Bath time was a war.

Leo did not want water. He did not want soap. He did not want the rubber duck, the sailboat, or the washcloth shaped like a frog. He wanted, as far as Clara could tell, to stand naked in the hallway and scream at the ceiling.

So she let him.

She sat on the closed toilet lid and filled the tub halfway and tested the temperature with her wrist. She put the frog washcloth on the edge. Then she trailed her fingers through the water and made small splashing sounds and said nothing at all.

The screaming wound down.

Leo peeked around the doorframe.

"It's just water," Clara said to the frog. "Very boring. Nobody would want to play in it."

Leo stepped into the bathroom.

Ten minutes later, he was sitting in the tub making the frog swim laps, and the floor was soaked, and Clara's shirt was soaked, and she had never been happier to be wet in her life.

At seven forty-five, Rico appeared in the doorway.

He had taken off his tie. His sleeves were rolled to the elbows. He looked as uncertain as a man walking into a room full of strangers.

"You said three nights a week," he said. "This is one."

"I did."

"I'm here."

Leo looked up from the frog. His face did something complicated—hope and suspicion fighting for space.

Clara stood and handed Rico the towel.

"He likes to be wrapped up like a burrito," she said quietly. "Rosa told me. Ask him first."

Rico looked at the towel. He looked at his son.

"Leo," he said. His voice came out too formal, and he cleared his throat and tried again. "You want to be a burrito?"

Leo considered this for a long time.

Then he held up his arms.

Rico lifted him out of the water and wrapped him in the towel, clumsy and careful, tucking the corners in all the wrong places. Leo's head poked out of the top like a turtle.

"Burrito," Leo informed him.

"Burrito," Rico said. Something cracked in his voice on the second syllable.

Clara slipped out of the bathroom and left them alone.

---

She heard him reading from the hallway.

He read the way a man reads a contract—flat, steady, without pauses for pictures. Goodnight room. Goodnight moon. Goodnight cow jumping over the moon.

He stumbled over mush. He went back and read it again.

Halfway through, Leo said something Clara couldn't hear, and Rico stopped.

"What?"

A pause.

"Mommy did voices," Leo said.

The silence that followed was so long Clara thought maybe Rico had walked out.

Then, in a low, terrible, completely ridiculous falsetto, Ricardo Moretti said, "Goodnight to the old lady whispering 'hush.'"

Leo giggled.

Clara put her hand over her mouth and walked very quickly toward the stairs before either of them could hear her.

---

She was given a guest room on the second floor, two doors from Leo's. It had a queen bed, a private bathroom, and a window that looked out on the back garden, where a stone fountain sat dry for the season.

It was the nicest room she had ever slept in.

She couldn't sleep.

At two in the morning, she heard Leo cry out.

Clara was out of bed before she was fully awake. She padded barefoot down the hall, already preparing herself—the low voice, the slow breathing, the distance.

She stopped.

Someone was already there.

Rico sat on the floor outside Leo's door, back against the wall, knees drawn up. He was still in his dress pants. A glass of something amber sat untouched beside him.

Inside the room, Leo whimpered once, then settled.

Rico didn't move. He didn't go in.

"He does this every night," Rico said, without looking up. He had known she was there. "Around two. He cries for a minute, then goes back to sleep."

"And you sit out here."

"If I go in, he wakes all the way up. Then he screams until four." He rubbed his face. "So I sit here. In case."

"In case what?"

Rico didn't answer.

Clara hesitated. Then she sat down on the floor too, on the opposite side of the doorway, her back to the wall.

They stayed there in the dark hallway, a man who owned half of South Brooklyn and a waitress with sixty-three dollars in her checking account, listening to a little boy breathe.

"You were right," Rico said after a while. "In the restaurant. I'm a stranger to him."

"You're not a stranger tonight."

He turned his head and looked at her. In the dim light from the window at the end of the hall, his eyes were very dark.

"Why are you really here, Miss Bennett?"

"You're paying me."

"That's not why you walked across that restaurant."

Clara looked at the closed door.

"Because when my brother was seven," she said slowly, "everybody kept telling me he was being difficult. Teachers. Neighbors. My mom, when she was too tired to see it. And he wasn't difficult. He was drowning, and everyone was standing on the shore telling him to stop splashing."

Rico was quiet.

"Leo isn't difficult," Clara said. "He's grieving. He's just too small to know the word."

Inside the room, the little boy sighed in his sleep.

Rico picked up the glass beside him, looked at it, and set it down again without drinking.

"Go to bed, Clara," he said.

It was the first time he had used her first name.

She went. But she lay awake for a long time afterward, listening, and she didn't hear his footsteps leave the hallway until the sky outside her window had begun to turn gray.

---