My brother plays guitar in clubs till late at night and is hardly ever home during the day. Sometimes I wake in the night and hear him when he has come back walking through the house, his guitar case hitting up against a chair our mother forgot to move. She makes a path for him before she goes to sleep, like she’s clearing room for a dance floor, and I go to bed thinking I can’t sleep, something’s going to happen, people will come over and turn on music and there will be a party and laughter, but nothing does happen, my mother just comes to bed, sleeps alongside me and cries the way she always does.

John lifts me up onto a metal box bolted to the street lamp and as he does, he slides his hands up high under my knit top. I like it up high. I can see the whole park, a juggler or band or preacher at work in the pit of the fountain when it’s not on. The metal box is warm and it clicks when the light turns from red to green. John passes me up a hot dog and my soda and I watch a taxi cut off a car. The taxi driver starts yelling and the two men get out and stop traffic and all the while the metal box I’m on clicks while the light turns from red to green.

It ends with a horse cop on the scene. I can see his stallion. I think he’s trying to look at me, but then I see him rolling one eye so far back it looks like what he’s trying to see is inside his head.

Of course I get all the hot dogs I ever want. John tries to get me on onion, but I like them plain, no mustard or anything. I drink orange soda or sometimes cream. I sit on the curb and eat. John kisses me goodbye. He says it’s all he wants. I request the Hershey with almonds next time, nuts in things are my thing, I tell him, they’re my bag. He laughs, he says where he comes from hard-boiled eggs are baked into loaves of braided bread.

“What about the shells?” I want to know. “All that fucking sharpness in your teeth,” I say.

I curse all the time, or maybe it’s just “fuck” I always say. Fuck, I think it too, fuck, bread must have been all the hot dog men ever ate in their countries.

My mother says shit in French all the time. Merde when the electric gets cut. Merde when the candlestick wax drips onto her clothes. Merde when the gas gets cut too and we eat cold sandwiches each night for dinner. Merde in her sleep while I lie next to her in bed, merde a scream in a string of other French I do not understand. Maybe all the sleep-talking is why our father left.

*   *   *

An angel woke me when my sister was sleeping too close to the old space heater and the flame went off and the whole house smelled like gas. I tugged at my sister’s shoulder and tugged and tugged and finally her eyes opened and she told me to leave her alone, she was sleeping. The angel was floating above my head when it happened and she kept calling my name and I didn’t want to wake up either, but she was fucking persistent, this angel, and so I turned off the gas and saved everyone’s life.

I’m the one who shops and I’ve got ten bucks for two days to feed the five of us. Polly at the A & P knows I’ve only ever got ten bucks and she says “How ya doin, Smitty?” Then she passes through a bunch of my items without ringing them up and gives me a wink. I even come home with change. Tom does it too, but his nose is huge and red and usually has a ripe white pimple on it, so I don’t like to stand on his line, but like I said, he’ll do it too and not charge me for some items and wink when he’s packing the bags and call me Smitty.

Two weeks after Easter the store’s chocolate hasn’t all sold so Polly and Tom throw leftover chocolate bunny rabbits into my bag after I’ve already paid. My mother says Polly and Tom are saints and shakes her head and counts out loud in French the change I give her back and takes a bite out of my stale chocolate rabbit’s ear. She hands it back to me one-eared and I pick out the candy sugar eye and eat it and then put the rabbit back in its box and up on a shelf. Missing an eye, now it’s not able to look out its plastic window at me and my mother doing whatever we do in our house.