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hay sometimes.”
    “We should keep an eye on them,” Uchenna said. “See who brings them food.”
    “See if anybody brings them food…” Uchenna said.
    In her pocket, her phone suddenly rang, starting to sing “Don’t Worry, Be Happy” at the top of its little lungs. In the field, the horses shied and stamped their feet: two of them actually turned and ran to the other end of the little field, then turned around again and stood staring.
    “Oh no, it’s mam,” Uchenna said.
    “Were we at the library yet?” Emer said as they hurried back along the path.
    “I don’t know,” Uchenna said, “wait a moment…” She got the phone out, snapped it open. “Hello?”
    “Where’d you go off to in such a hurry?” her mam said. “You dad finally got his mind made up, he’ll be home in an hour.”
    “Are we going out?” Uchenna said, glancing over her shoulder at the field. Things seemed to be quieting down in there: and as they left, she saw one head come up: the dirty white head of the Mammy Horse, looking after them with that same sad, tired expression.
    “No, he’s bringing pizza,” her mam said. “Will you stop at the Spar on the way back, sweet? Get a big bottle of white lemonade and a big bottle of Coke. And a loaf of bread: we’re almost out.”
    “Okay, mam,” Uchenna said. “I’ll call you on the way back. Bye!” And she hung up.
    “Come on,” she said to Emer, turning around on the path. “We have to go to the shops.”
    They headed back the way they’d come: the path past the field would bring them up against the development wall again, and a little further down that way was a path that would lead between two of the circles to the road that went up to the smaller of the two Adamstown shopping areas. “You didn’t even have to say we were at the library or whatever,” Emer said.
    “I didn’t have to,” Uchenna said. “She talked herself into it.”
    Emer smiled. “Parents,” she said. “Once you get them trained, they’re not so much trouble.”
    Uchenna wasn’t so sure. Though her mam could be very easygoing, there were times—mostly when Uchenna’s dad got her thinking that way—that she could be really stern and tough to deal with. But Uchenna’s mind wasn’t on that right now. It was once more on the Mammy Horse, as they went past the tied-on tubular gate and past the little field again. As the path they were on went through another hedgerow and out the other side, Uchenna paused and looked back at the Mammy Horse, standing there with her head down, looking tired.
    “It’s January, by the way,” Uchenna said.
    “What?”
    “Mam’s due date.”
    “Oh!”
    “January fourteenth.”
    “Cool,” Emer said. But her glance followed Uchenna’s, back toward the field. “You’re gonna start worrying about her now,” Emer said, sounding resigned.
    “I have other things to worry about,” Uchenna said. She started digging around in her pockets for her coin purse. “We have to get minerals at the Spar. And bread. Don’t know if I’ve got enough, and I don’t want to go all the way home again—”
    But by the time they’d come out of the fields and back into the world of pavements and shops and concrete walls, and were walking up to the first apartment building, the one with the glass-fronted Spar convenience store in it, they had gone through all available pockets and come up with six Euro and forty-three cent, which would be just about enough for what they had to buy. Uchenna and Emer pushed through the usual small front-of-store crowd of tweens and teens idling away the time before they had to go home, went in, and got the big bottles of lemon soda and Coke, and a loaf of the perfectly square plastic-wrapped bread that Uchenna’s mam loved and her dad condemned as “sliced white bathroom sponge” while at the same time eating vast amounts of it toasted and smothered with butter. Uchenna’s taste ran more to the crunchy French baguettes that the shop sold