After Hours at Dooryard Books

Mrs. Valdez corners Patrick.

“You’re in charge here,” she tells him, an index finger firm against the placket of his shirt, her nurse’s uniform bright in the gloom of Susan’s kitchen. “You treat that baby like she’s your own baby and that poor girl like she’s your sister, you hear?”

Patrick can only nod. He’d watched with a secondhand sense of shame as Mrs. Valdez took in the empty bottle of Ballantine’s on Susan’s bedside table, the pills in the bathroom, the pervasive smell of weed.

“They’re both healthy,” Mrs. Valdez assures him. “Physically, at least. New mothers need meat. Can you cook liver?”