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wanted a steak. Like being hit with a handful of feathers when you wanted a sledge hammer swung hard against your heart.
    The twisting need for the delayed fix roiled slowly under the surface easement of the stick, but it was a bit farther away. It was just far enough away to keep her from getting up and going back to the man in the room. It was just far enough away so that she was able, after a time, to trip and fall headlong into an exhausted sleep.

 
Chapter Six
     
    RICK STUSSEN, the big fat blond butcher, thought of himself as an amiable man who, through no fault of his own, had got into a mess that seemed destined to get steadily worse until, finally, the whole world was going to blow up in his face. He spent a lot of time thinking about it. He would sit in his small back room on the ground floor of the Varaki house and he would tell himself that he would think his way out of this jam. And each time his thoughts would veer off into the past, and he would wonder how on earth this could possibly have happened to him. And sometimes he would cry. At such times the sheaf of bills hidden behind the loose section of baseboard was no comfort.
    He was forty and he didn’t know where the years had gone. He had come into the store when he was sixteen, when Walter had been a little kid, toddling around and getting into things. At sixteen, as now, he had been big around and blond, with rather small pink hands. He’d lived up on the third floor then, because the store took up most of the downstairs. Those had been the good years. From sixteen until the war came.
    It had made him a part of something. And before that he had been a part of nothing. A part of gray yards where it always seemed to rain, and you were always lining up for something, and the sisters rustled when they walked. You cried when you were hurt, so the others were always finding new ways to hurt you.
    Coming to be a part of the Varaki family was different. It was being a part of something. You could get out when you were sixteen if you had a job.
    The bad years came right after he went to work, a year or two later. That was when Gus almost lost the store, and there was just Gus and Mom and him to handle everything.
    It was good to be a part of everything and work hard and watch the kids growing up, Walter and Henry. Teena didn’t come along until later. He always got along fine with the kids. Helping out. Staying with them when they were small and Gus and Mom wanted to go out.
    He hadn’t wanted it all to change. And that was the funny thing. People were always pushing on you, trying to push you out of the one place you’d found where everything was warm and soft and safe, and there wasn’t any hurting.
    The only hard thing had been getting used to the people in the store, coming in to buy. Gus had kept after him until he learned how you had to do it. Keep smiling and talk loud, and say something about the weather and try to remember their names. It wasn’t too hard after you got onto it. It made you feel like you were hiding. You were hiding behind a big smile and a loud voice. He remembered the first few times he had been alone in the bathroom and happened to look in the mirror and see that big smile there, without even thinking about it.
    It was Mom who kept pushing at him. “You got to get a girl, Rick. You got to go out. You got to get a girl and get a family.”
    “Sometime,” he would say, smiling. “Sure. Sometime.” She had kept it up until he thought maybe it was the thing to do. She was a neighborhood girl. She was the only one he sort of liked the looks of, because she had a thin clean look. He remembered how hot his face got when he asked her for a date. They went out about six times. He didn’t touch her. She seemed to like him. They laughed and smiled and joked around. And the Varakis kidded him about her. It was the sixth time they went out. The last time. He took her up on the porch and he was going to talk about the movie. She reached