The radiator in the front room knocked three times and then gave up, the way it did every morning that October, and Cal Dunn lay under two blankets and his winter coat and listened to see if it would try again.
It didn't. He got up.
The linoleum was cold enough to make his toes curl. He found his socks in the dark, the gray pair with the heels gone thin, and pulled them on, and then he went to the window and scraped a circle in the frost with his thumbnail. Below him Brereton Street was still blue with early light. The steeple of Immaculate Heart of Mary stood up green and gold over the roofs, and past it, down the slope, the Strip District was already awake, trucks backing up to the produce houses with their beepers going, men in aprons throwing crates. Somebody's car wouldn't start. It coughed and coughed, like Mr. Wozniak downstairs did every morning before his first cigarette.
Cal went into the kitchen and turned on the oven and left the door open. It was against the rules, but the rules were his mother's, and his mother wasn't home yet.
He put the kettle on the back burner. He got down the box of Quaker oats, which was the big kind with the man in the hat smiling like he knew a secret, and he measured out two cups with the chipped coffee mug, because the measuring cup had broken in August and nobody had replaced it. Then he went to wake his sister.
Rosie slept like she was falling off a cliff, one arm flung out of the bed and one leg hooked over the edge. She was seven and had a voice that could carry across the whole of Polish Hill if the wind was right. He stood in the doorway a second before he said anything, because once she was awake the morning would belong to her.
"Rosie. Up."
"No."
"Oatmeal."
"With brown sugar?"
He thought about the brown sugar, which was down to a hard lump in the bottom of the bag that you had to chip at with a knife. "With some brown sugar."
She opened one eye. "How much is some?"
"Get up and find out."