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listen to the putting down of plates and the pulling out of chairs for the dinner down below. Whatever, I thought. Whatever. Because it was not like anyone was asking me if I wanted the bald one around.
    After a while my mouth was peanut glue and the saltines were like cardboard. I stood to check on the moon, which wasn’t that full and wasn’t that close. I opened the window and closed my eyes and tried to hear the music from the House of Dance, but in between me and the dancers there were cars and trains, and houses and people and their sorrows, and coughing and silence, and TV and romance, and things lost and stolen. I couldn’t hear the throb at the House of Dance. But I could hear Mr. Paul and my mother laughing, puffs of sweetened ha-ha stuff inside mumbled conversation. My momwas laughing, but she didn’t mean it. I knew precisely how her laughter sounded when she felt glad or lucky.
    Back when he was ours, my dad had a knack for making Mom and me feel lucky. Because we’d been chosen by him. Because he was so handsome. Because nobody told his kind of stories. We didn’t have to have anything else if we had him, that’s how lucky he made us, and if he carried me on his shoulders, I could touch the sun, and if he said “RosieRosieRosie,” I knew the melody of my own name, and if I did something that made him smile, then I was blessed and lucky, both. But lucky, Mom said, after he’d gone for good, was no kind of blessing. Lucky was the taste of something sweet that had already been swallowed.
    Mom wanted nothing lucky from right then on, which is the best way I have of explaining Mr. Paul. She’d answered an ad: “Window Washer Wanted.” Good with ragsand a bucket, I guess. Good with breakable things. Good at coming and going, not being noticed, good at standing on top of a ladder, nothing, I’m telling you, nothing the least bit lucky about it. “You take what you’re given, and when nobody’s giving, you take what you can get,” she’d said. I remember that because I was eleven. Because lucky for me had become Leisha and Nick, and also Rocco, when he wasn’t being stupid. Lucky was having my mom all to myself before she fell for Mr. Paul. I’d just thought that she’d gone off to make some money. I didn’t know that she was about to achieve her own brand of leaving too, that it would be up to me to fix my family’s sorrows.
    You want to know how I know how long I’ve been abandoned by my celebrity dad? I keep a running count of all his twenties. That night I had 385, no more, no less, which, in money speak, equals $7,700. The week after that I’d have 386. One week more, and—themath could not be more no-brainer; even Rocco, his mighty self, could do it. The shoe box behind the crate of toys was getting explosively full.
    What difference could it possibly make if I dug in to relieve the pressure?
    Who was going to notice?

ELEVEN
    T HREE DAYS LATER , approaching Granddad’s, I heard voices that I deciphered at first as coming from TV. But then again, I thought, Granddad’s clunker didn’t work; besides, the closer I got, the plainer it was that one of the voices was Granddad’s. I could hear him clear as anything as I walked through his kitchen door. I could hear him talking about cranberry juice, the newest best drink, he was saying, for morning.
    “Granddad?” I called.
    “Right here, Rosie,” he answered, as if Iwouldn’t know by then where to find him. I walked through the kitchen and into the dining-living-bookshelves room, and there he was, and there was Riot, and there she was, a stranger. She had big brown eyes, and a braid of color on one wrist that could have been a tattoo; her white shirt made her skin seem darker. Her hair was long and like my mother’s hair—the color of black ink and silky—and she was standing much too near my grandfather, holding a tall glass with a little stain of cranberry color at the bottom. She’d stuffed a pillow into the place beneath one