A Puerto Rican girl at school gets pregnant. She comes to school in her father’s button-down shirts and undoes a few buttons and shows us her navel which she says has popped out as far as the bulging eyes of one of those little mop dogs. I know the kind she means, the kind like Ma Mère’s. A little Bambi dog eye, just one, the Cyclops of her belly.

“Comes everything with seed,” Mr. Lenin says. We are building wooden birdhouses.

“Rats come,” says the pregnant Puerto Rican girl. She has seen them shimmy up the brick of buildings, so many you’d think it was ivy, but it’s just what the realtors call Lower East Side charm, crawling rats instead of climbing ivy. She is afraid for her not-yet-born child’s cheeks. The rats might think they’re chunks of cheese and bite them.

“I’d like to build a wooden trap instead, if it’s all right with you,” she says to Mr. Lenin. Others of us do too, with guillotine doors that slide down when the rats step on a dowel to get to the seeds. When she is nearly due the class gives her a shower and she receives our wooden rat-traps in the shapes of birdhouses tied with yellow and pink ribbons. We all sign a card. “May your baby’s cheeks never be chewed.” She cries and hugs us and lets us feel her kicking baby. “If everything comes for seed,” she says to me, “then maybe a little seed could bring your father home.” I shake my head. “A trap then?” she says. She turns to Mr. Lenin. “What would it take to build one big enough for a man?”

“More wood,” Mr. Lenin says, while he stands at the mirror hung in the closet of the classroom cutting his long black nose hairs with a tiny saw blade.

The next day Mr. Lenin opens the door to the supply room.

He points at me. “Come, I show you,” he says. I point at myself. “Me?” I say.

“Yes, come,” he says.

I walk into the supply room. There’s metal shelves stacked with different lengths of wood. A lot of wood.

“When you are ready. I help you build trap. The one for a man,” he says. “I know how to do it. But don’t tell principal.” He takes down a huge piece of wood from a top shelf. “We start with this,” he says. He takes my hand and places it over the wood. I glide it back and forth, feeling sawdust, the powder of the wood.

“I once wanted to build same trap when I was your age,” he says.

Finally, I get a phone call. Someone saw my sign.

“I found your dog,” a man says.

“My sign is for a man. My dog’s right here,” I say. It’s true, our dog is sleeping in the corner with one of the cats sleeping curled up between her legs.

“What’s my reward?” the man says.

“The reward is you get to keep the dog,” I say.

“That’s fucked up,” the man says. “I should report you to the humane society.”

One night we all wake up because Ma Mère’s standing at the window, pointing at a bum wandering on the street. She is calling for our mother, asking out loud in French if she remembers her father and our mother answers of course she remembers her father, and Ma Mère draws our mother near and puts a hand on our mother’s shoulder and says in French, “Vois tu? There he is, wave to him,” she says. Our mother waves to him and puts her arm around Ma Mère’s waist and the two of them watch the bum, reeling, drunk, trying to make his way up the street.

In the morning the bum is at our breakfast table.

His name is Manolo and he is not our mother’s father.

“But he is hungry and we should help him,” our mother says and Ma Mère, from her chair in the living room, says, “Oui, he is hungry,” so we have to let him stay and our mother finds some of my brother’s shorts that he never wears and she gives them to Manolo.

“Call him Uncle,” our mother says a few days later.

“Uncle?” we all cry out.

“He could be yours, he looks so much like my father,” she says and she makes him special meals cooked with saffron that stains our wooden spoons yellow.

“That’s what it does to your insides too,” Louisa says, holding up the yellowed spoons, showing us how we are yellow-bellied.

Manolo sleeps in an old car parked on the street, saying he doesn’t mind it there, especially since the weather’s warming up. The car doesn’t run and every other day Manolo puts it in neutral and we help push it to the other side of the street so it won’t be towed.

After a while, we do call him Uncle. He likes to tell us stories about Chile. Long, long stories that are mostly about women he loved and women he wished loved him back. Their eyes are all black as night and their hair soft as breezes. When he tells us the stories he outlines their figures in the air for us, dozens of big breasts and narrow waists and curved hips shaped by his hands and left standing invisible and silent all over our house.

I go to see John and he gives me a broken hot dog to eat and then he tells me to be careful, that Uncle Manolo may be a creep.

“How disgusting,” I say and John nods his head but I’m talking about the hot dog he just gave me.

“Fuck, is this some kind of tail?” I ask him and I show him where I bit into the hot dog, how a string or a tail of some sort is processed into the thing. “Rat tail, must be, or big mouse,” I say.

“It’s just what happens sometimes to hot dogs when they’re made,” John says. “Eat and keep quiet. You want someone to hear you?”

John takes off his fast food hat and throws it in the garbage.

“It’s falling apart,” he says. He wipes his hand through his hair which shows his balding head beneath it. Sweat glistens on the rolled wrinkled skin by his neck. I’ve never seen him looking so hairless.

“Creeps like your new uncle make me want to go back to my country and be with my wife and kids,” John says.

John says come here and he sits down and I sit on his lap and he slides his fingers up to my tits and after a minute I stand up. I think a minute’s long enough for a hot dog, especially a broken one and all with a rodent tail inside.

“Go home. I’m busy,” he says. But there are no customers and he’s not busy, he just looks down, putting his hands around the handles on his hot dog cart, as if he’s mustering energy, as if any moment he’s going to run breakneck with the cart in front of him through the street, ready to crash into some bus or truck and do himself in. I don’t want to leave him this way, so I tell him what my brother said, that if you’re going to kill yourself you better be careful you do it the entire way, and not just half-assed so that you’re stuck in a wheelchair your whole life collecting your shit in some plastic baggie. And then I go home.