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might as well make sure.
    â€œJust be sure ta bolt the door behind me, an’ don’t open it. Don’t open it for no one but me, d’ya hear? Not even if it’s just one person, sayin’ he needs to come in for some’tin’. D’ya hear me? I don’t care how sweet he is to ya—not one person!”
    â€œWhat person?”
    â€œNever you mind.”
    She hadn’t meant to sound as harsh as she did. It was impossible to explain it now, even if she could.
    Oh, but that she could rip out her past, just for the sake of this boy—
    â€œIt don’t matter who,” she said, softening her voice. “All sorts of shanty trash are out there today, stirred up about the draft, or some such. Someone tries to come in anyway, you get t’others, go out the back door down to the O’Kanes. The back door now, d’ya hear?”
    â€œYes’m.”
    He nodded gravely and she smiled.
    Best to make it a duty, another task for him to carry out, he was good at that.
    â€œGood then. I won’t be gone a quarter hour, don’ worry.”
    She backed out of the room, to give him some privacy. He had already become painfully modest, sleeping in longjohns or his pants even in this heat, lest she see him naked in the morning. She let him put on his pants and shirt before he escorted her to the door. There she swung up the solid ash bolt, breathing a sigh of relief when she heard it swing back down after her, once she had stepped outside.
    He was a good boy, he could be relied upon. As much as anyone could, if he came by—
    The women of the block stood at the pump like a row of brightly colored flowers. All of them at least slightly different shades, even sisters and sisters, the mothers from their daughters. There were women and girls from the Islands, blue- and purple-black as plums. Runaway women from somewhere in the South, faces the color of fine chocolate or well-used leather, or brushed with just the faintest trace of red, or olive. Women from Hamburg and Bavaria, or from Leinster or Connaught, like herself. Faces originally whiter than white, freckled and pale as the hide of a pale horse—but browning now, weathering as they all were, under the hard summer sun of the City.
    Each of them looked relieved to see someone else out on the otherwise deserted street. Waiting where they did every morning, to fill their buckets at the green wooden Croton hydrant that lay beneath the shadow of Sweeney’s Shambles.
    Paradise Alley was not really a street or even an alley at all. Rather it was a passageway, never more than nine feet wide, that led into the Shambles—the huge, connected double tenement on Cherry Streetthat loomed above them, its walls and even its windows perpetually blackened with coal soot. Ruth and her family rented rooms just outside the tenement, in one of the few remaining houses crammed into the tail end of the block, where it slanted down toward the south and west. Most of the houses less than thirty feet deep and twenty-five wide, two stories apiece and another half story, which served as workshops for the tailors and carpenters and shoemakers who had first rented them. Not that there was anyone left on Paradise Alley with such skills anymore—
    The Croton spigot was the only one for three blocks, so women came from all over the Fourth Ward—the Jews from the next block, and the women from the tenement, and even Deirdre, swapping stories and telling tales. Most days they liked to extend this chore, chatting and watching idly as their children tried to murder one another in the street.
    Today, though, they were more taciturn, almost tongue-tied. Scuffing at the ground with their shoes and fiddling with the wooden buckets. Tersely sharing what bits of news they had.
    â€œI hear they’re goin’ out at Owen’s, and the Novelty—”
    â€œHenry says any shop what don’t turn out, they’ll