HIS UNSIGNED MERCY

idn't look up f

e she was tasting the w

in man tried a smile on for size. "Wea

achines that eat quarters, a husband who's been dead since two thousand nine, and a nephew who owe

kicked the side of the vending machine, for reasons I will never understand. Then he stopped

across the cra

Father Michael. Then I call my nephew. Then, if I'm

dow did

f nephews," the

se on the pile. "Take an umbrella from th

runted, the bell rang, the door sighed shut, and the room filled

anyway. My legs had stop

the old woman said. "They went le

something steaming from a thermos into its cap. She pushed it across the coun

. I own this place, God help me. Yo

enn

sweatshirt in front of me. UNIVERSITY OF SOMETHING, with a hole in one elbow. "L

sheets and somebody else's life, and it was th

" I said, and tried to fish

y in teeth. "Put that back. Keep your mon

to something else, and I had to press the heel of my hand against my mou

towels. I don't remember falling asleep. I remember the last thing I tho

ight after dinner he sat at our kitchen table with a ledger the size of a cinder block. When I was five, he taught me

d my forehead at the door and

his employer. By midnight my mother had packed one bag and pressed a brass compass into my palm and told me to keep it where nobody co

the windows h

a rusty hinge. "I need to get

since my husband proposed." She did

ook, soft as cloth, filled with initials and dates and columns of numbers I'd stared at for six years without understanding. It was the reason I'd taken t

moved the unlit cigarette from one side of he

ake up. You owe me ei

s. He didn't ask a single question, which I took to mean he'd been raised by Rosa. I climbed into the cart. He piled towels on top of me.

mewhere ahead, sharp as a dropped pan, and Tomás wheeled me straight past

guard took his coffee on the hour. I knew room 214, third

closet was bare. My two uniforms, my o

ils under the floorboard by the rad

ng bu

ng for

ned a

paper cup of coffee in one hand and,