know you see people,” Jimmy said gently, “but I’m really here. I’m real.”

“The beat goes on,” she said to the blank TV.

“I just want to ask you about this house.”

She still wouldn’t look at him. Jimmy took an apple from his pocket. He took a noisy bite. She didn’t look at him but the smell of it suddenly filled the room.

“Any of them ever eat an apple before?” he said.

She glanced at him. He took another bite. From his pocket he produced another apple. He put it on the TV tray beside her chair, the way you put down food for a dog you just rescued and then step back.

She watched the action, then tried to shake it off.

“The beat goes on,” she said, staring ahead again.

Jimmy sang a line of “The Beat Goes On.”

“Any of them ever sing before?”

She gave him a quick look, a flash of impatience.

“Yes . . .”

“Take a bite,” Jimmy said.

She hesitated, then reached for the apple on the TV tray. She took a bite.

“It’s one of those new Fuji apples,” he said. “How do you think they did it? How do you get a brand-new apple?”

She took another bite. “You didn’t knock,” she said. “You said you did.”

“I knew you wouldn’t answer. What’s your name?”

“I can be here,” she said. “I’ve got a right.”

“I have nothing to do with that. What’s your name?”

She looked at him. “Rosemary. Rosemary Danko.”

Jimmy already knew it, before she said it.

“You look like your dad,” he said.

“I’ve got a right to be here. This is where they killed him. I’m not leaving.”

He stepped back, leaned against the wall.

“Where do you get your food?”

She straightened herself in her chair. “Two a.m., I go to the Ralph’s. It used to be a Hughes. They cash my checks and they take my stamps.”

“Are you on medication?”

“They think I live at the other place, over in Garden Grove,” she said. “Sometimes I have to go over there on the Six Bus, to keep them thinking that.”

A cat jumped into her lap. She looked at it a moment, as if she wasn’t sure what it was. Then she relaxed.

“They won’t kill me here,” she said, as much to the cat as to Jimmy.

“Who wants to kill you?”

She said something that he couldn’t understand, something mumbled, swallowed up.

“Say it again,” he said.

She suddenly looked at his feet. “I like your shoes. Most people don’t wear those.”

“Who wants to kill you?” he said again.

She looked at him hard, suddenly angry. “Who are you? What does this have to do with apples?”

“Who killed your father?”

“I know what I know. That’s why I don’t live over in Garden Grove.”

Jimmy nodded as if he understood.

“They knew his weakness,” she said. “They were waiting in the closet.”

Maybe it was the pretty people—maybe that was what she had said.

Jimmy asked her again who they were but she just ate her apple. Every bit of it, stem and seed.

“I’ve never seen a picture of your mother,” Jimmy said.

“She comes on Sundays.”

Jimmy waited.

“And I go there Mondays. When she comes here, I know the next day is Monday.”

“What does she say about you being here?”

“We don’t talk,” Rosemary said.

“What does she say about you being here where they killed him?”

“That’s what she doesn’t talk about.”

“What day is today?” Jimmy asked.

She got up out of her chair.

“Did you ever hear the record they were playing?” she asked, her face opening up a little, “Daddy and that woman?” She didn’t wait for an answer, opened the front of a nightstand, an old humidor cabinet, and took out a 45 record in its original sleeve. She stepped over and put it on a turntable with a fat center post, a teenager’s record player. It clicked, the arm moved over, it began.

It was Streisand’s “People (Who Need People).”

“It was still playing, again and again, when the police looked in the window. They left it here. They had no idea how it fit in . . .”

They both listened to it. When it ended, it started again and Jimmy left her there.

After dark, about nine, when the neighbors would all be inside with their prime-time TV or their murder books and their third or fourth drinks, she came out. The streetlight over the alleyway behind the house was out. She pulled the door closed behind her and started away, nothing in her hands. One of the cats came out of the broken kitchen window and watched her go from the sill.

The Number Six bus was crowded with domestics