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kindergarten teacher—a woman who must have been trying to look like Ms. Santa Claus, a rope of white hair down her thick torso and wire glasses that clung to the tip of a diminutive nose—and introduced himself. How impressed the woman had been when Paulie spoke: “Hello there, I’m here to learn and laugh, if you don’t mind, my darling!” But within two weeks the phone call. Paulie had come out of the bathroom with his pants down several times and politely requested the teacher’s help; he could not participate in an activity wherein she asked the students to draw simple shapes. Lydia had begun to protest, but Ms. Susanne had interrupted gently: “I’m not saying he refused to, Ms. Fontaine, or that he tried but his coordination was below average. I’m saying that he looked at his pen and paper and he looked at the blocks in front of him and he looked at the other children and he plainly
could not
.”
    Lydia did not tell Seymour for a full two days. When he came home from work, he was tired and slow, and quite often the only thing that visibly cheered him was Paulie. Paulie balancing on his leg; Paulie offering impersonations of a humpback whale, a jet plane, a Christmas tree. So when she finally did it was unplanned, it just came out, while she was sitting on the closed toilet watching him shave, in sobs that attempted words and reverted to sounds. Once he’d comforted her enough to understand what she was saying, he called in sick and tucked Lydia into bed; he promised that when he returned, they would figure it out, and he took Claudia to school.
    He let Lydia sleep most of the day, and in all the time she was out she hardly changed positions under the great white comforter. Through the morning and afternoon he watched Paulie, held his hands and then his feet, listened as his son told him a story about an elephant searching for a tree large enough to shade his mother during the summer. “Where did you hear that story,” Seymour asked, though he already suspected the answer. “From my daydreams, of course!”

E DITH AND D ECLAN had always prided themselves on their taste in people. Their renters, mostly blue-collar and from somewhere else originally, paid on time and stopped to say hello to each other in the hall; they held doors, gave away laughter freely and sat out in the overgrown back garden in the summer together, sharing sun tea and simple sandwiches. For a full decade, theirs was the most-attended Fourth of July party in the surrounding blocks. Declan would weave among the tenants and their friends, a lit sparkler attached to his thin silk tie, spilling whiskey into glasses without asking, butchering patriotic adages with his thick Irish accent in a way that left his guests cackling.
    Declan made himself available to his tenants, and so did Edith, although after he died she began widening the scope of her generosity, drawing leases to those she found unusual, or hurt, or in visible need of asylum. She knew what he would have said, how he would have bit down on his smoke and brought a palm over his cheek—that it wasn’t her job to mother the world, no matter what regrets she had about their own children. But he was gone and that was his fault, she reminded herself frequently, for living hard on his body like he had. He could have quit the cigarettes, could have downed a few more vegetables, could have ended a few nights without landing in the bed like a felled pine.
    For a year she rented to an out-of-work opera singer with hollowed-out cheeks who was always late with the rent but put on a suit every morning and practiced his scales. A single mother of twins famed for her colossal Afro and her abilities as a wrist wrestler, who often accepted Edith’s offer to babysit while in her apartment she held raucous tournaments attended by bearded men in loud prints. A substitute teacher with a quivering Adam’s apple and a stutter and a little beagle that forever ran ahead of him. A balding snake