At breakfast Ben corrected exams while Sia sat in the kitchen’s small bay window with a newspaper, eating her favorite morning glop of yogurt, honey, mangos, and dry cereal and giggling softly over the comic strips. The one time she caught Farrell staring at her, she asked him to make her a cup of herb tea. She was dozing when he left for work, a dusty gray Persian cat sprawled twitching in the sunlight, and Ben was snapping pencil points and cursing middle-class illiteracy.
So, it will make us mad.
He literally ran into Suzy McManus, coming through the front door as he was going out. It was dangerously easy not to see Suzy; she took up so little space so quietly. She was a thin woman, almost gaunt, pale of eye and skin and hair, and her voice, addressing anyone but Sia, was equally anorexic, starved of all inflection. Only when she spoke with Sia did she even begin to take on color; and on the occasions when Farrell came on them laughing together, he was astonished each time to realize how young she was. He had promptly determined that he would make Suzy laugh himself, but it was all he could do to get her to talk to him, let alone understanding her mumbled responses to his jokes and questions. Now, righting her before she fell, he flirted with her, saying, “Suzy, this makes the third time I’ve knocked you down and stepped on you. Don’t I get to keep you now?”
Suzy answered him in—as far as he could ever tell—absolute seriousness, in her usual downcast whisper. “Oh, no, it takes much more trampling than that.” She ducked her head abruptly, in a way she had, turning so that she almost looked directly at him, yet Farrell never saw her eyes. Then she vanished, which was another way of hers, slipping past him toward the kitchen, but trailing away into air before she reached the door. Farrell had a very bad day at Thumper’s.