"Last night, about five," George, Jr., said.

"What?" Sylvia couldn't believe her ears. She jumped out of bed and angrily hurried to her son. She wanted to shake him, but he was too big to shake. "And what were you doing between then and now? Drinking away your pay with a pack of worthless sailormen, I'll bet-that or worse." She sniffed, but she didn't smell beer or whiskey on her son's breath. She didn't smell cheap perfume, either, so maybe he hadn't been doing worse.

"Ma, I'm not drunk," George, Jr., said, and Sylvia had to nod, for she could tell that was true. He went on, "I didn't do… anything else, either. Not like that. Not what you meant."

Reluctantly, Sylvia nodded again. She didn't think he would lie to her straight out. "What did you do, then?" she asked. "Why didn't you come home?"

George, Jr., took a deep breath. "Ma, I didn't come home because I paid a call on Constance McGillicuddy and her folks. I asked her to marry me, Ma, and she said yes."

"Oh." The word took all the breath out of Sylvia. She stared up at her tall, broad-shouldered son in the gloom inside the flat. To her, he would always be a little boy. "Oh," Sylvia said again. Yes, she'd had to inhale first. Little boys didn't give her news like that.

"I love Connie, Ma," her son said. "She loves me, too. We'll be happy together. And she's got a waitressing job that looks like it's good and steady. We'll be able to make it, with a little luck."

In times like these, how much luck was out there? Sylvia didn't know. Times were hard when you had to worry about what your wife-to-be could bring in. She did know that. But George, Jr., was sensible enough to make the calculation instead of ignoring it. I did something right, Sylvia told herself.

Aloud, she said, "I haven't even met this girl, or her family. What do they do?"

She could barely make out her son's smile in the darkness. "Her father's a fisherman-what else? He knew Pa a little. I don't think they ever sailed together, though. He was in a destroyer during the war, too. He even got torpedoed, but he made it to a boat and got picked up."

"He didn't get torpedoed after the damn war was over." Sylvia's voice stayed soft, but she could hear the savagery in it. Even after more than sixteen years, what Roger Kimball had done still felt filthy to her. She remembered the weight of the pistol in her hand, remembered the way it had bucked when she pulled the trigger, remembered the deafening report, remembered Kimball falling with a look of absurd surprise on his face and blood spreading over the front of his shirt. If I had it to do over again, would I? she wondered.

She didn't wonder long. Hell, yes! I'd do it in a red-hot minute!

Coming back to here and now took a distinct effort of will. "McGillicuddy," she said. "She'll be Irish, then. Catholic."

"Does it bother you?" her son asked. "It doesn't bother me a bit, honest to God it doesn't." He laughed at his own choice of words.

Sylvia had to think about how much it bothered her. Some, yes, but how much? It wasn't as if she went to church every Sunday herself. She'd known plenty of Catholics who were perfectly nice, perfectly good people. How much did it really matter if her grandchildren grew up as mackerel-snappers? Less than she'd expected it to before she looked things over inside herself. "I guess it's all right," she said, and then nodded, firming up her acquiescence. "Yes, it is all right."

"That's taken care of, then," George, Jr., said. "They don't mind too much that I'm not." That side of the coin hadn't occurred to Sylvia. Her son went on, "It's the United States. Who you are counts for more than who your folks were. President Blackford's wife was Jewish, and nobody made a big fuss about that."

"I suppose," Sylvia said. "I'm still glad he lost. The Socialists just don't know what to do about the Confederate States."

"With this new Freedom Party taking over, who does?" George, Jr., said.

"I know." Sylvia hesitated, then went on, "That Roger Kimball was a grand high panjandrum in the Freedom Party. If he hadn't been, I never would have found out about him. That's the kind of people that party draws, and it's the best reason I can think of to figure they're up to no good."

"We licked the CSA once," her son said. "If we ever have to, we can lick 'em again."

He remembered only the last war. Unlike people born in the nineteenth century, he didn't think of the repeated humiliations the United States had suffered at the hands of the Confederacy, Britain, and France before the Great War. And, though his own father was part of the cost of licking the Confederate States, he didn't think about that, either.

Well, why would he? went through Sylvia's mind. He hardly remembers his father. How do you miss what you didn't even know you had?

She stood on tiptoe to kiss George, Jr., on the cheek. "Go to bed now. It's late. It's so late, it's getting early." He laughed at that, though Sylvia knew perfectly well what she'd meant. She went on, "I'm happy for you."

"Connie's the most wonderful girl in the world." He spoke with absolute conviction.

Did she already let him into her bed, to make him that happy? Sylvia shrugged. It hardly mattered, not if they were getting married soon. The worst that could happen was a baby, and most people looked the other way if a first baby came seven or eight months after the wedding instead of the usual nine. "All right, son. Sleep tight tonight, and we'll talk more in the morning."

In the morning, though, George, Jr., was still asleep when Mary Jane's alarm clock went off. He didn't wake up, either; in fact, his breathing didn't even change. Mary Jane got dressed while Sylvia made coffee for both of them. Her daughter had landed a typist's job. Neither of them knew how long it would last. They both knew she couldn't afford to be late. She'd got the job when the girl who had it before was late three times in two weeks.

Along with the coffee and eggs over hard, Sylvia gave Mary Jane the news. "That's wonderful!" Mary Jane squealed. She hugged Sylvia. "Wonderful!"

"Have you met the girl?" Sylvia asked. "I haven't."

"Once," her daughter answered. "We were at a dance together. We'd come separately, but we were both there at the same time. She's blond-green eyes. Pretty enough, I guess." Mary Jane shrugged, as if to say what men saw in women was largely a closed book to her.

It was to Sylvia, too, but she said, "George certainly seems to think so. Do you care that she's Catholic?"

"Not me," Mary Jane said at once. "As long as she gets along with George, that's what matters."

"That's what I think, too. We're going to have to meet her and her folks, you know. I wonder what they'll be like." Sylvia sighed. "I wonder if they have a telephone. If they do, I could go to a booth and call them up and arrange it. But Lord only knows how many McGillicuddys there are in Boston."

"If they have a telephone, George will know the number." Mary Jane was bound to be right about that. She gulped down the last of the coffee, rose from the table, and put on hat and overcoat against the cold, nasty weather outside. She hurried to the door, then turned back. "I'll see you tonight. Gotta run now, or I'll miss the trolley."

Sylvia had been laid off from a job in a canning plant not long before, just as she had after the Great War ended. She wasn't hurting yet, not with Mary Jane working and with the money she'd made in the 1932 presidential campaign, some of which she still had. Not going out to look for work one morning didn't worry her.

George, Jr., emerged from bed, still yawning, a little before nine. "They want to meet you, too, Ma, and Mary Jane," he said when Sylvia asked him about the McGillicuddys. "They haven't got a telephone, though. I'll set it up when I see Connie."

Sylvia and Mary Jane went to the McGillicuddys' house-it was a house, not a flat-near T Wharf two days later, on Sunday afternoon. Constance's father, Patrick, was a redhead, going gray; her mother, Margaret, had hair whose defiant gold had to come from a dye bottle. George, Jr.'s, intended also had three strapping brothers and a kid sister who couldn't have been much above ten. A big black dog named Nemo barked and wagged his tail and generally considered the house to be his, with the McGillicuddys tolerated guests whose purpose in life was to keep him full of horsemeat.