I said. I’d heard a line like that in the movies; people in the movies were always saying they didn’t have anybody to turn to. I pictured them spinning round and round, turning, as the people they knew became a blur, impossible to pick out.
He looked out the window. “When did this happen?”
“Last month. She came home early — we thought she was away, on one of her retreats, but she came home, and… she saw our dad….”
“He was fornicating with Elena,” Jamie said. He looked at Muddie when she gasped. “Well, we might as well tell him.”
“Elena?”
“She used to cook for us,” Muddie said in a hushed voice. “In the summers, and weekends, when Delia was away. But now she’s just our friend. She’s… Portuguese.”
“Anyway, she wants to take us away from him, and it’s not fair at all,” I said. “If you could only help us somehow. Da said you’re important, that you know how to get things done. He says you’re a great man,” I added, even though Da had said no such thing.
Nate focused his attention on me. I clasped my hands together. The time had gone when I could rely on being cute. I was twelve, with bony knees and a skinny face. My red hair made me look freakish now, I was certain. But I tried to conjure up some semblance of my old adorableness.
“If I help you, you’ll owe me a favor,” he said to me. “You understand?”
He was looking at me seriously, not humoring me, the way adults usually did. I nodded.
“Shake on it?”
I put my hand in his. I remembered to grip it hard. We shook.
“All right, then. It’s a deal.”
There was a sharp rap at the front door.
“Well,” Nate said. “It appears that this is my busy day.”
We heard the murmur of voices and we exchanged a panicked glance. It was Da. If we could have scrambled out the back window, we would have.
Da followed Nate into the room. One look told us how much trouble we were in.
“I’ll deal with you lot in a bit,” Da said to us. “Go outside while I apologize to Mr. Benedict.”
“Jimmy, it’s all right,” Nate said. “The children are upset. They have a right to be.”
“It’s family business, Nate, and none of yours.”
“Why not, if he can help us?” I burst out. “It’s not like you’re doing anything!”
“Kitty Corrigan!” Da roared. “Mind your manners!”
“I’ll mind them outside, if you don’t mind,” I said primly. I walked out with all the dignity I could. Nate Benedict had treated me like a grown-up, and I wasn’t about to let Da turn me back into a child.
But we were desperate to hear what Da would say, and so instead of waiting outside on the sidewalk, we followed the concrete walk on the side of the house to a backyard, hoping to sneak near the open window.
On the patio was a round table and chairs, and a boy sat on top of the table with a camera, aiming it above at the sky. He heard our footsteps and turned, and I remembered him from the night we’d had ice cream. Billy.
We approached him warily. We knew, the whole city knew, that his cousin Michael had been killed in a car crash just a month or so before. He’d been sixteen, just two years older than Billy. Hundreds of people had attended the funeral. We didn’t know his cousin and didn’t know him, but the death of a young relative was serious enough to make us kinder than we might have been normally.
“Hello,” I said. “That’s a nice camera.”
He looked down at us, and I figured he knew who we were.
Ignoring us, he put the camera back up against his face. That was okay, that was fine — we were in his neighborhood.
He turned and looked at me through the camera. “Whatcha doing?” I asked. “Shooting birds.”
I’d never seen a camera like that before, with dials and gears and levers. And people didn’t take photographs much — it was too hard to get film during the war.
“What kind of camera is that? A Brownie?” I asked, even though I knew it wasn’t.
He snorted. “It’s an Argus C3.”
I hoisted myself next to him. “How do you get film?”
“My dad gets it.” He lowered the camera.
I looked down at the camera, then back up at him. For a moment, we looked into each other’s eyes. Something ran between us, like we each had hold of a string by the end