Several nights a week Jack Ramon picked Mary up and drove her to his house. He came to the porch if her stepfather’s car was home and he’d come out and shake his hand. “Nice to see you, Mr. Carnation,” Mr. Ramon said.

Mr. Carnation accepted the handshake and looked at Mary. He didn’t say anything and she never understood the significance of the look. What did he mean by looking at her without saying anything every time she went away in Jack Ramon’s car?

Mr. Ramon’s two kids came to the door to see her. One was a two-and-a-half year old who still required diaper changing and an elaborate bed time procedure and the other was a five-year-old who helped watch the two-year-old during the evening. Sasha, the five-year-old, came to the door wearing a feather boa and a pink dress. “Ray,” she said — Ray was the two year old — “wants to wear this boa. I told him feathers are for girls and daddy said wrapping things around your neck is dangerous.” Isadora Duncan died that way. Her scarf was long since that was her signature look, a long flowing scarf. It wrapped around the tires of her little sports car and strangled her to death. Someone said about her death, Mary remembered, “Affectations can be dangerous.”

“They are, Sasha,” Mary said.

Mary’s mother called when she arrived at the Ramon house. Jack answered the phone in the whirl of his wife getting ready to go out. He handed the phone to Mary, “Mrs. Carnation is on the phone for you.”

Mary for some reason wanted to correct him. She wanted to say, “Her name is—“ but her mother had changed her name so many times now in her life that she wasn’t sure that it mattered. Only three times. It made it sound like dozens of times when she thought about it that way. What was the use of a name if it could change? Aileen always called to remind her about some chore she’d forgotten to do.

“I will do it tomorrow, mother.”

“It needs to be done every day,” she said. “That’s why it is a chore.”

“Yes,” she said. “I understand.”

Mary knew the call wasn’t about that, but it was about judging where she’d been between their house and the Ramon house. That Aileen didn’t do this in her own house, this checking up on her, made her angry. This playing at parenting. That is what it was. The call wasn’t for her. She didn’t have anything to say to her and didn’t even pretend she had anything to say to her. She just called so that Mr. Ramon understood that Aileen cared about her daughter enough to check on her, to keep tabs on her.

“That your mother on the phone again?” In the kitchen Mrs. Ramon drank a hot spicy tea. The room smelled like cloves and cinnamon. Mary always wanted to drink it, but it was Mrs. Ramon’s special tea to sooth her voice before singing. She sang at a club several nights a week. She was always drinking the tea and reading a magazine when Mary came to the house because that was Mary’s job to watch the kids while she went out and sang.

“Yes, Mrs. Ramon.”

“That woman calls every time to see where you’ve gone. How come she don’t know?”

“She does know.”

“Why she calling here, then?”

Mary had nothing to say to that. To her it seemed obvious it was a ten-minute drive from the Carnation house to the Ramon house. She called twelve minutes after she left the house. Two minutes wasn’t enough time to do anything; what she didn’t understand is why they didn’t call in the evening. They didn’t know when she left and when she would come home.

“She checks on you every minute. My child five. I don’t where she is.”

In the hallway between the kitchen and the living room there were framed photographs of singers in Seattle. There was one of Frank Sinatra, even. Mary didn’t know who most of them where but the presence of Sinatra made them all seem more glamorous to her than maybe they were, the black suits, the mix of black, Asian, and white faces was cosmopolitan to her. There was a record on the wall with the label on it with Edna Ramon’s name printed. That was her. The record indicated to Mary some tragedy. She could have been famous but wasn’t because of something unforeseen that had happened; she’d become ill or maybe it was just bad luck. She had a record and people beyond this street knew who she was even if the people on this street not only didn’t know who she was but thought she was just a Mexican woman. She wasn’t even Mexican, but Puerto Rican.

As soon as she arrived and as soon as the tea had been drunk, Mrs. Ramon rushed around the house getting dressed. She had no shame in front of Mary or her husband. She ran around in her underclothes, skidding on the hard wood floors, and then put on her dress but was unable to zip it until Jack stopped in the hallway and pulled up her zipper. She should have had some modesty. She was on in years and her skin had a soft, dimpled texture with odd hairs coming out of her back. She wasn’t hairy, really, but she had some hair on her back and Mary took the time to look at it. The first time she’d been embarrassed but now that it was the routine, she wanted to see, she wanted to see what a woman who wasn’t her mother looked like because maybe she wouldn’t look like her mother when she got old. Maybe she would look like Mrs. Ramon instead. That would be a good thing to look like Mrs. Ramon instead of her mother.

Mrs. Ramon wore long eyelashes and red — almost black — lipstick. Her eyes were outlines and before she went she stood in front of her two children in the living room. They’d been playing around the house and they knew the rhythm of the night and so they moved to the front room and played on the floor and waited for their mother and then she stood before them and raised her arms. “How do I look?”

“You’re beautiful, mother,” Sasha said.

And Ray started to clap his hands. This is what he’d been doing lately. He clapped his hand and she turned around for them. Mary thought she did look very interesting in her dress. She looked ready to go onto a stage and sing. Mary would like to hear her sometime. She’d looked for her record in the house, but the only copy of the record was the one in the glass frame and even thought she’d examined that she didn’t see anyway of getting the record out of the frame.

The Ramons climbed into their car and drove away. Mary spent the evening going through the familiar cycle, drawing, playing ball on the carpet, eating dinner, washing up after eating dinner, the chasing game where the put on one of the loud jazz records in the collection and then ran around the house, and then they lay on the floor panting. It was time to put them to bed, and she brushed their teeth. Sasha helped Ray with his teeth and then Mary inspected and then finally put them to bed. Mary felt nearly alone in the Ramon’s house.

The kids went to sleep immediately. From the stories of the other babysitters at school, this made the Ramons a desirable babysitting gig.

Mary took the frame of the record down and turned it over to see if she could remove it without breaking anything. It looked like she could. It was secured with a number of bendable tabs on the back. She bent them. One of them broke off. She cut her finger on another one. She pulled the board out and the record was stuck in a kind of cardboard sleeve. She took it out and almost dropped it. She placed it on the turntable and then played it.

It was a torch song but had a long bit that was very soft and then the chorus came very loud and Edna Ramon pulled her voice back into the back of her throat.

My man don’t come home late at night.
He don’t come home early in the morning
I don’t know where he is. The truth?
The truth is he best stay away.

She listened to the song several times and then was afraid they’d come home. She heard them, she thought, and then hurriedly put it away and the record dropped on the side of the sofa. It didn’t break. She picked it up and then it tipped down onto the hard wood floor and snapped. She picked it up and it seemed okay. But when she put it back into the frame, it wasn’t okay. It was broken in two, divided by a very fine line. She fit them together and then put the whole thing back together again and put it up against the wall.

There were keys in the door and Mr. Ramon came into the house without Mrs. Ramon.

Mary was flushed from the record.

He stopped and then went over and turned off the stereo.

“How were the kids?” he asked.

“Good,” she said. “The kids are good.”

He went to the bedroom to check on them. She watched him lean down to kiss them on their cheeks.

“I’ll give you a ride home.”

“But who’ll listen out for the kids?” She didn’t know where Mrs. Ramon was.

“They’re sleeping,” he said. “The drive there and back is twenty-minutes.”

She wanted to go home. So she believed him. She didn’t really believe him but she didn’t want to stay here any longer.

He checked on his children again. “They are dead asleep,” he said.

He locked the door to the house. He opened the door for her. The car smelled like smoke. He grunted when he saw down in the seat next to her and he turned and smiled at her. “Thank you for taking care of my kids,” he said.

He handed her the envelope with her money it, like he always did when he drove her home.

On the drive he said, “She wanted to be a star, you know?”

“Mrs. Ramon?”

“She is one. A star is hard to live with. For a while before the kids were born I thought she would make it. I thought that. She cut a 45 and it did well. She got a lot of work for that and for a year it looked like she actually had done it. It just was just a matter of time. She sang Vegas, LA, you name it. People knew who she was.”

He started the car and backed it out onto the highway and began to drive. Mary didn’t know where Mrs. Ramon was; why hadn’t she come back like she always had?

“That was her best year,” he said. “During a year like that we both thought given a year like this the rest will be gravy.”

The road turned over a deep gully and the angles of the road were sharp he drove onto a shoulder and then slowed the car down. Only then did she realize that he was drunk. Only in his driving did she realize that because his speech was fine. He seemed tired, that was all, but in his driving, his lack of attention to where they were on the road, he was drunk, she knew.

“But a person can’t live on gravy. The year ran out and nothing every really came of the record beside the record. The record was out there but there was no one asking about a second record. Well, people asked about the second record, but no one who was in the power to make a second record happen asked about it.”

“We sent them stuff. But they weren’t asking and weren’t interested in what we sent.”

He rolled the window down and let in the damp air from outside, the smell of rotting leaves on the shoulder, and then they passed over the bridge near her house. It smelled of the rotting salmon.

“She holds it against me and sometimes let’s herself get talked into thinking it will happen again for her. She was twenty-five then. She’s not past it yet, but you know every year she gets further away from that year. Something could happen, I guess. I just don’t think it will happen with me. I don’t think she believes that.”

Mr. Ramon turned to look at Mary and he shrugged. “I had my chance.”

He stopped the car and Mary quickly climbed out. “Please drive home safely, Mr. Ramon,” she said.

She thought about the children and what if he didn’t get back. When she got back to the house, Roger Carnation was watching from the living room.

He had a cup of coffee and one of the historical novels he always read.

“Mary?” he said.

She turned to look at him and then went up the stairs to where he wasn’t allowed. She took off her clothes and put on her pajamas and brushed her teeth and then lay down in her bed and lay completely still in an approximation of sleep. She wanted to call to find out if he got home safely.

When she called in the morning, Mrs. Ramon answered the phone her voice angular and raspy in the early morning.

“Is everything all right?” Mary asked.

“Why wouldn’t it be?” Mrs. Ramon said.