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stodgy. “ What, Polly,” he said.
    “My father’s going to find an apartment for us.”
    Michael blinked. He said, “Why would we need an apartment?”
    “To live in, silly!”
    “But we have a place to live in. Here above the store.”
    “Yes, but Dad says he can find us something of our own. Lots of times he hears first when people are getting evicted, he says, when they come to him looking for someplace cheap in a hurry. All he has to ask them is, ‘Where was it you’ve been living till now?’ and if their landlord hasn’t—”
    “But we can’t afford our own place, hon. I already told you. Mama’s going to move out of her bedroom and you can decorate it yourself, any way you like.”
    Mrs. Anton was giving up her bedroom? So she’d have to sleep in that sliver of a room that used to be Michael and Danny’s. (It wasn’t very hard to figure this out, with houses all more or less the same floor plan.) What a sacrifice! The women sent Mrs. Anton a look, but she didn’t respond. She was watching Michael and Pauline.
    Pauline said, “Oh.”
    Michael said, “You understand.”
    “Well,” she said.
    She took a step backward. She was wearing flimsy sandals in an impossibly narrow size, something none of the hefty neighborhood girls could have dreamed of fitting into, and even on this creaky floor her step was so light and dainty that she didn’t make a sound. She spun around, and just like that she was gone. The screen door swung shut. The rusty spring on top vibrated twangily.
    Michael turned to the women with such a perplexed expression that Mrs. Brunek, for one, seemed to feel the need to explain. She gave a tinkle of a laugh and said, “Oh, you know: bridal jitters!”
    He said, “Maybe I should go talk to her.”
    He left, his rubber-tipped cane chirping in an anxious-sounding way.
    Miss Jakubek was so distracted that she started shopping all over again, even though she was already carrying a little parcel of canned goods.
    Sometimes it seemed that the war was blurring St. Cassian’s edges. The factory girls were dating fellows from South Carolina and West Virginia; the boys overseas were writing home about girls with English accents. A number of the neighborhood women—respectable women, married, with children—had taken jobs at Glenn L. Martin. They set off for work each morning in coarse blue denim coveralls while their mothers, wearing scarves knotted under their chins and dresses shaped like potato sacks tied in the middle, watched after them and shook their heads. Who knew where it would end?
    You didn’t hear just polkas anymore; you heard “Chattanooga Choo Choo” and “The White Cliffs of Dover” and “I’ve Got a Gal in Kalamazoo.” You heard “Blues in the Night” and “Take Me” and “I Don’t Want to Walk Without You.” Young people danced cheek to cheek, so slowly they might be sleepwalking. Katie Vilna got pregnant. Jerry Kowalski’s girlfriend ran off with a sailor from Memphis. Everyone in the neighborhood learned how to identify airplanes.
    Joe Dobek’s body was found and shipped home, and they held a funeral for him on the first cool day in September. Even before the war began, St. Cassian’s cemetery had been running out of room, but they squeezed him between two strangers’ graves from long, long ago when the neighborhood was Irish. The mossy headstones of O’Malley and O’Leary flanked Joe’s pearly white one, and Mrs. Dobek fell into the habit of laying flowers on all three graves when she came to visit Joe. John O’Malley had lived ninety-two years and died at rest in the Lord. O’Leary (no first name) had come into this world and left again in the space of a single day. Mrs. Dobek told her friends that sometimes, when she should have been praying for Joe, she thought instead about the O’Leary baby’s mother—how terribly, achingly sad she must have been to lose her infant, but how much more she could have lost: all the years of his growing up