Chapter 16: Under the Tin Roof

"Think about it however you like," I said to Constance, and I walked into the elevator.

Harrison held the door.

He had heard the whole thing, and he did not say one word on the way down.

Ada came home to the round window that evening, in a car seat that Harrison had buckled in with four tries and a stricken face.

Margaret had made a nest of folded blankets in a dresser drawer.

"It's what they did in my family," she said. "She'll sleep like a stone."

Ada did not sleep like a stone.

She had spent ten days in a plastic box with a hum, and she missed it.

By nine she was screaming, thin and furious, and nothing in either of our arms made it stop.

Harrison stood in the middle of the drafting room in his grey sweater, rocking from foot to foot.

He had come at seven, as the terms said.

He had left no phone at the desk, because there was no desk, and no phone to leave.

"Try the sound of the rain," Margaret said from the stairs, pointing at the tall windows.

"It's a good racket on the roof of the loading dock. I used to take the foreman's baby out there."

"She's been home four hours," I said. "She isn't going out in November."

"Under the overhang. In the pram, with the hood up and two blankets."

I looked at my daughter's red face.

Then I got the pram.

The loading dock ran along the back of the warehouse, a concrete shelf under a deep tin roof.

The rain came down in a solid sheet a foot beyond the edge, and it drummed on the metal over our heads.

I pushed the pram back and forth in the yellow light of one bulb.

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