Fire in the Ashes Read Online Free Page A

priority but then was forced to wait for an hour and a half, or else go home and then return, before she actually received a bag of groceries.
    The only job she’d had since moving to the Bronx was cleaning houses or apartments in Manhattan, which, she said, was something she was glad to do, but was also forced to do as part of her welfare obligation in New York. “One lady, Mrs. Jacobs, lived on Second Avenue. The other onelived—let me see, on 14th Street, somewhere around Greenwich Village.” Both were elderly; one was home-bound. “They were nice to me,” she said but for some reason she could not explain, this heavily promoted “work experience program” lasted only six months and did not lead to permanent employment.
    She was candid with me, and herself, in her recognition that at least some of the suffering she had undergone had been of her own making. While she had been homeless, she had grown attached to a kindly-seeming man who was good to her at first but who was subject to depressive swings of mood and soon began abusing her. Once she had her own apartment, she took out an order of protection, but her boyfriend kept on coming back, she said, when he was depressed or hungry. Sometimes when he showed up at the door, she told me that she lacked the will to keep him out. On more than one occasion, he had beaten her severely.
    I asked her if she prayed.
    “I do pray—but not out loud.” She said, “I pray inside.”
    Amidst the sadness of the conversation, she kept reaching out for gaiety. A nervous laugh would precede the revelation of a longing or a memory that brought an evanescent sense of satisfaction to her mind. “I pray,” she said, “for something that I haven’t done for thirteen years.”
    I asked her what it was.
    “To pick up my knitting needles,” she replied.
    A soft smile lighted up her eyes. “I used to make a sweater in three weeks if I had nothin’ to upset me. I’d start when it was summertime and I’d have six sweaters made for Christmas.… If you ever see me get my needles out again, you’ll know I’m feelin’ happy.”
    At the corner of Brook Avenue, she stopped next to the stairs that led down to the subway station, looking in a vague, distracted way at a woman in a long skirt who wasselling bunches of chrysanthemums and roses. She reached out her hand in the direction of the roses but it seemed she didn’t dare to touch them.
    “Would you like them?”
    “One rose,” she replied.
    Tiny drops of water sparkled on the petals. She held the flower in her hand against her chest as we were walking back in the direction of St. Ann’s. At the corner, she looked left and right. Then, with relief, she told me, “There you go!” and waved across the street.
    Lisette was coming up the avenue with a couple of her friends. When she saw her mother she ran into her arms. Taking a bunch of papers from her backpack, she showed her a book report she’d done that day at school. It had been marked A-plus by her teacher. Her mother studied the book report, kissed her on the cheek, then handed her the keys to the apartment and two dollars to buy something at the store.
    “An A-plus on a book report doesn’t mean a whole lot at this school she goes to,” Vicky said once Lisette was gone. “Her teachers like her. They do the best they can. But I don’t think that they can give her what a girl with her potential ought to have.…
    “You see, this is the best that I can get for her right now. I don’t accept it—yet I do, because I don’t know any choice I have.” But a moment after that her gaiety returned. “See?” she said. “I know she’s home. She’s safe upstairs and we have food to eat. And so, for now, I’m happy. There you go!”
    Her moods were like that. Sometimes sadness. Sometimes gaiety. Sometimes a bright burst of jubilation. Then she would crash down—so fast—into the pit of a depressive darkness. Then she would be fighting back again and searching for