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I guess it was bound to happen.” He leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head.
    The way he spoke of my mother made her seem like someone who did not belong to me. “I do not know what you mean,” I said.
    He eyed me. “I find that surprising.” He dropped his hands to the table. “I believe if you give it some thought, you’ll find that you know exactly what I mean.” He raised the flask and jiggled it. Then he set the flask down and rocked gently in his chair.
    “Mr. Oliver.”
    “William.”
    “William,” I said.
    He watched me.
    My hands shook and I took a shallow breath. “Did you want something?” I said softly.
    He twirled the cap from the flask. “Now that is a very philosophical question. Let me ask you. Are you a philosopher?”
    I shook my head.
    “Are you sure? In my experience, questions of desire, of longing, are almost always philosophical questions. What one can have and cannot have. What one will be and cannot be. What one wants and why. All questions for the universe. And that is the realm of the philosopher.”
    A cold draft came in under the eaves. I shivered.
    He cleared his throat and then leaned over with his fist to his lips and coughed. When he was done he looked up at me.
    “My doctor tells me I need to go west for my health,” he said. He wiped his hand with a handkerchief he withdrew from his pocket. “The cold is no good for me. But here I am.” He put the cloth back in his pocket and lifted the flask in the air. “To the bright and limitless future,” he said. He took a long pull and set the flask on his desk and laid his hand on the table between us.
    “I have a need to restore an order to its owner,” he said. “I can’t trust the others. I suspect they would open the parcel and distribute the contents among themselves, all in the name of equality. No man better than the next. I’m sure you are familiar with this dreary rhetoric. It’s ill-informed, to say the least. Of course one man is better than the next. This is what the world is about.” He coughed again and leaned hard over his knees.
    When he was finished, he cleared his throat and told me that the package was on the counter by the cash register. “The address is written on the front,” he said. He paused. “You can read? I don’t know how you people raise your children. You could be perfectly illiterate.”
    “I can read,” I said fiercely, and stood up. “Do not concern yourself.”
    He lifted one eyebrow and stood up, too, smiling. I do not know if he was more amused by my tone of voice or my haste. He hooked his thumbs in his suspenders and contemplated me. “I do not worry, Mary,” he said. “But I do think of you. This is what you must bear in mind.”
    It was lunchtime. I picked up the package and followed Ella and Inge and Johanna out into the yard. One by one they fetched their pails from under the steps. They sat on the cold bare ground in the raw light and ate. The daylight moon had swung past its midday high to the leading edge of the western sky. I could see down the alley to the street. It was now a week until Christmas and the town businessmen had strung gold garland on the lampposts to encourage us to shop. As the breeze came up, the garland glinted and fluttered like the ruffle on a dress.
      
    My mother used to boil our clothes in a pot on the top of the stove. She hummed while she worked, an old tune her mother had hummed, and her mother before her, a song she tried to teach my sisters and me as if we were just the next in line. One day she saw me in the doorway and told me to bring the blueing from the mudroom. The shirts in the pot bloomed white almost as soon as the blueing touched the water.
    Now we wait, she said. She sat down at the table and I sat down across from her. I thought she would tell me a tale of R üge n. But when she began to talk, it was only to tell me a story that she had heard from Mrs. Muehls. A woman named Mrs. Hiram McDonald had become