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the face I know the extent of her betrayal. Not a problem, honey. All I did was love you and promise you the world, and you stole my heart and all of the good years with the boy. They got names for that, and the devil thought of all of them.

Nell
    I told Jacob that soberness builds on sobriety. I told him that we needed him.
    The woman’s mother, Mrs. Clark, was in the room and she saw his hands shaking. It was a breach, and things had gone very slowly and then quickened all of a sudden and had gone out of control. Miss Eakins was home in bed, she’d slipped in the mud the week before and broke her ankle. Jacob asked me to come with him to assist, and we had to take Duncan, there was no time. He was in the room for all of it.
    Afterward Jacob told Mrs. Clark that he couldn’t have done anything differently for Mrs. Stevens, her daughter. I don’t know what he could’ve done or not done. Maybe Miss Eakins could’ve helped. She usually managed the childbirths, more than Jacob. Mrs. Clark called him a butcher, her skin as mottled as a gull egg and stray hairs on her lip as long as a man’s. She yelled it in the street as she was running us off. When I looked back, the husband, Mr. Stevens, stood in the doorway, weeping. Duncan’s feet weren’t touching the ground, his hands clamped in ours, I worried we’d injure his shoulders. Mrs. Clark’s grandchild might live, but her daughter was dead.
    â€œHow can this pain feel so new again?” Jacob said as we were going up the stairs to the apartment. “What else has man been doing forever save dying? We should be used to it.” He went inside and grabbed the bottle he’d been keeping on the windowsill and went back out the door, to find his awful brother, I’m sure of it. As if it could be worse. Duncan looked at me as if I’d done something to make his father leave, or at least it seemed that way until he smiled. I had to remind myself that he didn’t think like that, no child did.
    That night someone threw a burning can of kerosene through the office window downstairs. We could’ve been killed, but Jacob was down there drinking with Matius when it happened and they amazingly had the sense to throw it back outside before it could catch. I’m afraid to go into the streets.
    The low coward, my brother-in-law Matius, has finally departed, but Jacob remains full of nonsense. I pressed him for information because I knew that something had happened, but he just grinned at me in his torporific way and told me nothing. I’d allowed him to be a drunk and distant and come home stinking because I knew it would end, soon as his brother was gone it’d be done. Apparently I was wrong.
    He brought Duncan carved wooden toys from Mr. Kozmin, the inebriate, his current fellow, his pal, and somehow got it into his head he could make them too but didn’t get very far before I was helping him stitch up his hand after he’d slipped the blade. Not so good when the surgeon cuts himself, particularly after what happened with Mrs. Stevens. He didn’t put up any kind of fuss when I threw his sorry figurines into the stove.
    Mrs. Sheasby, our neighbor the next door over, let slip the news. He’d bought property, her husband’s and others, on Matius’s advice of course, and now he was stuck with it until he could sell it. The bastard brother had stayed at Pinter’s Hotel all summer long because I wouldn’t let him stay with us. By the grace of God I saw him only once, in the street from the window, and my blood went hot to the roots of my hair and I wanted to be sick. Jacob hadn’t said a word or attempted to discuss anything with me; he’d just done it. I questioned him on it again and again until he confessed. How the two drunken idiots had accomplished so much was beyond me.
    Jacob tried to sell Sheasby’s place—the one building I knew he wanted to keep because he disliked