Her home lacks clocks.

But the woman knows what time it is, at least to the half-hour; she tracks its passage via programs on the living-room TV, her family’s focus, its jabbering blue hearth.  And when Geraldo appears and her baby hasn’t, she knows that something is amiss, that He been beat up after school.  Or maybe one a them Dominicans in they big cars, like a old Lincoln or something?  With the windows open and they music turn all the way up, down from Washington Heights?  Maybe they runned over my baby in the street like he nothing, the woman thinks, like he a animal.

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