Bowery Girl by Kim Taylor

ain’t gonna squeeze us out of Lefty’s. I’ll slit the throat of every one of the bastards before I’ll let that happen.”
    Mollie heard the words, and knew they were not his, but Tommy’s. He never questioned anything Tommy said or did. It was pathetic. Mollie wondered if he ever had a thought of his own. She remembered once that she’d asked him if he liked plum pudding. He’d looked around the room, instinctively settling on Tommy. Waiting for an answer. He didn’t get one. He just shrugged his shoulders and turned the conversation to something else.
    â€œI gotta go,” Mollie said.
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œâ€™Cause I got to.” How could she say that she loved one side of Seamus and hated the other? The other would win. It always did.
    â€œStay the night.”
    â€œYou know me and Annabelle got a pact. You know—”
    â€œI know,” Seamus muttered. “Gotta come home at night.”
    â€œSo’s we know the other’s all right.”
    Seamus sighed. He stretched out an arm and wrapped it around Mollie’s waist.
    â€œI gotta go.” She brushed his arm aside and turned so her feet dropped over the side of the bed. She pulled on her shoes, and in her hurry, knotted up one of the laces. She stood, took her coat from the hook in the door, and slung it on.
    â€œSee you later.” She did not kiss him before leaving.
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    The Ragpickers’ Lot was a narrow strip of empty space that ran from Roosevelt straight back to Chambers. It had not changed in the years since Annabelle had found her there. Only the faces were different. A few metal barrels of burning firewood provided the only warmth.
    The right side of the lot was a marvel of technical design: Layers of scrap wood had been nailed or balanced to create sleeping quarters four squat levels high. It was a feat of design because it rarely collapsed. When it did, the thing seemed to build itself up within a day, and all the stalls were occupied. Long and narrow feet clad in mismatched socks stuck out of one box, fourth level. One ground-floor unit boasted a guard dog, who kept one eye open and one cropped ear cocked.
    The left side of the lot held the rags—three men high and six deep—rags collected from trash bins for too many years to count. Some were washed in the nearby tub and resold.
    Mollie wondered if they held children still, as they had once held her. She knew that men and women came often from the Children’s Aid Society, that they brought broom handles to sift through the rags and find the children. Some of the ragpickers would watch, and if a child was found, they would claim to be the boy’s or girl’s guardian and ask for fees before releasing the child. Most of the kids came back within a week. Others were not heard from again. The Children’s Aid Society claimed to send the children to families in the West. But there was no one to prove that, and a lot of the kids thought they were being sold into white slavery.
    Which in a way would be true, for the Society would clean them up, teach them to read and curtsy and sew and hammer, and find them a job. The do-gooders loved to boast about finding jobs for the “destitute.” They boasted of the “honor of work,” and how they’d steered another poor soul from the “depravities of crime.” But work—in a factory, as a cash girl at a department store, as a maid in a Washington Square manse—meant only slavery in another form. Mollie’d seen the girls who stood in the window of the millinery factory on James Street, staring longingly through the plate glass while the machines rumbled and shook behind them. Mollie herself had once asked after a job sewing ladies’ gloves—only to find the wages so low one could barely afford a berth in a flophouse.
    She crossed the lot, stopping at the first ash bin. An old man warmed his fingers, keeping them so low to