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each other, in a language that he did not understand. But he did not fear them anymore, he said, they were older than before and frail, and he now believed that they were on his side.
    Rocco had not known that they had been against him. “You should have told me,” he said, extending his hand toward the boy and with the backs of his fingers tapping Mimmo’s chest, three times, mirthfully, on the buttons. “I would have driven them off for you.”
    “But they’re on my side now,” repeated his one remaining.
    “Whose were they on in days gone by?”
    “Yours,” he said.
    Early evening. October. Mimmo slouched, boneless, on his stool. The first and last and Loveypants had decamped sixteen months and five days before. The bold and simple pennant flag of Ohio hung from curtain rings in the doorway between the front of the store and the kitchen and billowed with the heat convecting from the oven in the rear. The numbers sixteen, five, twenty-four, stitched by Rocco into the central stripe of the flag, attested to the date of the initiation of his streak. The dough in his grip, leavened by a colony of yeasts he’d founded and daily fed and daily taxed so as to save on brewer’s yeast, was folded by him, rolled, thrust, folded, rolled, swung through the air behind him, thrashed against the surface of the worktable, rolled again, all at terrific speed (he was not ungifted at this) until it was as tight as a mattress and wondrous to touch, even this late in the day its charms unlost on him. “Strike it with your open hand, Mimmino,” he murmured, hoisting it under the melting boy’s unsubmitting eyes. “Spank it. Look, I am a little god. I make flesh out of dust and water.
    Look, it weighs more than you. Why, it feels more like your ass than your ass does.” His voice was soft, rasping, tired, a soft bass voice, the soft voice of a hardened man. “Give it a roundhouse punch, it won’t mind.” He sniffled, as did the boy. The Buddha wore a forlorn look today. His posture made Rocco worry he wasn’t feeding him enough cheese. “Go on, close your fist and give it what you have,” he said. “Feel how silky and warm like your skin it is. Sit up and touch it, why don’t you, talk to it, stick your nose in it and take it in.”
    That was when the boy asked, if it was all the same to him, and if room could be found on the floor, maybe, if he could go live with his mother. He had the merest beginnings of yellow-orange whiskers at the corners of his mouth.
    Rocco put him on the train and watched him go.
    The bucket leaked. The water dripped on his shoes. And yet he didn’t run home but continued walking at the same pace.
    She didn’t come back. She stayed there. Even when he had a little money and wrote postcards saying, Now is the time; Steak for breakfast; I will take you dancing; I will close the store on Sundays; What therefore God hath joined together let no man put asunder. And the boys stayed with her. They visited their wanting father seldom, then less, then not anymore. One married. One enrolled in a taxicab-driving class. One volunteered to fight the nation’s enemies in the Far East.
    Like anyone else, he struggled to keep the commandments and to be steadfast in his faith. He confessed on Saturday afternoons that, notwithstanding the threat of the scriptures, he had as yet failed to turn the hearts of his children to their father. He took a break from work at six thirty Sunday mornings to hustle up the street and receive Communion and made it back in time to open the store at the wonted hour. Regarding his neglect of the day of rest, he recalled that the Lord had once asked, If you had a sheep that fell into a pit on the Sabbath, wouldn’t you lay hold of it and lift it out?
    His streak endured.
    He desired for himself solitude, which was to say the company of his own.
    Late afternoon. August 14. Yesterday. Seventeen years unwifed. Dog days. The days the Dog Star rose with the sun. Attempting to nap on the