Read Water Street for Free Online Page B

They all knew. In Ireland they'd eaten limpets and grass when Mama and Dawere young and the potatoes had gone bad. If Bird had food to eat, she wanted to say, it might as well be decent, but she didn't, of course. She didn't have the chance, anyway.
    “Where's Thomas?” Mama asked.
    Thomas, who had breakfast there now more often than in his own apartment.
    “I thought you went for him, Bird,” Annie said.
    “Not yet.” Bird looked out the window at the bridge tower, rosy as the sun caught the edge of the stone. She wondered if seagulls flying by would stop for a rest.
    “Bird,” Annie said.
    “Just go to the stairs,” Mama told her. “Give him a call.”
    Bird raised the spoon to her mouth, closing her teeth to filter the oatmeal like a sieve, then went out into the hall to lean against the banister. “Thomas,” she shouted up.
    “You're enough to wake the dead,” Annie said after her.
    There was no sign of him. She knew he was there; he just didn't want her to know he was waiting for someone to ask him to eat with them.
    “This is the last time I'm going to call you, Thomas. Then I'm going to march right back into my apartment, slam the door, and you won't even have a taste of this delicious oatmeal that Annie made.”
    That brought him out. The string from his knickers was missing so the legs were falling down, and his white shirt had never seen the underside of an iron in its whole miserable life.
    A fine thing for the first day of the last year of school.
    Bird went back to her seat at the table and grabbed her spoon as he slid onto a chair next to her.
    Hughie sat up and stretched, his hair tousled. There was a new bruise on his chin. He'd been fighting somewhere again. Bird glanced at Mama, hoping she didn't see it.
    “I need an ice pick to eat this oatmeal,” Bird said, trying to distract everyone, trying to make Hughie smile.
    “We're lucky to have oatmeal, cold or hot,” Annie said, echoing Mama.
    Bird crossed her eyes at Annie and saw Hughie's eyes dance. She sat back satisfied as Annie spooned cereal into Thomas's bowl.
    “Someday your eyes will stay like that, Bird. You'll have to follow your nose everywhere you go,” Annie said.
    Bird took a few more lumps of oatmeal, digging deep. Annie always put a raisin or two at the bottom. She found four.
    “Not bad this morning,” she said as Annie slid away from the table. Annie reached for her shawl on the hook and put on her hat, ready to go to work at the box factory.
    Bird took a quick look at her plain face, her hands bruised from working on the boxes, and stood up. “Wait a minute, Annie.”
    She went into the bedroom for the pink paper flower Mrs. Cunningham had given her, and tucked it into Annie's hat brim.
    “You're not half bad sometimes,” Annie said.
    “All the time,” Bird said, and took a damp finger to a bit of oatmeal on her shirtwaist.
    Someone was coming up the stairs as Annie went down, probably a patient looking for Mama. Bird felt a little tick in the back of her throat. It was hard to breathe when shethought of Mama and her patients; the milkman's boy. How disappointed Mama must be in her.
    How disappointed she was in herself.
    That day, that terrible day, she had come up the stairs with Thomas, and in the bedroom Mama had helped her pull off her bloodstained waist and stood there, her hands on Bird's shoulders, as she washed her arms and hands. Bird had told Mama then that she could never do anything like that again. That grayish white bone, the blood seeping out—
    “This is the way of it,” Mama had said, almost sternly. “We've all been through it.”
    Now Bird bent down to kiss Mama at the table, getting a whiff of the sweet smell of her. And Mama reached up to cup Bird's cheeks in her hands, hands that were rough from washing and ironing and working with her patients.
    Bird slid out the door as a woman came in, and looked back to see Thomas shoveling in oatmeal as if he had spent his childhood in the Old Country