Sworn at the Font

The godfather was not settled, Rosaria Falcone told her on her first morning on Federal Hill, and it was not Meg's concern.

An hour before that, at six in the morning on the first of June, Mrs. Batista was already out at the curb with the bus running.

It was a full-size yellow school bus, the long kind, and it took up the whole front of the house and a good part of the neighbor's. Mrs. Batista parked it there every summer because the depot wanted the lot resurfaced in June and had wanted it resurfaced in June for as long as Meg had lived upstairs. She was standing in the open door at the top of the steps with one hand flat on the dashboard vent and her reading glasses pushed up into her hair, which was black and braided and pinned up flat against the back of her head for the heat. She was five foot one and wide through the shoulders, with medium-brown skin and the forearms of a woman who had been hauling a steering wheel that size around Cranston corners for twenty years. She had come up from Santo Domingo at nineteen and had driven for the Cranston schools since before Meg was in first grade on one of her routes.

"Feel that," she said, before good morning.

Meg came down the porch steps with her duffel bag on one shoulder and her school tote on the other and put her hand where Mrs. Batista's had been. The air coming out of the vent was exactly as warm as the air outside it.

"They fixed it," Mrs. Batista said. "Every June they fix it. I have a paper that says Fixed on it with a man's initials. Forty-one campers by eight o'clock, Garden City, Knightsville, the Y, and every one of them with a sandwich in a bag going bad by nine." She took her hand off the dash and wiped it on her slacks. "I am going to call that depot from the Y and I am going to read that man his initials."

"You should," Meg said.

"I will." Mrs. Batista looked at the bags. Her glasses came down off her head and onto her nose so she could look at them properly. "So where are you going with all that. You said a summer job. You didn't say a summer job with a suitcase."

"Federal Hill. A family up there. I'm minding a little girl, four, Monday to Saturday, nights included. I'll be back here Saturday afternoons and Sundays."

"Federal Hill," Mrs. Batista said, the way she would have repeated an address a parent gave her for a drop-off she did not want to make. She did not say anything else about it. She said, "Your rent's the first," and Meg said she had left the check under the door, and Mrs. Batista nodded and climbed back up into the bus and pulled the lever, and the door folded shut on her and the engine noise both.

Meg put the bags in the back of her car and sat a minute with the window down, watching the bus pull out wide around the corner, and then she drove up to the hill.

She had been up there before, the way everybody in Cranston had been up there before: for a birthday dinner, for cannoli in a white box tied with string, under the arch on Atwells with the pine cone hanging in the middle of it. She had never once been up a side street. She parked where Rosaria had told her to on the telephone, on the side street below the corner house, with two wheels on a curb that had been painted and repainted so many times it had gone soft at the edges, and she sat for a second longer than she needed to with her hands on the wheel.

The job had come through Lidia Falcone, who taught second grade at the parish school at the bottom of the hill and who had sat two seats down from Meg at a district training day in March on early literacy and had laughed out loud, once, at the right part of a slide. Lidia had rung her in April. My aunt's going to call you. She's not going to explain anything. Just say yes or no. Then Rosaria had rung, and had not explained anything, and Meg had said yes, because the rent did not stop in the summer and a public pre-K teacher's paycheck did.

The corner house was three stories of pale-gray clapboard with a porch across the front, freshly painted, and a bay window on the ground floor with a lace panel in it. Rosaria had said, on the telephone, Not the front. Round the side. So Meg went round the side, to a gate in a wooden fence with the paint worn off the latch, and put her hand on it and pushed, and it did not move.

She pushed it again. It gave at the top and stuck at the bottom. She stood back and looked at it the way she would have looked at a four-year-old's shoe that had been put on the wrong foot, and then she got her fingers under the top rail, lifted, and pushed at the same time, and it swung so easily she nearly went through it after it.

There was a narrow yard behind: trash cans, a hose coiled up on a bracket, a row of tomato plants in white buckets along the fence with their first green fruit on them. Three wooden steps went up to a screen door. Through the screen came a radio, a man talking about the weather in a voice that suggested he took it personally, and the smell of onions and peppers going soft in oil, at seven in the morning.

She knocked on the frame of the screen door, because there was nothing else to knock on.

"It's open," somebody said, and she went in.

The kitchen was hot. Every ring on the stove had a pot on it, and the window over the sink was open on the yard and doing nothing whatsoever about it. There was a table in the middle of the room with an oilcloth on it printed with lemons, and at the table, very straight in a chair with a cushion on it to bring her up, sat a small round-cheeked girl in a striped T-shirt with her hands folded on the oilcloth in front of her like somebody waiting to be served at a restaurant.

The woman at the stove turned round. She was short and broad through the hips, with dark-brown hair dyed and set, glasses on a chain against her chest, and a housecoat over a blouse that was plainly too good to cook in. She looked at Meg for about as long as it took to wipe her hands on a dish towel. Then she took a plate off the warming shelf over the stove, put a wedge of frittata on it and a heel of bread beside it, and set it down on the oilcloth in front of the empty chair across from the girl, and pulled the chair out an inch with her foot.

Meg still had the duffel on her shoulder.

There was already a fork laid at that place. There was a folded paper napkin under the fork and a glass of orange juice standing beside it, and the juice had been poured long enough ago that the glass was sweating a ring onto the lemons. They had laid her a place before she was in the door. She understood that, and she understood that she had been put across from the child and not beside her, and she did not yet understand what either of those things meant.

"Thank you," she said. "Mrs. Falcone?"

"Graziella," said the woman at the stove, who had already turned back to it.

"Sit down," said a second voice, from the doorway into the passage, and Meg sat down.

Rosaria Falcone was shorter than her voice on the telephone and wider through the shoulders, with iron-gray hair cut off square at the jaw and shoved back behind her ears, and reading glasses of her own on a chain. She had an envelope in one hand. She did not sit down. She stood at the end of the table, between Meg and the child, and looked at Meg the way a cashier looks at a check before she decides to take it.

"You have her Monday morning to Saturday noon, nights included," she said. "The two front rooms on the second floor are yours and hers, and you're paid Fridays, and Graziella feeds you."

That was the job. Meg waited, in case there was more of it, and there was not.

"She's christened at the church at the bottom of the hill on the last Sunday of August, the thirtieth," Rosaria said.

"All right," said Meg. "Who's standing for her?"

She asked it because it was the thing anybody would ask, and because she was a confirmed Catholic, though she had not been inside a church since the bishop had tapped her on the cheek at thirteen, and she knew a christening came with people attached to it. Graziella's spoon stopped against the side of the pot. It stopped for less than a second and then went on going round.

"The godfather is not settled," Rosaria said. "That's not your concern."

She put the envelope on the oilcloth by Meg's plate. Meg's name was on the front of it in a round, forward-sloping hand, and she could feel the edge of a key through the paper.

"The side door and the front," Rosaria said. "Nobody uses the front." Then she went out the way she had come in, and Meg heard the screen door at the back bang behind her a moment later, so she had gone round through the passage and out across the yard rather than past the table again.

Meg looked at her plate. Then she looked across it at the child, who had not moved her hands.

"Hi," she said. "You must be Pia. I'm Meg."

"I know," said Pia. "Graziella said." She had brown eyes and fair skin with a few freckles coming out across the bridge of her nose, and light-brown hair that had been cut in a bowl by somebody who loved her and had not been cut by anybody since. It was growing out unevenly over her ears. She looked at the duffel on Meg's shoulder and then at Meg's face. "Who are you for?"

Meg put the bag down on the floor beside her chair.

She had been asked a lot of things in her first five minutes with a child. Was she a mommy. Was she old. Did she have a dog, was that her real hair, why did her nose have a sunburn on it in June. Nobody had ever asked her that. But she had been in that house for about four minutes herself and she could see why a child would. Everybody Pia had met since the spring would have been handed to her as somebody's. This is your mama's cousin. This is Graziella, this is her house. This is Rosaria, you're going to live with Rosaria now, she's for you. A child who had been handed that many people in that many weeks would have started sorting them, because that was what four-year-olds did with too much of anything: they sorted it.

The fair thing was to answer the question she had actually asked.

"I'm for you," Meg said. "For the summer. Monday to Saturday. I'm not for Graziella and I'm not for Rosaria, I'm for you, and in September I go back to my own class, in Cranston. I have sixteen kids in my class. They're four too."

Pia thought about it with her whole face.

"Not after the summer," she said.

"No. After the summer I go back to my class. I'll tell you when it's getting close, so it's not a surprise."

Graziella put a cup of coffee down at Meg's elbow without a word and turned the handle toward her right hand. Meg did not know how she knew which hand.

"Okay," said Pia. She unfolded her hands. "You can eat that. Then you can carry your bag up. I'll show you which room. Yours is the one with the bad window."

Meg ate the frittata, which was very good, and the bread, which was from somewhere that knew what it was doing, and drank the juice because it had been poured for her, and Pia watched every forkful the way Meg herself watched snack time in October, to see who was going to be trouble.

The second-floor front rooms looked out over the porch roof onto the street. Pia's had a small bed with a pink chenille spread, a shelf of books that somebody had brought from New Haven in a box that still had a strip of packing tape on it, and a photograph on the dresser in a silver frame of a dark, laughing young woman with a sharp chin and her hair blowing across her mouth. Meg did not look at it for long. She had been told in the April phone call that the mother was Chiara and that she had died in the spring, and she had been told nothing else, and she had not asked.

Her own room had a double bed made up tight with a folded towel on the foot of it, a crucifix over the door, a box fan on the floor, and a window that went up four inches and stopped. The bad window. The room had been made up for her before she arrived, like the place at the table.

She unzipped the duffel on the bed, and from the tote she took out the thing she had made on Saturday night at her own kitchen table in Cranston: a metal ring with eight laminated cards on it, each one the size of her palm, each one with a picture cut out of a magazine or drawn in marker and a single word under it. BREAKFAST. SHOES. PARK. LUNCH. NAP. BATH. BOOK. BED. She made one for every child she minded. Pia came and stood in the doorway and looked at it and did not come in.

"What's that."

"It's your day," Meg said. "So you know what comes next. You can move them round if we change something."

Pia came in then, and took the ring, and turned it to PARK, and held it up.

They went down the front steps because Pia said the front was for going out and the side was for coming home, and Meg had no reason to argue with a rule that sensible. The sidewalk was already warm. A woman was hosing down the front of a shop three doors down and the water ran in a sheet into the gutter and smelled of wet brick. Pia held Meg's hand without being asked and held the card ring in the other, and talked: about the bakery, which was four doors down and where Paolo was; about the park, which had a fountain that did not go on until it was hot enough; about Graziella's tomatoes, which were not ready, and would not be ready if you touched them.

Below the corner house, on the same side of the street, there was a building with a black iron rail running up three stone steps to a dark door, and a lamp over the door that was lit at ten o'clock on a June morning. In the window there was a small brass frame with a card in it, a name and a date. A man was standing at the top of the steps.

End of sample. The story continues in the full edition.

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