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barrelling downParliament Street, there’s a scraping sound, like two stones being rubbed together. “Is it a bat?” Rachel asks.
    “A nighthawk. Calling to another nighthawk. You can hear the second one now, farther off.”
    “What are they saying?”
    “Oh, they’re saying…” Another short pause. “They’re saying, ‘A lot of people are out tonight.’”
    “They’re saying, ‘That man and that girl down there should take those dogs for a walk.’”
    Mika slides her off his lap. “On the contrary, they’re saying, ‘Why isn’t that girl in bed yet?’”
    U PSTAIRS , C ELIA uses her foot to turn off the taps. How is it, she wonders, that you can soak in water and not drown, or at least become saturated? We’ve got pores, she reasons. We’re porous. It surprises her that she has never wondered about this before.
    She closes her eyes and calculates how much money she made tonight: forty-two dollars in tips, and then her wages on top of that, minus deductions. Seventy dollars, give or take—enough to pay the minimum on her Visa card. Or should she get the car door fixed? Mika knows somebody at an auto body shop who will give her a deal.
    She didn’t consult Mika about the modelling school because even though he never directly confronts her or secondguesses her decisions, the question of how Rachel could be too young to pose in front of a camera and not too young to sing in a bar would almost surely have come up. The answer is, she’s too young to do either, but at least when you’re singing it’s your voice you’re showing off. So Celia argues with herself. Maybe she’s jealous. Maybe she’s balking at thepossibility of Rachel’s earning more in a few hours than she can earn in a week. No, it isn’t jealousy. It’s not wanting Rachel to turn into one of those clothes-obsessed, narcissistic child sexpots. For another couple of years, anyway, she’d like to keep her under wraps.
    Keep her under wraps. She hears how that sounds. Her impulse is to be overprotective but she fights it. She dreads burdening Rachel the way she was burdened, not that her mother actively interfered with her life. Her mother watched her. She followed her around the apartment with her eyes, and when she was at work she had her friend Mrs. Craig listen outside the apartment door. There were no rules laid down—that wasn’t her style. Whenever Celia did something to upset her, she’d start in about the harmful effects of that kind of behaviour on girls in general or on herself specifically, twenty-five years ago, how she had suffered from the very same mistakes and misjudgments. It was never, “You shouldn’t…” It was, “Nice girls don’t…” or “I wish I hadn’t…” And then she’d sigh and leave the room or get back to what she’d been doing, as if she didn’t really expect to be listened to. It was confusing. It left Celia feeling like a lost cause but also mysteriously entitled, possessed of an unreasonable power. Plainly, she was the centre of her mother’s existence, and yet she can’t imagine that her mother ever looked at her and thought, “Aren’t I lucky?” or that she had nightmares about people coming to the door and saying, “A mistake was made, we have to take back your child.” Celia remembers, after Rachel was born, leaving the hospital with this utterly dependent creature in her arms and wondering, “Why doesn’t somebody stop me?”
    None of which is to say that she’ll be changing her mindabout the modelling school. The fact that Rachel gave in so quickly must mean she herself doesn’t feel ready, and by the time she does, her body might not even be the right shape, although that’s unlikely. If long fingers and toes are any indication, she’s going to end up tall and lean like her father. In whose armpit Celia nestled as they walked from the Lava Lounge, where they’d discovered a mutual interest in Sarah Vaughan, over to Spadina Avenue, where he had a room you rented