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row.”
    â€œWe get in a row because I can’t stand to see him treat you the way he does.” Ray inclined his head in the direction of the cottage’s single bedroom, if one could call it that. It was a corner of the home partitioned off by a ratty blanket that offered minimal privacy from the living area and the kitchen’s sputtering stove. There, he knew, slept his nephew, Luca, a little boy who would be half-starved alongside his mother if Ray didn’t subsidize Tony’s sporadic income with some of his own.
    â€œHe’s trying.”
    Ray stifled his first response. “Vi, I want to know why he is working for Mayor Montague. He certainly doesn’t work on the books. It’s common knowledge that Montague pays men under the table for performing… less than legal jobs. How else could he run half the city? One of the men at the Don Jail * told me all about it. He said… ”
    â€œNot the Don Jail again, Ray.”
    â€œAnd who knows what Tony does to scrape up his liquor money?”
    â€œYou hurt my feelings.” Viola’s long, purple-black curls fell haphazardly around her face, much as they had done when she’d been a little girl.
    She looked more and more like a little girl each day, Ray thought—cornered, cajoled, and beaten down by her husband. Ray intervened as much as he could, but Viola loved Tony, so coming to fisticuffs with him resulted in little more than black eyes and more tears for his sister.
    Viola’s English was far poorer than Ray’s, and she lapsed into Italian now. She defended Tony as she always did, explaining how hard it had been for him to adjust to their new life in Canada. He hadn’t always been this way. He would be himself again someday. But even after five years in the country, these Canadian men didn’t give him a chance.
    â€œYou make your own chance here, Vi. You have to make your own chance.”
    â€œI’m tired. You woke me up.” She clicked her tongue. “Look at you. You’re soaked to the bone. I will make you some tea.”
    She moved toward the stove and put a kettle on to boil. “Here. Put this on.” She took one of Tony’s cable-knit sweaters from the clothesline strung across the ceiling over the dinner table. Ray turned his back to her, wrestled out of his soaked shirt, and settled into the warm woolen folds of Tony’s sweater.
    He was much more comfortable now, especially with a cup of hot tea. He told Vi about the funny girl who had his coat. “The worst part is, I left my notebook in the pocket. It just dawned on me that I don’t have it.”
    â€œWhat a strange girl.” Viola wrinkled her nose. “Going about begging.”
    He didn’t want to come back around to Tony, but it was inevitable. “Then I saw Tony and I had to leave her there without explanation.”
    â€œDid Tony see you?”
    â€œNot that I know of.”
    â€œGood.” Viola grabbed the fabric of Ray’s sweater and tugged him closer. “I want you two to get along. Like in the old days.”
    Ray tried to smile. “I worry about you.”
    â€œI worry about you too.” She sipped tea from a cracked china cup. “When was the last time you went to confession? Father Byrne said you haven’t been ’round in weeks.”
    Ray looked for something to settle his eyes on. There was a week-old copy of the Globe and Mail on the side table. The headline written by golden-boy Gavin Crawley. What with his all-Canadian pedigreeand looks, British family, and inherited money, Crawley didn’t have to scrape by at a third-rate paper like Ray did. “I haven’t been to confession, no.”
    â€œOr mass?”
    â€œI go to a different mass.”
    â€œYou don’t go to St. Paul’s at all anymore, do you?” Viola’s brow furrowed and she crossed herself. Their deceased mother would turn over in her grave.
    Ray started