine. The girl really hadn’t asked for it. Plus she had a mother, however half-baked.
ON THE WAY HOME to the Shimeks, they stopped and hid Mazarine’s bicycle, walked through the high brush and into the trees, then up a slight rise to their pine tree. “We should bring a blanket here,” said Franz.
“I can just see us, a blanket on the back fender of the bicycle — try to explain that!”
Franz began to kiss her. He could smell the apple on her breath. Some grains of sugar clung to the dip in her throat just above the lavender collar of her dress. When he licked the sugar from her throat, Mazarine looked up into the branches and tried to hold herself together. She didn’t want to be the first to tell him how she loved him, so she bit her lip. When she felt as though she’d burst, she pushed Franz fiercely over and stared into his eyes a moment. Slowly, she brought her lips down far enough just to graze his. Then she pinched him, let him grab for her. When she fell in a sprawl, she let him lie on top of her, but only until his breath came quick and hoarse. While he still had his eyes closed she rolled away and ran, mocking him, hair flying, toward the road.
IN THE YEAR after her father was released from jail, it seemed to Delphine as though he was being slowly erased. He thinned all over. His skin softened to a ripe peachiness, his eyes blurred. His hair was a candy pale floss sticking straight up on his head. Roy diminished, became almost gamine in his appearance like a small, ancient boy. Those strange unfocused eyes regarded the world with too mutely affable a gaze. Before, the drink made him bold and loquacious. Now, he was dreamy, slow, forgetful and often disturbingly at peace.
Still, he was industrious enough. He spent his mornings at the shop, doing whatever came his way to be done. And then, taking as his pay ten cents and a slice of sausage, he went on to his afternoon position. He began helping Step-and-a-Half with her sortings and haulings, assisted her in picking through town leavings. Together, they ranged across the town plucking scraps from back porches. Step-and-a-Half and he had occasionally worked together between his binges. Now they saw each other every day. They made a strikingly odd pair — she tall and heron-proud, fierce-beaked, fabulous in her collection of skins and rags and he stooped and pale with the roses of shot veins, old whiskey in his cheeks, his skin ever more translucent and fine except for the purple onion of his nose. He began to improve her equipment. Roy constructed a clever light cart out of broken crates, bent hardware, and bicycle tires. One would push and the other holler as they passed up and down the streets collecting all there was to collect, which in those times was dire stuff unless you knew, as Step-and-a-Half did, the banker’s cook, and were accepted at the back doors of the greater and the lesser rich — the former bonanza farms swallowed into the town limits and the shop owners, who stayed in business by only the slimmest margins. By reason of her long-standing fidelity to her trade, she was welcome in these places, and so, now, was Roy Watzka.
Step-and-a-Half’s collaboration with Roy was an irritation to Delphine. She knew that she should have been glad that her father had joined in the pursuit of an honest trade. But to align himself with such a strange character, and thus make himself the subject of more talk, was hard to bear cheerfully, though she made a good show. And, as well, Delphine was sure that Step-and-a-Half disliked her for the mere fact that she had to all appearances taken Eva’s place behind the counter.
Yet there came a day when Step-and-a-Half spoke to her. She came into the shop for her pickings one morning, and didn’t leave after the small ceremony in which Delphine handed her the sausage ends and trimmings. She picked through them with her usual discernment, then Delphine took her choices and wrapped them neatly. There was a kind of snobbishness about her, Delphine thought, an insistence on choosing the best of the worst. And why was she still standing there with the package in her hand, glaring, clearing her throat with a rusty scrape? Step-and-a-Half had a sharp, camphor-ridden, wolfish but not exactly unpleasant smell. This day she wore a fabulous scarf, a broad band of turquoise velvet, in a sort of turban around her head.
“Found a cat,” said Step-and-a-Half.
“Roy told me.”
Apparently, now, she kept a kitten in her stuffed cabin, a little gray thing with tiny fierce teeth. Maybe she wanted milk, thought Delphine. She asked Step-and-a-Half to wait, went to the cooler, and dipped a bit of milk into a cream bottle.
Returning, she handed the bottle across the counter. But Step-and-a-Half only took it with a small nod of incredulous thanks, as though offended by Delphine’s extravagance. She did not turn to leave. For a few moments, she squinted at Fidelis’s ornate diploma from Germany, as though she was reading it. The diploma hung in a heavy, carved wood frame on the wall behind the counter, but the words were German script and too small to make out. Finally, Step-and-a-Half dipped her regal head, crowned with the velvet wrap, and stated directly to Delphine, “They’re making a tunnel down to China.”
Delphine, startled, understood now that Step-and-a-Half was making crazy small talk.
“They’re digging their own graves. You better stop them.”
“All right,” said Delphine carefully, “I’ll stop them. I don’t want any trouble.”
Step-and-a-Half agreed with a sage look. Suddenly she lunged halfway across the counter and peered into Delphine’s face.
“I know his family, the Lazarres. Bunch of no-goods. You watch yourself around that Cyprian and hang on to your money.”
“Who asked you?” said Delphine, mystified. “And I’m the one taking his money, for your information.” She added the last just to stump the other woman, but it didn’t work.
“So you think,” said Step-and-a-Half, turning on her heel. With a swish of robes and a clatter of her man’s boots, she strode banging out the door.
AS THE DAYS grew short, Cyprian appeared at the shop every night and most often had a beer with Fidelis around dinnertime before Delphine finished with her work. Sometimes the three of them ate together after the boys came home — their faces flushed and ruddy with cold, wringing their chapped hands, sweaty from running, dirt sifting from their shoes. While the boys took their baths, Delphine would clear their plates and replace them with new. Then the three grownups would eat whatever Delphine had the time that day to make — riced potatoes, goulash, maybe a cake if she had the eggs. Unsold meat that wouldn’tlast, on the verge, she cooked up, too. Often, Tante joined them, and sometimes Clarisse came around, or Roy or any number of Fidelis’s friends and members of the singing club. Delphine and Cyprian usually left Fidelis and some assortment of people at the table, unless they were practicing, which meant they all stayed late. One ordinary night, as she was in the middle of a shop inventory and had a hundred small items to reorder swirling in her head, Delphine left just the two men, Fidelis and Cyprian, sitting together over the remnants of kidney gravy and mashed potato pie with nothing to distract them from each other but the bottles in their hands.