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I went into the bedroom now, and opened it. The envelope from the Bureau of the Public Debt lay there.
    The savings bond was still tucked inside it. He wouldn’t steal from me. It was the law of the jungle, you don’t shit where you eat. You don’t steal from the person you live with, who you depend on.
    That night I lay in bed waiting for him to come home. Washington Street grew quiet, except for the occasional car driving past at high speed, a whoosh of sound, kids screaming out the windows, the sounds swelling and then receding.
    Around 2 A.M., I heard the key turn in the lock. The floor-boards creaked. The toilet flushed. Then, silence.
    I lay there, listening in the dark. Who was he? A bird person. A brother and sister both. A creature who could change his shape at will, fill any form you wanted.
    I sat up in bed, and went quietly into the other room. I could see the mound of his body on the futon. He lay on his stomach, his hand wedged up underneath the pillow. The street lamp outside the window shone in on him. He seemed fast asleep.
    â€œDean, you asleep?”
    â€œYeah.” I could tell by his voice he nearly was. His revels had exhausted him, whatever they were.
    â€œYou got a phone call,” I said.
    He didn’t open his eyes. “Yeah,” he mumbled, his voice muffled in the pillow.
    â€œA lady. A woman.”
    â€œYeah.” Still, he didn’t open his eyes.
    â€œShe was upset.”
    â€œUmmm.”
    â€œShe said she was looking for you. She said you’d been with her, and then you left, and you stole from her.”
    He rolled over on his back, flung his arm across his face.
    â€œDo you know who it was?” I asked.
    â€œNo . . . But I gotta go to sleep now.”
    â€œShe said she had a little daughter.”
    â€œCindy,” he said, his arm still flung over his eyes.
    â€œDid you steal her money?”
    â€œOf course not. She’s just pissed, that’s all, ’cause I left her.”
    â€œWhy’d you leave her?”
    â€œToo old.”
    â€œToo old?”
    â€œYeah—she was a wo-man!” he said, emphasizing the word.
    I stood in my flannel nightie by the door, waiting for him to say something else. Then I said, “You wouldn’t steal from me ever, would you?”
    He rolled over on his side, and pulled the edges of the sleeping bag up under his chin. “Oh for heaven’s sake,” he said. “You know I wouldn’t do that, Chrissie! . . . Please, Chrissie, I gotta go to sleep now.”

C HAPTER 7
CHRISSIE
    It was deepening November now, the sky was thinning, a watery gray. The trees were all stripped of their leaves, bent in the wind; weather to pull your collar up around your neck for.
    It was as if Dean could read people’s minds. It was as if now, since the woman’s call, Dean could sense some doubt in the air, in me. He started trying to do me favors. He bought flowers for the apartment, which I had to stick in an empty milk carton because I didn’t have a vase. He even bought me a book, a paperback, Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry, something he’d picked up at a tag sale or something. (He, of course, never read a book himself.) I didn’t tell him I already had the book for Lit-Comp II.
    During the week that November, I went to work as usual at the Nightingale Home. The Home was in a brick building high up on a rise overlooking the town and the river down below. I was a nurse’s aide there. I liked the job, though the smells, of urine, of dentures, of disinfectant, hung over the place constantly. And sometimes the bodies of the old people, the crinkly lizard skin of their hands with the liver spots, frightened me. But when I read to them, they would put their faces up to me like children. They would clutch my hand with theirs, and the warmth of their skin would permeate mine and would comfort me. They called me “sweetheart” and