“Girlie, you been living in the wrong hotel.”

“What?”

He put on a shirt and looked at her. She was filthy and smelled sour. “Where are your clean clothes?”

“In number fourteen.”

“Where’s August?”

“I tried to wake him.”

They walked down to the cabin she shared with August, and he rummaged through her few things until he found a clean set of clothes. August lay like a stone and didn’t move. Sam gathered up four sooty little dresses and some underwear and brought her back to his cabin, where he gathered his dirty clothes. In the boat’s laundry they waited for a wringer machine to come free, and while their clothes were washing he got them breakfast in the café. On the starboard side, workmen were replacing a section of bulkhead that looked as if someone had blown it out with a cannon.

Back in the laundry he sent their things through the wringer and hung everything to dry on the temporary lines strung on the aft deck between trips. Then he looked closely at the girl. “When’s the last time you washed yourself?”

Lily shrugged.

“Do you know how to wash yourself, or does August do it?”

She rubbed her nose. “I can wash if you soap the cloth.”

He led her back to her cabin, where August was snoring, drew a sink of water, put her on a stool, soaped up a washcloth, and told her to take everything off and scrub herself good all over, then rinse the rag clean and wipe off the soap and put on her clean clothes. He would wait for her out on deck.

“I can’t put on my socks when my feets are wet.”

“Just come out dressed and I’ll put your socks on.”

He sagged against the rail, something in his head spiking against his skullbones, a pain that should have been fatal.

In half an hour she came out and the little dress was on backwards. One of the cooks was coming down the Texas rail. “Oh, for gosh sake,” she said, pulling the dress off and turning it around on her. She cast Sam a malevolent look and walked on, saying over her shoulder, “You got to watch that baby, now.”

They went onto the dance floor, and he sat at the piano’s keyboard and closed his eyes, trying to ignore the pain at the back of his head. He felt her climb onto the bench, and he kept his eyes closed.

“You sleeping, Mr. Lucky?”

He began sorting through the books of music on the rack and found a simple waltz. “Do you want to sing?”

He knew she wouldn’t. He had tried to coach her on a few songs that August said she knew, but when she sang, she dragged the notes and ignored the timing. Sometimes she just whined. Neither one of them knew what was wrong with her. “Look at that mark. It’s an F. Can you find F on the piano?”

She pressed down middle F, the single note buzzing out over the hardwood.

“When the mark is in the blank line above, it’s an A, and then a C.” He went on, and she touched the notes. He looked into her corn-flower eyes. “Is a sharp up or down?”

“Up.”

“How much did your father teach you?”

“Those notes. F-A-C-E and E-G-B-D-F. He’s going to teach me to count.”

He was sick to his stomach and dizzy, and the bandage on the back of his head felt hot, but when Lily said this, he spiraled down into a new dimension of pain-of darkness, even. “Who is?” he whispered, putting an arm around her.

She looked at her shoes. “Nobody.”

He felt in her posture some notion that had not occurred to her before, that people disappear in a manner she might never understand. She began to cry gently, but he knew she didn’t really comprehend why she was sad. Someone had told her that her father had gone to heaven, then someone told her that her mother had gone to the same place, and none of it made the least sense to her because she was in the eternal present tense of childhood where the motion of life keeps your mind busy, and the future and the past don’t even exist. He felt sick for her, but terrible for himself as well, for the thin shoulder he cupped in his right hand might have been his own sister’s or brother’s, and then he was crushed by a deeper understanding of what he had lost back before he knew what loss was. He didn’t know such a feeling could come so late, and to keep from crying in front of her, he grabbed a music book and started playing the first piece that opened up, a waltz called “Falling Waters,” and he began explaining the three-four rhythm. Lily’s head raised up and scanned the page. It was a simple piece with single bass notes, and she crossed behind him and stood on his left, poking out G and C more or less in time, watching his fingers complete the chords. He began to have the strange feeling that they were playing into the future, a place where there was no baggage to carry.

They’d spent an hour at the piano when August came through the starboard door covered with coal dust. “I had to help load. I’ll take Lily now.”

Sam looked him up and down. “It’s all right. You get cleaned up, then we’ll go and pull the clothes off the line and iron them.”

“Hot time of day to iron next to a stove. How’d you get banged up?”

“I don’t even know.”

August looked at his bandage closely. “We’ve got some aspirin in our room.”

“I’ll get them when I bring down the clothes.”

THE BOAT PLOWED NORTH all the way to St. Paul, where the New Orleans music packed the dance floor every night. During the day, patrons desperate to escape the shore-bound heat loaded on board and sat under the cloth awnings, staring at their houses drifting by as travelers from some foreign land might, relishing the illusion that their town was exotic, special, or at least worth a look.

The crowds were mannered but large, the weather rainy and windy. The pilots fought the shallow channel of the upper river, and one time Mr. Brandywine was flanking a bend when he saddle-bagged the steamer on a sandbar. A ferryboat had to be hired to take fifteen hundred people back to the landing, and the Ambassador was stranded until a rise came down to float her off three days later. Sam was thankful for the idle time. The child began to soak up her piano lessons as well as her short fingers allowed, and he was teaching her limits. Do not stand at the head of stairways. Stay away from the smokestacks. Never go down to the main deck, where the guard rails were sometimes open to the water. At night he read to her, seated in an armless deck chair next to her bed, until she grew tired of the same ten baby books, so he began to make up stories. She stopped him in the middle of one and said she didn’t like it.

He’d just finished playing with the night band because the pianist had jumped to a hotel orchestra, and his head felt as wooden as the wall behind it. “What kind of story do you want?”

“One about a bathtub.” She climbed out of the bunk onto his lap.

He looked at her. “A bathtub?”

“A house with a sidewalk in front.”

He frowned. “Okay. There was this little boy named Fritz who lived in a house with a huge bathtub.”

“Could he play the piano?”

“Uh, sure, he was a crackerjack pianist. Now Fritz fell in a mud puddle in the backyard…”

“Was there grass in the yard?”

“Grass? Yeah. Lots of nice grass. Well, Fritz began to cry and…”

“Did his mother come out and tell him it was okay he got muddy?” She put a hand in his shirt pocket and hung on.

“Of course she did, baby. It was an accident.”

“Did she take him inside a house? The house with the big bathtub?”

He sensed the soaring hope behind the question and understood at once what he had to do.