The Crooked Branch

“If you’re good, I’ll bring ye back something from America,” he said. “But not if there’s tears.”

When he’s home I don’t even remember the deserted panic of these empty afternoons. It’s like I have revolving brains, each one amnesiac of the other.

When I finish shopping, I take two more laps around the shop just to fill up some extra minutes with people and food and comforting public noises.

was an awful thing that’d happened, the way this hunger had undressed death, and made it common.

Emma begins to wail, and I begin to sweat. I need to pee. My incision throbs from carrying the car seat up the steps. But Emma’s hunger trumps all my would-be biological urgencies.

He’ll take the food from our mouths and sell it out to England to please his lordship, for to fatten his wife and his wallet. They will profit from our starvation!”

In fact she says this whenever I tell her that Emma is fussy. She says, “Well, she can probably sense how uptight you are, and that makes her uptight, too,” which is obviously a very helpful observation. But now

Leo has been encouraging me to pick up a writing job or two, to start freelancing again. He thinks I can do research during the days and the evenings while Emma sleeps, and then write during the mornings when he’s home, before he goes in to the restaurant. Before Emma, I had more work than I could manage. But Leo doesn’t seem to understand what’s h

“That’s why you have to stay, son. Your mother needs you here, to keep things ticking over until I can get back. We can’t leave the girls all on their own, right?” Michael shook his head. He was nearly ten now. He