Marie-Helene Bertino - 2 A.M. at The Cat's Pajamas

Mrs. Santiago looks up from the scale, her face still arranged in an expression of scrutiny. “The deal?”

Sarina’s grade partner is calling again. She answers.

“Clare Kelly … has been attacked by a biker!”

Sarina apologizes to Mrs. Santiago with her eyes, gathers her bags of caramel, and slips outside. Flurries second-guess through the alleys. “Is she dead?”

“She’s at the hospital now, poor lamb. I called Principal Randles. We need to find a replacement to sing at this morning’s mass. But who? When she sings it’s like God is hugging you.”

Sarina supports her bags on the carousel horse and rolls her eyes. Her opinion on God: You work your side of the street, I’ll work mine. She mentally sorts her students for a singer. The twins, James and Jacob, two variations on the same, dull boy. Brianna, the other Brianna. Maxwell, Devon, Mackenzie. A classroom of girls angling for a future in swimsuit modeling. Maybe don’t name your kid on an empty stomach. Her mind’s eye rests on Madeleine, a hastily combed little girl in the third row. She recalls some teacher’s lounge gossip: Madeleine, assembly, singing.

“What about Madeleine?” she says.

“Good Lord, no,” her grade partner chortles. “She sang last year but it was … unpleasant. I doubt the principal thinks of that day fondly.”

“She was that bad?”

“Did I say she was bad?” the woman says. “Things happened.”

“If we need a singer, she’s all I have,” Sarina says.

“She probably won’t want to sing after what happened.”

“What happened?”

“It was unpleasant. Let’s leave it at that.”

Sarina freshens her tone. “I could ask her.”

“You could.”

“I will.” Sarina hangs up.

Mrs. Santiago has waited for her to end the call. The window between them, the women wave good-bye. Sarina mouths the words: Thank you .

“My pleasure,” Mrs. Santiago says, at full volume.

You can hear through the window, Sarina realizes. Another stunning miscalculation on her part.

In Fishtown, beneath a pile of construction flats, Pedro the dog launches out of a nightmare. The bear that chased him becomes an advertisement pasted to the bottom of a box, a tax attorney with reasonable rates.

Pedro is an open-air pooch, not prone to evenings at home. His joints are nimble and his snout superb. He spent the previous night following the scent of a bitch, pink notes and hydrangea and dung. The pursuit led him out of the meat and coffee smells of his neighborhood to the minty trash of Fishtown. Flirting around the periphery of his brain is an idea both completely vivid and at the same time so malleable that it is not only an image but a hope. When he moves from one street to the next he feels he is moving more toward himself. He is lonely and knows he is lonely. He is in love but is not sure with whom.

As the dog awakens, the city awakens. Crust on its windshields and hungry. Snorting plumes of frustration in the harbor. Scratching its traffic on the expressway. Bone cold and grouchy, from the toes of its stadiums to the strands of its El. One by one each Main Line town revs its city-bound trains. Against the light of dawn, their track lamps are as worthless as rich girls.

Good morning , the city says. Fuck you .

The dog does not consider himself lost, though several neighborhoods away, his person’s worry manifests in food prep. Fat sausage and sweet bread. The flurried sidewalk dampens his paws as he sniffs around a fire hydrant. Her? Her? A street vent. Her? The trunk of a tree that in warmer months brags cherry blossoms. Her? A stretch of fog-colored siding, then a blunt interruption — the cement steps of the Red Lion Diner.

Inside at the counter, Officer Len Thomas finishes his breakfast. This final bite, the corner of toast dipped in the bit of ketchup piled with the last of the eggs, is the culmination of ten minutes of planning. Napkin dispensers on the counter: gorged, gleaming birds. He chews thirty times, gives up after sixteen, dabs his mouth with the napkin, and with a succinct gesture signals for the check.

The waitress, who had to promise him twice that she understood what dry meant, watches a television that hangs in the corner. A famous actress is coming to town. The waitress does not see Len’s gesture or hear the whistle he adds when he performs it again. She is officiating the marriage of two bottles of ketchup; overturning one and balancing it on the mouth of the other so it can empty its shit.

The man whistles again. The waitress turns around and in one fluid motion replaces his plate with the check. It strikes Len, still enjoying the slide of egg-bread-ketchup down his throat, that the waitress and the actress have physical traits in common. If the waitress lost twenty pounds and straightened her hair she could be the actress’s fatter, less attractive cousin. Len unfolds his wallet and counts out bills. The waitress doesn’t hide her interest in the badge and picture in his wallet: a Sears shot of Margaret holding their alarmed-looking son.

“Your wife?” she says.

“Ex.” Len flips the wallet shut. “The Cat’s Pajamas is on this block, right?”

“Next block.” This man has rejected her niceties, so the waitress returns to a glare. “Not open this early, though.”

“They’ll open for me.” Len forces a laugh.

“Sor-ree, Mr. President.”

“You look like her.” He counts out a tip. “That actress.”

“Nah,” she says.

“Change?” he reminds her.

She rings him up and deposits the change onto his palm. “Good luck with Lorca.”

“Pardon?”

“Cat’s Pajamas, right?” She turns her attention back to the television.

Outside, Len unrolls a stick of gum from a pack he keeps in his breast pocket. He’s accustomed to people not liking him. The waitress, everyone in the Boston precinct he left behind, and probably whoever this club owner is whose day he’s about to ruin. The morning feels scraped clean. He folds the wrapper into a neat square and tosses it into a nearby trash can. He knows the numbers on his license plate add up to fourteen. He knows the latch on his belt is centered because he has checked, twice. A dog sniffing a newspaper stand notices him. Perfect flakes twitch in his whiskers.

“Hello, pooch,” Len says.

The dog finds nothing it needs in the figure of Len Thomas and goes back to searching.

The only sojourn Madeleine is permitted to make alone is the half-block walk to Café Santiago every morning to eat her breakfast. It is one of the many rules that snap frames around her newly motherless life. No alleys. No sleepovers. No going anywhere except Santiago’s after school.

Her apartment complex is shaped like a horseshoe; her father’s apartment is on the fullest swell of the round. In the center stands a halfhearted fountain that has surrendered to time and inattention. Madeleine marches past it, through the arch that leads to the street, past the store of stained-glass lamps (a line of dancers; their jeweled heads bow), through the cobbled alley (screw off, rules), to the blue carousel horse in front of Café Santiago. She rests her mittened hand on the horse’s saddle.

“Hello, horse,” she whispers.

Madeleine can feel its yearning to go up and down, its hooves frozen in midgallop. Slipping a quarter into its rusted change box would elicit nothing but a lost quarter. It’s busted, marooned and affixed to the sidewalk by an indiscreet pole, with no carnival for miles and no equine company. But Madeleine loves the horse, and saying good morning to it is one of her traditions. Skipping it would feel as uncomfortable as an incorrectly buttoned coat.