Joe’s clothes stayed in the closet and in the chest of drawers-even his shoes remained. All the laces were untied, too. Joe had not once taken off a pair of shoes by untying the laces first. He’d kicked off his shoes with the laces tied, and they were always tightly tied, with a double knot, as if Joe were still a little boy whose shoes often came untied. Danny had long been in the habit of finding his son’s double-knotted shoes and untying the laces for him. It was a few months, or more, after Joe died before Danny had untied the last of Joe’s shoelaces.

What with Joe’s wrestling and skiing photographs on the walls, the so-called writing room was a virtual shrine to the dead boy. In the cook’s mind, it was masochistic of his son to choose to write there, but a limp like Dominic’s would keep him from investigating that third-floor writing room with any regularity; Dominic rarely ventured there, even when Daniel was away. With the bed gone, no one else would sleep there-apparently, that was what Danny wanted.

When Joe had been with them in Toronto, both the cook and his son could hear the boy’s kicked-off shoes drop (like two rocks) above them-or the more subtle creaking of the floorboards whenever Joe was walking around (even barefoot, or in his socks). You could also hear that third-floor shower from the three bedrooms on the second floor. Each of the second-floor bedrooms had its own bath, with the cook’s bedroom being at the opposite end of the long hall from his beloved Daniel’s bedroom-hence father and son had some measure of privacy, because the guest room was between them.

That guest room and its bathroom had recently been spruced up-in readiness for Ketchum’s expected arrival, the woodsman’s now-annual Christmas visit-and because the bedroom door was open, both Danny and his dad couldn’t help but notice that the cleaning woman had prominently placed a vase of fresh flowers atop the guest room’s dresser. The bouquet was reflected in the dresser’s mirror, making it appear, from the second-floor hall, as two vases of flowers. (Not that Ketchum would have noticed or acknowledged a dozen vases of flowers in his room, the writer thought.)

Danny guessed that the cleaning woman probably had a crush on Ketchum, though the cook claimed that Lupita must have pitied the logger for how old he was. The flowers were in anticipation of how near death Ketchum was, Dominic absurdly said-“the way people put flowers on a grave.”

“You don’t really believe that,” Danny told his dad.

But the flowers and Lupita were a mystery. The Mexican cleaning woman never put a vase of flowers in the guest room for any other visitor to the Rosedale residence, and that guest room in the house on Cluny Drive was more than occasionally occupied-not only at Christmas. Salman Rushdie, the author with a death threat against him, sometimes stayed there when he was in Toronto; Danny Angel’s other writer friends, both from Europe and the United States, often came to visit. Armando and Mary DeSimone were visitors to the city at least twice a year, and they always stayed with Danny and his dad.

Many of Danny’s foreign publishers had slept in that guest room, which reflected the author’s international reputation; the majority of the books in the room were translations of Danny Angel’s novels. Hanging in that guest bedroom, too, was a framed poster of the French edition of Baby in the Road-Bébé dans la rue. (In the connecting bathroom, there was an oversize poster of the German translation of that same novel-Baby auf der Strasse.) Yet, in the mind of the Mexican cleaning woman, only Ketchum merited flowers.

Lupita was a wounded soul, and she certainly recognized the damage done to others. She could not clean Danny’s third-floor writing room without weeping, though Lupita had never met Joe; in those years when he’d come to Canada from Colorado, Joe never stayed for long, and Danny and his dad had not yet met what the cook called “the Mexican marvel.” They’d had a host of unsatisfactory cleaning women in those years.

Lupita was a relatively recent find, but she was visibly moved by these two saddened gentlemen who’d lost, respectively, a son and a grandson. She’d told the cook that she was worried about how Danny was doing, but to Danny she would only say: “Your boy is in Heaven-higher up than the third floor, Señor Angel.”

“I’ll take your word for it, Lupita,” Danny had replied.

“¿Enfermo?” Lupita was always inquiring-not of the seventy-six-year-old cook but of his depressed fifty-eight-year-old son.

“No, I am not sick, Lupita,” Danny never failed to answer her. “Yo sólo soy un escritor.” (“I am merely a writer”-as if that explained how miserable he must have looked to her.)

Lupita had lost a child, too; she couldn’t speak of it to Danny, but she’d told the cook. There were no details, and there was scant mention of the child’s father, a Canadian. If Lupita had ever had a husband, she’d also lost him. Danny didn’t think there were many Mexicans in Toronto, but probably more would be coming soon.

Lupita seemed ageless, with her smooth brown skin and long black hair, though Danny and his dad guessed that she was somewhere between their ages, in her sixties, and while she wasn’t a big woman, she was heavy-noticeably overweight, if not fat in a condemnatory way.

Because Lupita had a pretty face, and she was in the habit of leaving her shoes on the ground floor of the house (she crept about the upstairs barefoot, or in her socks), Danny once said to his father that Lupita reminded him of Injun Jane. The cook couldn’t agree that there was any resemblance; Dominic had sternly shaken his head at the suggestion. Either Danny’s dad was in denial regarding the obvious likeness Lupita shared with Jane, or else Danny’s memory of the Indian dishwasher was misleading him-the way fiction writers are often misled by their memories.

IN THE LATE AFTERNOON, when the cook was busy with the dinner prep at Patrice, Danny often left his writing room on the third floor-just as the last of the sun, if there was any to speak of, was glimmering through the skylight. There was no visible sun on this gray December afternoon, which made it easier for the novelist to tear himself away from his desk. Whatever remaining light there was from the west barely managed to penetrate the second-floor hall. In his socks, Danny padded to his father’s bedroom. When the cook was out, his son often went into that room to see the snapshots Dominic had pinned to the five bulletin boards hanging from the bedroom’s walls.

There was an old-fashioned desk, with drawers, in his dad’s bedroom, and Danny knew there were hundreds more photographs in those drawers. With Lupita’s help, Dominic constantly rearranged the snapshots on his bulletin boards; the cook never threw a photo away, but instead returned each removed picture to one of the desk drawers. That way, twice-used (or thrice-used) photos became new again-once more displayed on the bulletin boards, the only telltale signs of their previous use being the excessive number of almost invisible pinpricks.

On the bulletin boards, the snapshots were intricately overlapped in a confusing but possibly thematic pattern-either of Dominic’s design or of Lupita’s, because Danny knew that without the Mexican cleaning woman’s assistance, his dad could not have managed to unpin and repin the photographs with such evident ardor and repetition. It was hard work, and because of where the bulletin boards were mounted on the walls, it was necessary to perch on the arm of a couch, or stand on a chair, in order to reach the uppermost sections-not a labor that the cook, with his limp, could easily perform. (Given what she weighed, and her estimated age, Danny worried about Lupita undertaking such a balancing act on a couch or a chair.)