abhaile Chapter 6: six, a fargo fanfic

a/n: hey everyone! (if you celebrate it) happy halloween! i am here to bring a different kind of treat (i hope) by finally uploading another chapter. as i promised i've not given up on this story. things have just been hectic (new job, new studies, etc) so i get so little time to write. i'm also trying to work on the next installment of a different series i write for umbrella academy lol i write at a snail's pace.

anyways i wanted to write a special thank you to everyone who has supported this story. i am amazed that people still come back to it to check for updates, or that it's even gotten as much feedback as it has because the fargo fandom is smaller compared to the big ones on this site. so thank you so much. it really makes me so happy. rabbi is a hard character to write so i really am grateful when you all encourage me to keep trying.

now i also want to say that i don't know what you all hope regarding the canon story arc for rabbi. i usually stick to canon and i hope you can all accept that lol it's how i *usually* write my stories. i have an idea too so we'll see how it pans out heheh.

i hope you all have a lovely morning/evening/night and stay safe!

- zed

six

That night, I had another dream, one that was different from all the rest because Rabbi was in it. The house was decorated like it had been for Josto and Dessie's engagement party. The garden was a sea of white gazebos and garland. Flutes tinkled, bottles popped. The guests were dressed beautifully, but their faces were blurred, unimportant.

Birds flit to the birdhouse, bolted against the tree. So many birds that it seemed impossible for the birdhouse to hold any more of them.

Rabbi wore a fitted suit in a delicate shade of blue, one which warmed his pallor. I wore white, like a bride. I sipped champagne. It bubbled and fizzed sweetly on my tongue. Then came a dance. I swayed, I twirled. He held me.

The weather was warm, pleasantly so. I saw children around us. I heard them, glimpsed them, before a little boy stepped forward, his hand outstretched for me to take. There was a newspaper on the table. It read: Liberal.

Onward and onward, that little dance went. I reached up to rest my hand against his chest, palm flat. The lanterns fizzled out behind him. The birdsong melted into the blackness of the clouds overhead.

The birdhouse fell from the tree.

In the morning, my hand brushed the emptiness of the sheets beside me, without me understanding who it was I reached for. Rabbi, I realised. I had been searching for him as if he was still beside me.

It was a strange feeling, to awake from a dream so gentle, nothing like the nightmares which normally tossed me from sleep, confused, scrambling for a sense of stability. I spotted the bulky brown wardrobe in my bedroom and the small, fragile chair upon which a heaped pile of freshly-ironed dresses had been left to crinkle.

I passed entire days pressing down the collars and shirts and dresses of the Faddas beneath the sizzling lip of an iron that, come night-time, I could never summon the strength to sort out my own clothing. It was a rod for my own back, those dresses, so much so that it had me flopping back against my pillows, huffing a tired breath, before my eyes trailed toward the teasing glint of the golden latch bolted to my door.

I wondered what he had been wanting to keep out; who he had been wanting to keep out.

Mrs Fadda had insisted that she pack a suitcase for Zero. She layered it with his favourite pyjamas, pausing each time to breathe in the soft child-scent of soap and a faint lingering sweetness she could not quite name. I had stood in the bedroom with her, holding up each shirt and each pair of trousers for her approval, folding them for her and letting her place them within the suitcase.

She wanted spare socks, should he be cold in that house, by which she meant the Cannon household. She could never fully bring herself to whisper the name Cannon aloud. It was that family, that house, those people, strange phrasings which had me wondering if she hated them for taking her son or their skin or their power. It was awkward and uncomfortable to hear, because she seemed to take out her anger on them rather than her husband, who Rabbi told me had arranged the whole thing because of the escalating threat of outright war between the families.

Or perhaps it was all of it that bothered her, for she went about the house like a black storming cloud, quietly simmering, offering only the occasional rumble that promised it would soon prick us with merciless needle-sharp rain.

She wanted his most beloved toys to be tucked between shirts and trousers. She was afraid the Cannon children might snatch them from Zero if they saw them, because he was much too quiet and gentle, she told me. He endured, like his other brothers, like his father. It was Fadda blood, she told me, stroking her fingertips across the red-coloured buttons of one shirt before bringing it, too, against her face, clinging onto his clothing because she could not hold onto him anymore.

She pulled it away. Tears slicked her cheeks. Her eyes flashed puffy and bloodshot.

"Do you want children, Ava?"

I lowered the trousers in my hands. "I'm not sure, Mrs Fadda. I think so."

"Children are pain," she said. "Begins with the birth. Agony. Then, into your arms they put your baby. You hold him. You love him more than yourself, than anybody. Agony. All his pain becomes yours. Each bloodied knee, each tooth lost, each time he cries because of bullies or what have you, it becomes yours. Agony. So you ask, why have them? Why seek out pain? Is there not enough for you in the world already?"

The room was silent but for the rustling of the curtains, swirled by a cool breeze slithering through the open window. Out in the garden, there were leaves blown about in that same wind, curling against the curb, sticking there against brown-spotted clumps of snow.

She sat on the bed, grasping Zero's shirt against her chest and curling herself around it. I heard her words faintly. Perhaps in Italian, it made more sense than it did to me then, for I saw only a lonely mother sitting in a dim room, holding onto the last child that she had left. And what would her life be like once Zero was left? Just her and Don Fadda, wandering the rooms, with only the men in the garden for sound, and Rabbi and I still drifting like ghosts on the third floor.

What a life, I thought. What a life.

I was not drinking in what she said. I saw piles of clothing still to be folded, packed and already I was thinking of lunch for Zero. I reminded myself of his sandwiches, with an extra layer of peanut-butter, and jelly just how he liked it. I imagined what it would be like in the house with this new child, taken from his own home. I dreamt of his own mother, sitting in another house across town, breathing in the scent of her own child.

I was thinking of other things, because I thought Mrs Fadda was rambling.

"Agony," she said again. "Profound, intense. Hot, like bringing your hand against the stove. But then love comes, soothes the pain. It falls like water over the burn. All that agony; gone."

Rabbi had ripped his coat. He said nothing about it, but I had seen it in his room and offered to stitch it for him, before the meeting between the Faddas and the Cannons the following morning. I brought needle and thread into the warm yellowish tone of his bedroom, made fuzzed and inviting at night when its flimsy curtains were drawn.

The heater guzzled petrol. It slumbered like a dog beside us. Oftentimes Rabbi cleaned his gun. It seemed a habit, something for his hands, hands which were otherwise prone to strange night-time tremors. Night bothered him. It gnawed at him, crept along his spine like the scuttling bugs Zero found underneath stones in the garden. So he cleaned his gun to soothe the bugs and still his hands.

The length of thread between his shoulder-blades had worn. It split the coat, allowed the lining beneath to peek through and shine slick-black against light. I sewed, drawing the slit together, pinching the needle between my lips as I examined my work.

Once it was finished, he read aloud, for once. It was a poem. He read slowly and beautifully from a book that he had gifted me.

In its slip, he had written: A Eabha. He had signed only his initials.

I found myself run ragged from cleaning and sewing and cleaning some more. I drifted off. The heater was the culprit, stuffing his room with stifling air that wrapped me in a cocoon and lulled me. I woke sometime in the night; perhaps it had been only a few minutes, or perhaps long hours, because there was a crick in my neck.

Rabbi was not reading anymore. He sat in the chair beside mine and watched the swaying treetops outside between a sliver in the curtains.

"Take the bed," he said. "Won't be usin' it."

The suggestion was both scandalous and tame. I had learned from life that it mattered very little if nothing even happened between us in that moment. Rumours would bubble up between the floorboards, seep between the gaps in the wood, because the Fadda women might think me promiscuous and bold if they found out. The men might think me easy.

Yet it was also tame, in that Rabbi would remain in his chair and not ever approach me, that much was certain. He would not shift from that spot, that spot from which he watched me, his own jaw ticking at the sides as if he chewed his tongue between his teeth and wondered what I might think. There was no real reason for me to say, when my room was right beside his own. But I wanted to stay. I wanted to think that he wanted me to stay.

"All right," I said hoarsely.

It was sleep which crusted my throat. I cleared it, standing and slipping off toward his bed, stooping beneath the frame of the bunk. The mattress felt firm; the springs cried out in rusted splutters. I sank against the sheets and ruffled his pillow. There was an animal comfort that came from breathing in his scent.

In the morning, I would dwell on what might have happened had the Faddas come to the third floor that night in search of him, in search of me. I might have been thrown out, if the Faddas thought that I was like the German girl, herself spoken of like a stain that no subsequent housekeeper could scrub out from their furniture and rugs and countertops.

From between lowered eyelids, I watched the outline of him, taking out his gun for another cleaning, pulling out its parts; he had named those parts for me before, but in the drowsy half-light of my thoughts, I could not recall even a single word he had said. I remembered only the movement of his lips, forming sounds that washed right across me, because I was thinking of his eyes, burning intelligence at each blink, and the slow sinking of his shoulders each time that he had nudged his chair close enough to mine, so that our kneecaps knocked together and sent a bucking thrill up through me.

He was not one for touch; overt touch, at least, though sometimes his hand lifted and his fingers curled inward as if they had tried, without his wanting it, to reach out and brush away a strand of unnoticed hair from my coat, as if they had wanted to imitate those characters on the screens in the theatre who stroked the cheek of their love interest and drew her close. I wanted him to think of me like that. He made me feel like one of those stars whispering to him, gripping the lapels of his coat, newly-stitched by my own thread, hauling him against me.

I fell asleep to the sound of the heater humming and the gentle rub of cloth against the silver of his gun.

Bringing fresh linen through the house, I passed Zero's bedroom and heard a soft, feminine voice singing an Italian lullaby. It was Mrs Fadda, lying alongside him, her body curled around him as if she wished to return him to the womb and hide him from the trade between families which would happen in a few hours.

The suitcases sat at the bottom of his bed. I watched them for a moment longer, then continued through to the other bedrooms, thinking all the while about agony.

Before he left, Zero hugged me. He looped his arms around my waist and buried his face against my stomach. I squeezed him tightly. Rabbi stood in the hall, waiting. Zero began to pull away. I found myself gripping onto him for a few seconds more, like his mother had done. She wailed in the living-room. The sisters held her, huddled around her and offered crushed-up tissues for her tears.

Zero did not sob or wail. He stood still and allowed me to smooth down his hair, right his collar, tighten his shoe-laces. I pecked his cheek. I said, "Be a good boy, now."

"Will they cut the crust off like you do?"

"I'm sure if you ask nicely, they will."

The words smoothed the furrow of his brow. "Okay."

"Brush your teeth. Remember your sums and readin'."

"Okay," he said. "I will."

Off he went, with Rabbi guiding him by his shoulder. Zero looked so small, scuffing his shoes against the ground as if he wished the soles might stick and hold him in place. But his father waited at the end of the hall for him and cupped his cheek, tilting his head back against the hard, bitter white light of the morning.

The hall blurred in front of me. It was smudged by tears. No wailing, no sobbing. Simply a sniffle. Don Fadda muttered something to Rabbi, who nodded and returned to the kitchen. He had come to collect a scarf that Mrs Fadda had gotten for Zero, which the boy left draped over a chair. In the haze of Zero leaving, it had likely been forgotten.

Rabbi grabbed it. He glimpsed the tears glistening on my cheeks and hesitated, the scarf folded in his hands, hands that started up that awkward scrunching because he wanted to touch me and wanted to comfort me. I could tell. I had learned to read him like I read those books in his drawer, flipping each page and noting each paragraph of his expression.

He rocked back on his heels, like he would leave, but then it came: a gentle swipe of his fingertips against my cheek.

"An bhfuil tú níos fearr?"

Are you better?

There was something about hearing him speak in our own tongue that softened the pain within me. "Tá mé," I told him, nodding. "Go raibh maith agat."

"Maith an cailín." Even more kindly, he added, "He'll be all right, Ava."

Rabbi left, taking the tears and the scarf with him. He wrapped it around Zero and I wondered if my sorrow had soaked into it.

I dusted the figurines and brushed behind the portraits in the hallway. There was Daniel cast in oil, a den of lions prowling all around him. I cleaned the toys that the Fadda children had left scattered around. I brewed fresh steaming coffee for the Italians on the porch because one of them had asked for it, though I had been told the American coffee was nothing compared to the mother country; it brought me back to mothers – motherlands and mother-tongues until I brought a cup to Mrs Fadda and left it on her bedside table.

She was underneath her covers. She was humming the lullaby. It filled the room like the sound of the heater did in Rabbi's bedroom on the third floor.

Without pausing her humming, she snaked her hand out and held mine. It was brief. She squeezed and released me. I thought she had mistaken me, in her black-tinted world, for Maxia.

But then she said, "Thank you, Ava."

So I left her alone, which is what she wanted, for the black mood sealed itself around the doorframe and blocked out the rest of the household as soon as I closed it behind me.

In my own bedroom, I soaked in the poem that Rabbi had read to me the night beforehand, from a book of poems that he had found in a bookstore someplace. I had been too tired to hear the words. I had been too worn to appreciate them.

The poem was about a man who climbed a mountain; higher and higher this man went, ignoring all warnings of his treacherous path. He was found by monks half-buried in snow, at the end. It was a short poem, whose stanzas slipped underneath my eyelids, searing each letter against my brain.

I sat and thought about it and said the title aloud: "Excelsior."

It was late afternoon before I heard the staircase creak. I stiffened. The latch shone as if to remind of its strength, its purpose. Two short raps cracked against the door and resonated within my spine, forcing out a shiver of relief. I stood, rushing to answer, because Rabbi always called for me with those two little sounds.

Grey-coloured snow clung stubbornly to his coat. The tip of his nose was flushed a light red from the cold. He held his hands in his pockets, but motioned for me to follow him into his bedroom. The heater was off, this time. It sat flat and silent in the corner, tucked aside for a maroon-coloured duffle-bag.

Beside it stood a little black boy with eyes that reflected Rabbi, not in shape and not in colour, but rather in a brooding mistrust of the world around him.

"Ava, this is Satchel Cannon," Rabbi said. "Satchel, this is Ava McCarthy. I told you about her."

Satchel seemed unsure of what to do with himself. It was so much change to place on a boy of his age; I imagined his own mother all over again, sitting somewhere across town. I wondered if she was in a black sullen mood like Mrs Fadda. I shook the thought from my head.

I crossed the bedroom with its polished wooden floorboards and held out my hand for Satchel. He shook twice, then glanced at Rabbi again. He had not said a word. I worried that we frightened him, a pair of strangers who crowded him. So I stepped back and allowed him some space. His gaze skimmed the treetops. He looked at the bunk-beds.

"You'll sleep up top," Rabbi said.

It struck me only then that Satchel would share with Rabbi. It had not been discussed around me. Why would it have been? Yet it seemed somewhat of an insult that Satchel was not allowed to sleep in Zero's bedroom. It was like Satchel had been swept away into a cupboard, bumping against two dusty old cups that had been forgotten there already, those cups being me and Rabbi; our handles were broken, our rims chipped. No-one thought to take us out, anymore.

Still, I thought it was far better for Satchel. He was only a child, thrown from a boat bobbing along the sea, left to swim to a shoreline too far away for him to reach, all on his lonesome. Along came Rabbi to keep him afloat like he had done for me.

Rabbi herded me toward the landing again, his arm resting on the small of my back; not quite touching, but hovering against it, so that I sensed the heat of him bleeding through the strings of my apron. It was a wonder that the skin did not sting and blister for how hot it made me.

There, on the landing, he leaned close like we had the night that I had kissed him.

"Listen," he said. "The boy is in my care just like you are. Only I'm called away, now and then. Like tonight. I got the word Don Fadda wants us downtown so he can bash our ears –…"

Startled, I cut him off. "He can what?"

"Not bash our ears like that. Just slang. Wants to talk a lot, is all. But it might take a while and I need to know you and the boy are all right. So, I'm gonna haul that heater into your room and I want you to put down that latch until I come back. Should only be a couple of hours. Midnight, at the latest. You watch the boy. You stay safe. Can you do that for me, Ava?"

Before he could disappear following my nod, I latched onto his wrist. His coat was a coarse material that chafed against my palm. From where he stood, Satchel watched us. Rabbi spun back around and studied my hand gripping onto him. I brought him close again, looking up at him. In a whisper, I spoke to him in Irish, afraid that I might worry Satchel on his first night. I was even more worried that the Faddas might eavesdrop from down below in the hall.

"Is there something for us to fear, Rabbi?"

"No," he said, staying in our tongue. "Not tonight."

Not tonight.

Slowly his hand crept toward mine and pulled it away. It hung limp beside me, useless, unattached.

Rabbi turned and said something to Satchel, something that he had never said before then: "If I don't come back, I'm dead or in jail."

Once he was gone, I found myself whispering: not tonight, not tonight, don't let him be dead or in jail tonight…

Our bedrooms were quite similar, but Rabbi's heater seemed out-of-place as if it could not quite fit with the furniture in mine. Satchel sat on the chair that Rabbi had brought for him, thumbing through the pile of books. There was not much to occupy him. I searched his suitcase for pyjamas, finding a nice powder-blue pair that he might like.

There was a comfortable silence between us, which once again meant that Satchel reminded me of Rabbi in some strange way. I placed those new pyjamas on another chair in my room and stood.

The heater coughed; its wire gleamed red, steadily warming the space around us.

Satchel suddenly spoke up. "What does 'ee-ay-ba' mean?"

In his hands, he held the poetry book that Rabbi had gotten for me. He read from its slip where Rabbi had written my name: Eabha. "My name, Satchel. In Irish, is all. Still pronounced like Ava," I said.

He scrunched up his face at the letters. "How?"

I laughed. "Here, I can show you."

There was a scrap of paper on the desk from a letter that I had written to Nell, with a pencil abandoned alongside it. I brought both to him and scratched out my name in Irish, then sectioned it for him: ea/bh/a. I roughly circled the two starting letters and held it toward him. There was something endearing in the wide-eyed glance that he gave me, as if he thought that I was pulling his leg and the word meant something different altogether. But he listened, politely, leaning forward and following the dip and flow of the pencil in my hand.

"Those first two letters make the 'ay' that starts my name," I told him. "Then the two which follow make 'vee', like violin or violet. The last little 'a' all on its lonesome makes the final sound until you string them together to make Ava. Suppose you reckoned you'd learn more Italian on your first night than Irish, mind."

I handed him the paper and he put between the pages of the book, which he then set on his lap.

"I never heard anybody speak in Irish before. Sounds funny." He fiddled with the book. "Can you teach me some words?"

The room was quite still. Not even the heather seemed to churn and broil anymore. His question had been posed with such childlike openness that I loathed the anxieties it induced within me. I wanted to teach him all of it, anything that he wanted to say. But I worried about the Faddas overhearing him, if he spoke a word aloud in front of them, and that they might assume he was saying something insulting about them, about the house. He was only a child, but the world was tough enough for Satchel and I wanted to make no more difficulties for him, for he was judged on skin first and surname second, given his father was so well-known around town.

Yet he was sitting upright in his chair, a spark set alight seemingly for the first time between us, a chance for bonding. I was not willing to quench it and stamp on the ashes of what had might have been.

"Some," I said finally. "You should only use them with me or Rabbi, though. No speakin' it otherwise."

"Why?"

"It can be rude to speak in a language around people who don't understand it."

Satchel eyed me. "The Faddas spoke Italian in the car and I don't understand it."

I flushed. "That's different."

"Why?"

"Because I said so."

"That's what my older brother Lemuel says."

"Is it now?"

"Yeah." Satchel pursed his lips. "If I ask him why we gotta do things his way, he says 'because I said so'."

Guilt ate at me. "How about we treat it like a secret game for us? Like it was when my Grandmother taught me."

Again, the crunch of his brow in confusion was amusing and charming all at once. "Why did she make it a secret?"

"Because my mother wasn't too keen on me learnin' it. Thought it was useless."

"Why?"

Satchel shared that little-kid-habit of asking questions to just about everything. Zero had done it too.

After a moment of reflection, I said, "You see, the British owned my country for a long time. And they wanted us speakin' their language, not ours. No usin' your Irish name either. Had to use an English one that sounded like it. It was a lot easier for people who spoke English to find jobs, too, so parents were teachin' their little ones only to speak English, in the hopes they might find a better life later. Got to where a lot of Irish people only knew the little words, not the language. Then no words at all. Language dies that way, if you let it."

"But what about your Grandmother?"

"She wouldn't let it," I said, smiling at him. "She taught me and my brother, where and when she could. Hard to speak it without practice. Hard to learn new words without someone to tell you those words. So I like speaking it with Rabbi where and when I can. Not a lot of speakers 'round here, not like back home."

"Does it hurt not to use your real name?"

Here was another question offered in an innocent tone that flustered me. It was not bother that he had chosen, not annoy. It was hurt, something which struck me as another sign that Satchel was wiser than his years first suggested. Makes me feel like a fraud, is what I wanted to tell him. Makes me feel I'm slicing off something important that I can't get back. Makes me feel as chopped up as my name with those slashes between the letters. Makes me feel like I'm spitting on those who came before me – that I have to spit on them to survive.

Instead, I asked, "What do you mean?"

"My Daddy says names are important. Names are what make the person. He has a friend named Doctor Senator. Never lets anybody make fun of his name. He says if you do, you're letting them make fun of you and what your parents wanted for you."

This sat within me for a while before I could answer. "I think it hurt me more before," I said. "Then I got used to it."

And this was a lie which sat within him for a while too, before he could respond. "Maybe you should use it more even if makes it hard for other people to read it," he said. "That way you'd get accustomed to the hurt of telling them over and over how to read it, but still getting to use it."

"Sometimes I'd like to."

"But the world doesn't work that way."

I looked at him, surprised. "What makes you say that?"

"My Daddy said that too," he told me. "Sometimes we want something to be one way, but the world doesn't let it."

Satchel wanted me to teach him the words for book and lamp and bed, until we had gone all around the room and there were no words left. He was bright, so bright that he burned more than the red-hot wire of the heater. I taught him little words that he might never use again, and tempered that fiery pride each time he said book and bed and lamp aloud in my tongue.

Eventually, he said, "My Daddy told me the Irish come here for jobs."

"They do. I did, anyway."

Satchel hesitated a moment. "He told me people don't always like the Irish. Usually only the Irish like the Irish."

I thought, then, that Satchel understood more about the world than I had thought. I suspected that his father had already warned him of cruelty; I bet that his father could tell him even more about it than me. I felt dim and naïve for having assumed that childhood had protected him from stuff like that. It was what had given him that look in his eye like Rabbi, that ring of alertness around the pupil, always turning and turning. I wished that things were different for him.

I wished that it was different for us, all three on the third floor, so that three seemed the only number for us. Luckiness came in threes, or so I had always been told. So we would stick together, us three.

"Usually," I said. "But I was hoping you and I could get along all the same. If you want, that is."

There it was again: hesitation, before he nodded. Then he asked, "Is Rabbi Irish?"

"American," I told him.

"But he can speak Irish. And he likes you. That makes him more Irish." Satchel ran his hands across the book still wedged between his knees. "If the Faddas are Italian, why is Rabbi with them? Do they like him?"

"He works for them," I said carefully. "Like me."

Satchel nodded again, before sinking back against his chair. He seemed to be mulling through things. I wondered what he had already seen that had led him to notice the Faddas left Rabbi on the peripheral of their world, apart from Don Fadda, who seemed more affectionate toward him than he was even toward Josto at times. Even if Satchel had wanted me to explain that dynamic to him, I was not sure that I could.

Rabbi was neither brother nor son to the Faddas; not a stranger nor an acquaintance, either. He was something that neither of our tongues could articulate.

"I could run you a bath if you would like, Satchel."

He shrugged his shoulders. "Okay."

I stood from the chair. "If you like that book, we can find you another. Hold our own little book-club up here."

Again, his shoulders heaved and dropped. I sensed that he was still out of his depth, in this foreign house, with its foreign sounds and foreign voices drifting upward from the halls below. I had become accustomed to the footsteps, the groaning of the pipe in the bathroom each morning and the harsh cranking whine of the radiator when it warmed up. The curtains creaked along the rail when drawn. The trees sometimes brushed the house at night, like the gnarled, curled-up fingertips of a skeleton scratching at the walls. The latch had a comforting crack that followed the drop of the bolt.

Satchel looked around himself, placed the book aside and stood to follow me. He passed me into the hall, where I would show him around the bathroom and the cabinet and the cupboard so he would not be lost on his own at night, if he needed something.

Before I could step out onto the landing and into the bathroom with him, I saw that the book had slipped from the pile, and fallen open to show that slip again. The page that I had written on blew across the ground, close enough that I saw my own handwriting.

ea/bh/a.

Rabbi kept his word and came to my bedroom at midnight with his two careful taps against the door. Satchel had fallen asleep in my bed. Rabbi roused him, muttering at him to switch rooms. Satchel scuffed his slippers against the floorboards and did what he was told, passing to the other side of the third floor.

Rabbi watched him all the way, as if the boy crossed a desert rather than the short distance between beds. There was a strangeness to Rabbi; a strangeness more pronounced than usual, through his sniffing and glancing around and then his bluntness when he asked: "Would you like to go steady?"

I stared at him. "What?"

"Steady. Us. Together." He pulled his hands from his coat and yanked off his hat as if he only just recalled that he was still wearing it indoors. He rolled it around by its rim. "I were thinkin' is all – on the drive home, when the streets are empty and you can do the most thinkin' – honest woman and that – if you wanted – not honest, I mean, more like – if it was what you wanted. Makes sense, I'm thinkin'."

"Seems you did a lot of thinkin'."

The teasing had deflated his anxieties. His hat rested at his side. He no longer bounced and sniffed. He looked me in the eye and said, "I'll be frank. I care about you, Ava. I'm not about the gestures, the stuff Josto'd be doin' for Dessie and that. But I care about you and I'm willin' to try somethin' I've never done before."

"What somethin' would that be, Rabbi?"

Perhaps I asked because I was frightened by its potential: love, marriage, those things I never thought were meant for me.

"Bein' with someone," he said. "Wantin' to be with someone. Even for the small things like readin' and sittin' in my room. Prefer it when you're there with me. I want you there. I want you around. Never wanted that with anyone before."

It was an answer that reassured me in its simplicity. I was not for grand gestures either. At least, none had ever been made for me, but the thought alone embarrassed me. I preferred Rabbi as he was: reserved and thoughtful, quiet and attentive. I had never talked about love with my mother. I had never known an example of what it was meant to be beyond the four corners of that screen in a darkened theatre when the lead actor gripped the actress in his arms and tilted her, kissed her, told her about sunsets in their new life together, just like I had been thinking earlier that morning.

No-one had ever told me what love was meant to be. I had been patting around in the dark with him, and I was not even sure it was love between us. Fondness, perhaps. Affection. Whatever it was, it would blossom into love if it was not that already. I would come closest to it with him, I thought.

"Never wanted that either," I told him. "Bein' with someone properly, I mean. Used to think there was somethin' wrong with me, you know. No school-girl crushes or the like. But I like you. I want to be with you. Like bein' around you the same way you like it with me. I want to go steady with you."

"Good," he said. "Good."

I pushed forward like I had done on the landing before, closed that gap, cupped his cheeks and pecked his lips. It was a light touch. It was quick and gentle and not too much all at once for him, when he found touch so difficult and overwhelming. He cleared his throat. I spotted a flush to his cheeks. He stood tall, without that usual slouch in his shoulders.

And for a second I wondered if touch was what he wanted; that he craved it, that he wished it would last longer. But it had passed and I would have to dwell on it.

"It'll have to stay quiet," he said. "Between us. Your job and mine."

"Do you think we'll stay here forever?"

Rabbi watched me. "No," he answered. "Not forever."

There was something lingering in his tone. "Have you been thinkin' about that too, Rabbi? On those drives with empty streets?"

Neither of us said the word, but he understood what I meant: leaving.

"Been thinkin' about it longer than that." He combed back his hair. "But it won't happen now. Not tonight."

Emboldened, I reached up and smoothed his hair some more. "It'll need another trim soon."

"Good thing I found myself someone so good with scissors."

I smiled. "You remember that when I nick your ear next time."

There was a distant creak of a door opening in the hall downstairs. Rabbi reacted in a flash, smacking the switch in my room for the light, plunging us both into watery moonlight. He crowded us back into my room and his arm looped around me, fully holding me, which was so unlike what he had done before that I burned in a blush.

But he was distracted, not thinking at all about his skin against mine. His expression was focused, his face composed of silvery threads. His head was turned somewhat, looking along the staircase which shimmered downward ahead of us. His breath bristled against my hair.

Both of us watched the hall below. There was a small figure passing with drowsy and slow footsteps, sniffling – it was Antonia, the youngest daughter of Maxia and Antoon. She wandered toward their bedroom. It was likely that a nightmare had frightened her and made her climb out of her own bed to sleep beside her parents instead. If she had noticed us, stood so close together –…

Your job and mine.

Rabbi loosened up and stepped away from me. I missed him instantly. Love, I thought to myself. Fondness, affection. Was it not all wrapped into one?

"Goodnight, Ava," he said. He added, "Put down the latch. I'll take the heater and books out at dawn."

Suddenly I thought of what day was coming and asked, "Can we bring him with us?"

Rabbi had not turned the light on. Those silver-coloured lines flowed and ebbed around his face. "What?"

"Satchel. Can we bring him to Liberal?" I said.

"Yes," he said. "We'll bring him."

I smiled. "All right. Goodnight, Rabbi."

"Goodnight, Ava," he said again.

Satchel would come with us. Not tonight, I told myself. Not tonight. But soon.

In the dream that I had that night, which was identical to the dream that had come the night beforehand, the garden was filled with gazebos and flutes. It was guests, hors-d'oeuvres and toasts. I sat with Rabbi. His hand rested on my thigh. He was smiling. His blue suit had been stitched along the spine where it had split. The thread was neat and clean. I sipped at champagne. It tasted strange. I touched my tongue and pulled away dark red lumps.

I watched a figure stand for another toast; it turned and held its own flute out toward me. The face sharpened.

It was my brother, James. He was as ill as he had been before death; his pallor like greyish marble, his mouth a shade as blue as the suit that Rabbi wore. He turned his head and pointed his flute at another man, sitting at the end of the table, dressed in a green-coloured jumper. The coppery taste was still in my mouth. I wiped at my lips, wiped and wiped, but could not rid myself of those odd red lumps that came out.

Before the dream could end and I could bolt upright in my bed, Rabbi looked at me and said, "It won't happen now. Not tonight. But soon."

additional note: for translations, rabbi asks ava 'are you better'. she answers 'yes, thank you'. he says 'good girl'. also i don't remember if the other fadda kids are named, i made them up lol.