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picture what it was she was searching for. There was something of Big Lucy in the rolling of her eyes. And then she produced a penny and held it out to me. “Do you know your prayers?” she said.
    I nodded, although I knew I could not recite one if asked. The woman laughed warmly as if she knew this, too. The laughter made her look younger. With the McGeevers in mind, I had expected a toothless grin, but the woman’s teeth were strong and straight.
    “Give me your right hand,” the woman said kindly, and when I struggled with the schoolbooks in my arm in order to hold out the left, she shook her head and whispered, “The right one, dearie,” full of a peculiar sympathy. She placed the fan on her knee. She reached up to take my right hand from the banister. I felt suddenly unbalanced, there on the dim stairs.
    “Get yourself down to Mary Star of the Sea,” she said. “And light a candle.” She pressed the penny into my palm. “Don’t worry if every prayer’s gone out of your head. Don’t be bothered by that. A good outcome’s enough to say. Light a candle and ask our Blessed Lady for a good outcome. It only takes the asking.” Her pale eyes went back and forth across my face. Despite the gloom of the staircase, I saw that the woman could read everything there: not only the fact that every prayer had indeed gone out of my head, or that left and right still puzzled me, but also that I had already determined that I would not go into the empty church all by myself. I had never gone into an empty church all by myself. If Gerty were here, the two of us would go together, we would make a game of it, as we sometimes did on Saturday mornings, laughing at the door and then tiptoeing together up the echoing aisle, lighting the flame and leaning into our folded hands at the kneeling rail with exaggerated piousness. But Gerty had gone to her father’s people in New Jersey and the apartment upstairs was empty.
    The woman held my wrist and pressed the penny into my palm, and knew, I could tell, that she would not be obeyed. But she asked me anyway, “Will you do that?” And I said anyway, “I will.”
    Out on the street, I walked around the block again and climbed my own steps. Mrs. Chehab was gone, but the scent of the vinegar from her window cleaning still lingered. An Easter scent, I thought, although Easter had already passed. It was the scent of the solution we made to dye our eggs, but also the odor that pricked my nose in church when they read that part of the Passion where Jesus said, I thirst, and a sponge soaked with wine and vinegar was raised to his lips. And then the angel in the empty tomb saying, “He’s not here.”
    Upstairs, Gabe was alone in the apartment, already bent over his books. He raised his head as I came in. His brown eyes withtheir golden lashes looked tired in the dim light. He said, “Momma’s gone out”—although I had known this as soon as I opened the door, an absence in the air—and then he watched me as I placed my own schoolbooks on the table where he was already studying. “You’re late getting home,” he said. “You shouldn’t make Momma worry. She needs you to be good.”
    I shrugged. I still held the black penny in my palm, and his gentle reprimand was only a small weight added to my own awareness that I was not being good: that I had taken the penny with no intention of going to church with it. That I had forgotten already what it was the fat woman had asked me to pray for, a good solution or an answer of some sort. I put the penny on the table between us. “I stopped to see Gerty,” I said. “She wasn’t in school today. She’s gone to New Jersey.”
    But my brother spoke over me. “Momma’s in the city,” he said. “You should be a good girl now”—he was repeating my father’s phrase—“and do your homework quietly until they get back.”
    I reached out and picked up the penny again. It was my father’s phrase, “Be a good girl now,” but when my