A Family Apart Read Online Free

sobs and wails, then lifted the edge of her own nightgown to dry her mother’s eyes. She stroked her hair and soothed her until Ma fell asleep.
    But Frances lay awake long after, until the sky was streaked with light. Her frantic fears had subsided into a lump of cold that ached in the pit of her stomach. Frances knew that things would never be the same. She was no longer a little girl; those moments had forced her into a world of adult responsibility, and there was no turning back.
    Ma never spoke of it, and Frances couldn’t put into words what she had learned during the night, but she was comforted by the knowledge that the bond between them had grown even stronger.
    Now, as they walked home together, Frances and hermother crossed over to Ninth Avenue, going south, on streets in which the traffic had thinned. The rows of small greengrocers, meat markets, haberdasheries, and dry-goods stores were closed, their stained and faded canvas awnings cranked up tightly. The peddlers’ carts had vanished, relegated to wherever they were stored for the night, but spoiled fruit and wilted cabbage leaves still littered the curbs.
    In spite of the hour, the streets teemed with people. Some of them sat on stoops or leaned against the corner gaslights. Frances shot quick glances at them. Many were boys, some no older than Danny or Peg. There were gangs of thieves in their neighborhood, but she knew they wouldn’t try to rob a pair of poor cleaning women. It was obvious that Frances and her mother carried nothing of value. Frances kept a lookout, but she wasn’t afraid. Mike had taught her well how to handle herself. “Too well,” he had grumbled after their last lesson as he held a rag to his own bloody nose.
    As they turned onto Sixteenth Street, which cut through rows of crowded tenements, Frances thought she saw a familiar figure ahead of them. Mike? What would Mike be doing out so late? Rapidly the figure slipped into the doorway of the building in which the Kellys lived.
    Frances quickened her step and entered the building ahead of her mother, wrinkling her nose in disgust as the familiar stench of cooking odors, garbage, and unwashed bodies that clung to the walls of the long, narrow hallway surrounded them like a smothering gray ghost.
    As Ma quietly opened the door to the room that was their home, Frances thought she heard a low groan. She glanced in the direction of the room next to theirs where her friend, Mara Robi, lived with her aunt and uncle.Through the cracks around the door she could see the flicker of candlelight. Mara had been ill with a cough and fever. Maybe she was worse.
    “Ma,” Frances whispered, and clutched her mother’s arm. “That could be Mara! Come with me!”
    Ma murmured, “It’s late. You can visit Mara tomorrow.”
    “But what if she needs—”
    “Hush,” Ma said, patting her shoulder. “She has her uncle and aunt to care for her, and you need your sleep.”
    Frances hung her shawl on a hook as her mother lit the small whale-oil lamp that stood on the table in the center of the room. The glass of the lamp shimmered as the store window had, and Frances shuddered as she remembered her ragged, dirty reflection. But she looked around at the clean, spare furnishings in their room with pride: a few straight-backed wooden chairs, a table on which lay a Bible and a small framed wedding picture of Da and Ma, a double bed for the children to share, a cot for Ma, a small wood-burning stove in the corner, and floors scrubbed so clean the wood was bleached nearly white. Ma was bending over the sleeping children, a smile on her face. Frances knew that Ma wanted better for them. That they had so little was not her fault.
    Frances glanced at her brothers and sisters, automatically checking to see that all were safe and accounted for. Dark-haired, fragile Megan—who at the age of twelve had the job of caring for the little ones—was deep in sleep; seven-year-old Peg, with her bouncy red curls and