"My brother Ante went to Galen," said Tomo, after a while. "In 1955. I took him on the bus." Pull. Whistle. "I'm not going on the bus."
So in the end none of them had gone. Not really. Arvo had gone to the county home for six days and asked a man there to call him a cab, and the man had, and he had come back to the Carrigan and found the alley door locked and stood in the alley in the dark with his suitcase until Johanna came down the steps and let him in. Mossy had lasted three nights at the Finlen. Tomo had never left at all. Tomo had been in Room 14 with the door shut when Tiernan Carrigan locked the front door on the fourteenth of November, and Johanna had found him there four days later, sitting on his bed in his overcoat.
And Johanna. Johanna Treloar had been the housekeeper of the Carrigan Rooms since the spring of 1946. Old Mr. Patrick Carrigan, Tiernan's father, had hired her the year after her husband was killed. Her husband had been a miner named Wilf Treloar, a Cousin Jack like her, and he had died in a cave-in at the Mountain Con in October of 1944, three weeks before his thirty-eighth birthday. They had had no children. Old Mr. Carrigan had given her a room off the lobby, Room 1, and a set of keys, and she had changed the sheets and swept the halls and carried the coal and fired the boiler and collected the rents and sat up with men who were dying and men who were drunk. She had been there thirty-seven years. When the building was closed, she was supposed to go to her husband's niece in Anaconda. She had gone. She had stayed four days.
"She came back on the Greyhound," said Mossy. "Walked up from the depot with her suitcase. Came down those back stairs and opened that door with that key, and lit the lamp, and said, 'All right then, who's hungry.' Like she'd been out to the store."
"She's been feeding us," said Arvo. "On her check. Her check and what she brings."
Lauren looked at the coffee can on the desk, with the little foil packets of grape jelly in it. She thought about the parsley folded into a paper napkin. She thought about the second piece of toast, and the bacon nobody had ordered, and Johanna looking at it a long time before she picked up her fork. She had to look at the floor for a minute, at the little black and white hexagons, until she could trust her face.
"Corky Sweeney," she said. "The coal man. I saw her give him money."
"Corky's been bringing coal," said Mossy. "Carrigan's been paying him to keep a little fire, just enough for the pipes, you understand, a shovel or two a day, since November. Corky's back went out at Thanksgiving, so Johanna said she'd do it for him, and he wouldn't have to climb down. Only a little fire for the pipes won't keep three old men alive at thirty below. So she's been buying more off him. On top. Out of her own pocket. Corky didn't want to take it. He's Catholic, Corky. Feels bad about everything."
"And Carrigan doesn't know," Lauren said.