Femme Fatale and other stories

that he rolled back and forth, clutching his stomach, and some of the other boys laughed as if they had never heard this old joke before. Sofia didn’t laugh. She hated watching her father disappear in the back room of the tavern, from which he would not emerge until early Saturday. But it was better than running into him on the sidewalk between here and home. He always pretended surprise at seeing her, proclaiming it the darnedest coincidence, Sofia on Brighton Avenue, same as him. On those occasions, he would stop and make polite inquiries into her life, but he would be restless all the while, shifting his weight from one foot to another, anxious as a little kid on the way to his own birthday party.
    “How’s it going, Fee?” That was her family nickname, and she was just beginning to hate it.
    “S’all right, I guess.”
    “School okay?”
    “Not bad. I hate algebra.”
    “It’ll come in handy one day.”
    “How?”
    “If you get through high school, maybe go on to community college, you won’t be stuck here in Dundalk, breathing air you can see.”
    “I like it here.” She did. The water was nearby and although it wasn’t the kind you could swim in—if you fell in, you were supposed to tell your mom so she could take you for a tetanus shot, but no one ever told—the view from the water’s edge made the world feel big, yet comprehensible. Dundalk wasn’t Baltimore, although the map said it was. Dundalk was a country unto itself, the Republic of Bethlehem Steel. And in 1975, Beth Steel was like the Soviet Union. You couldn’t imagine either one not being there. So the families of Dundalk breathed the reddish air, collected their regular paychecks, and comforted one another when a man was hurt or killed, accepting those accidents as the inevitable price for a secure job. It was only later, when the slow poison of asbestosis began moving from household to household, that the Beth Steel families began to question the deal they had made. Later still, the all-but-dead company was sold for its parts and the new owner simply ended it all—pensions, health care, every promise ever made. But in 1975, in Dundalk, a Beth Steel family was still the best thing to be, and the children looked down on those whose fathers had to work for any other company.
    “Go home and do your homework,” her father told Sofia.
    “No homework on Fridays,” she said. “But I want to eat supper and wash the dishes before
Donny and Marie
comes on.”
    They never spoke of his plans for the evening, much less the stakes involved, but after such encounters Sofia went home and hid whatever she could. She longed to advise her mother to do the same, but it was understood that they never spoke of her father’s winning and losing, much less the consequences for the household.
    “I bought it for you, didn’t I?” her father had told her younger brother, Brad, wheeling the ten-speed bicycle with the banana seat out of the garage. Brad had owned the shiny Schwinn for all of a month. “Why’d I ever think we needed fancy candlesticks like these?” her father grumbled, taking the grape-bedecked silver stems from the sideboard, as if his only problem was a sudden distaste for their ornate style. One Saturday morning, he came into Sofia’s room and tried to grab her guitar, purchased a year earlier after a particularly good Friday, but something in her expression made him put it back.
    Instead he sold the family dog, a purebred collie, or so her father had said when he brought the puppy home three months ago. It turned out that Shemp had the wrong kind of papers, some initials other than AKC. The man who agreed to buy Shemp from them had lectured her father, accusing him of being taken in by the Mennonite puppy mills over the state line. He gave her father twenty-five dollars, saying: “People who can’t be bothered to do the most basic research probably shouldn’t have a dog, anyway.”
    Sofia, sitting in the passenger seat of her father’s car—she had insisted on accompanying him, thinking it would shame her father, but in the end she was the one who was ashamed that she had chosen her guitar over Shemp—chewed over this fact. Her father was so gullible that he could be duped by Mennonites. She imagined them ringed around a poker table, solemn bearded faces regarding their cards. Mennonites would probably be good at poker if God let them play it.
    Her father spoke of his fortune as if it were the weather, a matter of