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to go next door and ask Olga to watch Davie. You know I hate to ask her for favors. Where were you?”
    “Never mind where she was,” said Walter, pushing Anna Mae inside.
    “How many times have I told you,” Sarah scolded. “You come straight home from school!”
    “Come on, Woman!” Walter yelled from the curb.
    Anna Mae didn’t know where her aunt and uncle were going but she was relieved. At least for now she would not be punished. As she hung up her coat, three-year-old David charged through the hallway, holding a toy airplane over his head and roaring, jet-like, to the curves and dips of the plane. When he saw Anna Mae, he squealed with delight. She knelt down to hug him. He dropped the plane and threw himself into her arms. How she loved this little boy with his curly brown hair and eyelashes as thick as brooms.
    Anna Mae had been seven when David was born. Sarah had had a long labor and a painful delivery. When it was over Sarah seemed depressed. She didn’t even want to hold her new baby boy. To make matters worse, because of her age, it took her a good six months to recover. All the baby’s care-giving duties fell to Anna Mae. Sarah told her young niece over and over again, “I wasn’t much older than you when my sister—your mother—was born. My mother, your grandmother Maggie, made me take care of her. If I can do it, you can do it.”
    Anna Mae hated when her aunt mentioned her mother. Because that’s all she ever did—just mention her. If Anna Mae asked questions, she was immediately told to shut up. The subject of her mother was taboo.
    In the months that followed David’s birth, Anna Mae fed, diapered, and bathed the infant. She did it cheerfully. Anna Mae didn’t think of little Davie as a cousin. He was her brother.
    Now, three-year-old David nuzzled into her shoulder. “Daddy’s mad. My Annie not home. All gone!”
    “I wasn’t gone,” she assured him. “I came home, didn’t I?”
    Stanley, who was almost fifteen, yelled from the dining room, “You’re lucky you didn’t get a beaten!’”
    Ignoring Stanley, she kissed David on the cheek. He picked up his airplane and with a loud sonic boom and a shrill errrrrrr, flew it—roaring and sputtering into the kitchen, through the dining room, into the living room and back to the front hall.
    “Stop running or you’ll break your neck,” Anna Mae shouted on her way up to the second floor.
    In the bedroom she shared with little David, she placed her books on her nightstand and walked to the window. The Lipinski house, like so many others, was built on a hillside overlooking the Monongahela River. From her window she could see across town to the steel mill. The yellow-red glow of the open-hearth furnaces stretched for three miles along the river bank. Eighty-foot smokestacks spewed enough ash to blot out the sun. Pipelines flushed their poisonous waste into the river, turning it an ugly brown.
    Anna Mae thought that it was because her uncle worked in that terrible mill that he had to drink a lot of whiskey. Once he had spent all the grocery money on what Aunt Sarah called booze. Her aunt had run out of the house yelling that she was never coming back. She went next door to Olga’s. Later she came home because Uncle Walter wanted his supper.
    Last summer her Uncle Walter and some other men walked around with big white signs and didn’t go to work. Her uncle said that the bosses at the mill were unfair. But he didn’t say it like that. He used a lot of bad words.
    When Uncle Walter’s friends stopped marching around with the signs, she heard Aunt Sarah reading the newspaper to Olga. The strike had lasted for 116 days. Olga got mad when Sarah told her that Uncle Walter had been drunk for over half of them. Anna Mae vowed that when she grew up she would not let David work in that mill. Stanley could. She didn’t much care about Stanley.
    Squinting, she looked to the west where the setting sun sprinkled golden flecks across the murky