Nightwork: Stories by Christine Schutt

of the girls. Crouched in the collapse of his bed, he gave his version of the girls to Margaret. How their hands brushed over the new hair under his arms—as thoughit were high grass and they walking through the field of him. “My brother,” she said, “he told me what happened some nights after you abandoned the abandoned embassy.” The sucked-down candies he proffered on his tongue. The brother was talking and Martin was calling “Margaret!”—when who was this Margaret? She sometimes forgot herself with the boy—the boy huffing on his watch and scolding, “Fuck Martin! Margaret, it’s me who needs you.”
    She told the girls, “I had no babies of my own.”
    And another time, when they would speak to her of him, she asked the girls, “He did tell you about us, didn’t he?”
    “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” the girls said, which made her wonder then what her brother might have said about her.
    He might have said Margaret was his mother, even when their own was alive and making a living at night. He might have described a sister of stout and rounded back, despite that she was young; she was working. She was working dirty jobs in dirty clothes—for him. For him she was broiling cheap cuts done for dinner. For him she bargained; for him she wrote: “Please excuse this lateness. He wasn’t feeling very well. He didn’t mean it. He didn’t know. He didn’t understand.”
    The ways she thought to love him! Draping towels over his bent head at the mouth of the steaming pot—to help him breathe when he was croupy—such was her mothering. Margaret was the person he thought first to see when they picked him up for thieving. She never made him promise to quit his ways, but listened to him promise he would try to be better—especiallyaround Martin—no more stripping through the kitchen, drying himself with his shirt. He would not cough when Martin was talking or in the man’s presence snipe at her for money. The rinds and open cartons behind the milk—sometimes even a plate, fork and knife crossed over it—empty dispensers and unexpected bills, late-night lockouts and bust-up girls: There would be, the boy promised her, no more surprises.
    Was that how he thought to tell the girls it was among them—a sister, a brother, a brother-in-law—in a strip of rooms made smaller if the brother had company?
    Because, she told the girls, she was not so old as to forget some sensations; she recognized the knock of the bed and the yeasty smell of yearning. Her brother’s broken, coaxing voice—she knew the sound of that: his please and won’t and will you. The sore places near his lips and his lips, so split and glossy, were some of what it was about him—must have been—that made the girls say yes, grind their heels against his back, ask, “Doesn’t this hurt, what I am doing?”
    “No, no, no, no, no,” the girls insisted. “We were not like that,” and they didn’t call her by her married name, but spoke familiarly. “Margaret,” they said, and they described her brother as sullen. They had seen him elbow clingy girls, seen him shawled against the chills, seen him counting his money. The way he left the bathroom with his beery piss unflushed in the unseated bowl, the girls laughed to tell it, although Margaret had seen it, too. Suddenly, the brother was leaving his mark in the rooms through which he passed.
    “No,” she said. “He wasn’t such a beast as that.” He spent time uptown on the high grounds of the garden with the scrolly gates. “He could be sweet,” Margaret told the girls. “He was not indifferent to his surroundings.” He looked at trees, at how in spring the new leaves were so many of them spiked. He had his places—that much she said she knew. He sometimes went for drugs. “But, Lord,” she said, and looked hard at the girls, “we all of us sometimes need it.”
    The grassy smell of him come home on an evening when the sky stayed white, Margaret remembered him with blades of