Francis LaRue and Izzy Hernandez walk home from third grade toward the Singing Window, where a lady sits at a piano in a first-floor apartment. Her window has bars but is flung open, ladling up sunlight. Francis stops and listens. Izzy lags behind. A spring wind ripples off the Hudson and up 100th Street. Tiny green fans shiver on the ginkgos, and the Singing Window shrills out her scales, opera, whatever that yawling is. She sits with her narrow, erect back to the sidewalk.

Francis posts himself at the edge of the window and peers into her living room. A teddy bear in a dress sits on the sofa and the piano shines like ink. The Singing Window’s shoulder blades dance under her sweater as she plays.

Her living room has no boxes in it. It has no shopping bags. It has no trash like the clutter-cave that is Francis’s mother’s apartment. For this, she must be punished.

Francis tugs on Izzy’s hand. Izzy shakes her head. Her red hair whips in the breeze and she squeezes her eyes shut. Francis looks in the gutter. He locates a banana peel and picks up a cream soda can, dented and sloshy. A woman walks past with a baby carriage and Francis leans against a blue Mustang holding the cream soda can, waiting. Then he gathers up the peel. La la la LA la la la, says the Singing Window. Izzy has her hands over her face. Francis jams the garbage between the iron bars and into the window so it spills into the yellow living room. “La la la LA,” he shrieks, so that his voice cracks. He pulls back before the Singing Window can turn around, and he and Izzy run down the hill toward the park.

Francis talks less the closer he gets to home. He waves goodbye listlessly. Your mother sick again? says Izzy, who goes home to fresh-baked cookies. Francis looks down when Ray the doorman says, “Eddie wants to talk to your mother. You tell her, okay?” But he will not tell. Eddie is going to throw all their things on the street. He is the super—he can do that. He has the keys.

Francis opens the door to 8A only the permitted crack and squeezes inside, so no neighbors can possibly glimpse even the foyer of the clutter-cave. He ignores everything strenuously. Ignores the dusty shopping bags, the magazines and the cardboard cartons stacked so hot in winter by the radiators he’s afraid they’ll catch fire. He sneezes—he sneezes a lot at home. His eyes get pink. At dinner, his grandparents and his mother, Paulette, and Francis say nothing when it’s Stouffer’s frozen turkey again because the stovetop is so covered with Paulette’s magazines it cannot be used to cook.

Francis stirs his food in the metallic tray and decides to notice things like an artist, because this is something he might like to be. He notices how skeins of sunset light loop in from the windows. He thinks, “skein, skein, skein” because of the lumpy scarf his mother, Paulette, is teaching herself to knit. Notices how the Hudson River looks like rumpled aluminum foil.

Notices, too, how Grandma Sophie suddenly stiffens and stares across the table and past him, startled. Hears Grandma Sophie begin to croon.

“Oh, this is a weird one,” says Paulette, rising from her chair.

“Don’t,” says Francis, but she approaches him anyway.

Grandma Sophie makes a thin, high sound that quavers and rises in pitch. Her hands nest on her lap and her back straightens, and her lips part in an O. Francis has been watching Grandma Sophie seize for years.

Grandpa Marty sits beside Sophie and watches her closely. Paulette kneels by Francis. “Don’t,” says Francis, but Paulette pulls his head down into a hug. The scent of her scalp is too private for a son to smell. It is woodsy and moist, like tree roots in the park after rain. But he doesn’t struggle. His hair and Paulette’s hair smash together until finally Grandma Sophie stops her strange epileptic song and falls shaking onto Grandpa Marty. He lowers her to the rug. He puts a spoon between her teeth.

Francis breathes through his mouth so he can’t smell the tree roots. He listens to his grandfather’s soothing voice. Imagine singing with your window open, he thinks, so garbage boy can come by again and throw trash into your house. That is nuts. That is what’s really nuts.

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