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cardboard box with a lamp onit, but no carpet, just the bare concrete floor. He walked past again, and then again, and only dragged himself away when Tasha, objecting to being yanked back and forth, began to whine.
    The cot isn’t even the most disturbing part. The landlord is. He’s not the mother’s boyfriend or husband; Ron worked that out the day he followed her and Rachel home from the video store, and a guy sitting on the porch called, “Enjoy your supper!” when they went inside. It took a few more days for Ron to peg the guy as the landlord, but right off the bat he worried about Rachel’s living in a house with a man who wasn’t her father. His fears were realized last Tuesday night when he saw the two of them together on a porch chair, Rachel sitting in the guy’s lap and the guy’s right hand (Ron couldn’t swear to this, but the more he goes over it in his head, the surer he gets) moving around beneath her pyjama top.
    Where was the mother? It is unfathomable to Ron that the mother of a girl as beautiful as Rachel would leave her alone with a man under the age of eighty. But then this is a mother who makes her daughter sing for drunks and sleep in a cot on a concrete floor.
    “If she were mine,” he thinks.
    If she were his, what wouldn’t he give her? Wall-to-wall carpeting, a canopy bed, a top-of-the-line dollhouse.
    Almost without realizing, stunned by his train of thought, he puts the van in gear and heads off.

Chapter Four
    M IKA HAS HUNG venetian blinds on the basement windows and laid pieces of carpeting on the floor. The lumpy pullout bed Celia slept on last night now has a piece of plywood between the mattress and springs. When they came back from the motel, Mika was out on the porch but he didn’t tell them what he’d done, and only now, as Rachel is going to bed, do they find out.
    “He’s so good,” Rachel moans. “He’s so good to people.”
    “I really should break down and buy an air conditioner,” Celia says. She is sitting on the bed, testing the firmness. “If it’s this hot in June, what’s it going to be like in August?”
    “Mika will buy us one.”
    “Well, we’re not going to let him. He’s already paying the whole shot for music camp.”
    Rachel curls up beside Celia. “If we do get an air conditioner, can we still sleep down here?”
    “We won’t need to, will we? Our apartment will be nice and lovely and cool.”
    “What if we were like Anne Frank? What if we had to hide down here or we’d be shot by the Nazis?”
    “That would put things in a different light.”
    “Mika would have to sneak us down potatoes and, like, bread crusts. Right? Right, Mom?”
    “I think he’d do better than that. Come on, let’s go thank him.”
    The porch light is off. Mika says that the bulb burned out and then just seconds later the streetlight began to flicker. “Unseen forces at work,” he says. About the venetian blinds, he says, “Osmo and Happy didn’t want people peering in at you.”
    Celia bends to scratch Happy’s ears. “Always looking out for us, eh?” The two dogs pant like bellows. “I’m going to have a long, cool bath,” she announces. “You”—to Rachel, who is climbing onto Mika’s lap—“five minutes, then off to bed.”
    When she’s gone, Rachel touches Mika’s hair. “Is your hair flaxen?” she asks, having recently come across the word in a book. “Is this what flaxen is?”
    Mika’s mouth moves as if he’s talking, but he isn’t yet. Rachel waits. Her mother has told her that he used to have a stutter and sometimes needs a few seconds to get the first words out.
    “Flaxen is the fibre of the flax plant,” he says finally. “It’s blond and threadlike, yes.” He holds up a finger. “Listen.”
    “What?”
    “Do you hear that?”
    “The siren?”
    “No, listen. Wait, it stopped. No, there it is. Up in the sky.”
    Above the shush of a sprinkler and a woman yelling in a foreign language and the clatter of a truck