THE PATRON SAINT OF LIARS

Ann Patchett

COPYRIGHT

First published in USA in 1992

This edition first published in Great Britain in 2003 by Fourth Estate

A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.com

Copyright © Ann Patchett 1992

Cover image © Svitozar Bilorusov/Trevillion Images

The right of Ann Patchett to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9781841150505

Ebook Edition © February 2020 ISBN: 9780007397358

Version: 2020-07-21

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DEDICATION

This book is for my parents,

Frank Patchett and Jeanne Wilkinson Ray,

and my grandmother, Eve Wilkinson.

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

Habit

Rose

Chapter [1]

Chapter [2]

Chapter [3]

Chapter [4]

Chapter [5]

Chapter [6]

Son

Chapter [1]

Chapter [2]

Chapter [3]

Chapter [4]

Chapter [5]

Cecilia

Chapter [1]

Chapter [2]

Chapter [3]

Chapter [4]

Chapter [5]

Chapter [6]

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by Ann Patchett

About the Publisher

HABIT

TWO O’CLOCK in the morning, a Thursday morning, the first bit of water broke through the ground of George Clatterbuck’s back pasture in Habit, Kentucky, and not a living soul saw it. Spring didn’t care. Water never needed anyone’s help to come up through the ground once it was ready. There are rivers, hundreds of them, running underground all the time, and because of this a man can say he is walking on water. This was a hot spring that had broken loose of its river to make mud in the grass, and it kept on till it was a clear pool and then a little creek, cutting out a snake’s path toward the Panther River. Water will always seek out its own.

George Clatterbuck found it when it was already a pretty steady stream. It was only fitting that he should be the one, seeing as how it was his land. It was 1906. He was hunting for his family’s dinner. He smelled the spring before he saw it, foul and sulfurous as spoiled eggs. He thought it was a bad sign, that it meant his land was infected and spitting up bile for relief. The water was warm when he dipped in his hand, and he wiped it off against the leg of his trousers. He was thinking about it, thinking what he ought to do, when he saw a rabbit on the other side of the field. It was as big a buck as he’d seen, and he knelt down slowly to get off his shot. He had to shoot on his knees. His father taught him that way because he was afraid the rifle’s kick would knock the boy off his feet, thought George would be safer close to the ground. But since that was the way George learned, that was the only way he could ever do it, and now here he was, grown with a family, going down on his knees like a man in prayer to shoot a rabbit.

He blew the head clean off and didn’t disturb the pelt. He thought he would tan the hide and give it to his daughter, June, for her birthday. June, like many little girls, was partial to soft things. By the time he’d tied the legs onto his belt he’d forgotten about the water altogether.

It wasn’t long after that times turned hard for the Clatterbucks. Both plow horses came down with colic, and Betsy, the horse George rode to town, got a ringworm thick as your thumb that no amount of gentian violet could clear. Not a week after, every last one of his cows came down with mastitis that left them all drier than bones. George had to get up every three hours in the night and bottle-feed the calves, whose crying put his wife beside herself. “Sounds like a dying child,” she said, and she shivered. George didn’t say this to her, but he was thinking he might have to slaughter the calves and take his losses. Bought milk was more than he could afford.

Then, if he didn’t have enough to worry about, the horses broke free of the corral. George took some rope and set out to bring them back, cursing the rain and the mud and the stupid animals with every step. He found them at that spring he had forgotten, drinking so deeply he thought they’d founder. He was frightened then because he thought such water would kill them, and where would the money come from to buy three new horses? But the horses were fine. Betsy’s hide was smooth where the ringworm had been and the other two were past their own disorder. George knew it was the spring that had done this, but he didn’t know if it was the work of the Devil or the Lord. He didn’t tell a soul when he drove his sick cows down to the water, but by the time they came home their udders were so full they looked like they might burst on the ground.

Then little June took sick and laid in her bed like a dull penny. Doctor came from Owensboro and said it wasn’t the pox or scarlet fever, but something else that was burning her alive. She was slipping away so fast you could all but see her dying right before your eyes, and there sat her parents, not a thing in the world to do.

So George goes out in the middle of the night with a mason jar. He walks in the dark to the spring, fills up the jar, and heads home. He goes to his daughter’s room and looks at her pale face. He prays. He takes the first drink of water for himself, thinking that if it was to kill her he’d best die, too. It is foul-tasting, worse even than the smell of it. He lifts up June’s head from her sweaty pillow and pours the water down her throat, the whole jarful. He only lets a little run down the sides of her face. He wonders for a moment what it would be like to feed a child from his own body as his wife had done, but the thought embarrasses him and he lets it go. The next morning June is fine, perfect, better than new.

When the spring had saved his livestock, George kept it to himself, not wanting to look foolish, but when it saved his daughter he felt the call to witness. He went into the streets of Habit and told what he had seen. At first the people were slow in believing, but as hardships came to them and they went to the spring for help, all was proved true.

Tales of what had happened spread by word of mouth and before long people were coming up from as far away as Mississippi. The truth was stretched out of shape through all the telling, and soon the lame showed up wanting to walk and the blind wanting to see. The spring can’t do everything, the townspeople said. It’s wrong to expect so much.

And then one boy died right there at the water’s edge. He was that sick by the time his folks brought him. He’s buried in Habit now, two hundred miles away from his own kind.

One of the people who got word of the spring was a horse breeder named Lewis Nelson, who lived in Lexington. Lewis’ wife, Louisa, had rheumatoid arthritis and her hands froze up on her even though she was only twenty-two. They set off to Habit to see if the water couldn’t do her some good. The Nelsons were rich, and when they came to town they were looking for a hotel, but there wasn’t one. George had made a vow to never make a cent off the spring, and Habit said that was only fitting. So when visitors came they were taken in with charity, many times by the Clatterbucks themselves. This put the Nelsons ill at ease, since they were used to giving charity and not receiving it.

June was seventeen that summer. She had grown up as well as she had started out. She was a kind of a saint in the town, the first one saved by the spring, but all that really meant to June was that there were few boys bold enough to ask her out, and the ones who did thought it would be a sin to try and kiss her. She gave up her room for Mr. and Mrs. Nelson and slept on the sofa downstairs.

After her second trip to the spring the use of Louisa’s hands came back to her and she taught June how to cross-stitch. Her husband was full of joy. Lewis was a devout Catholic with a head for figures. He saw the hand of God in the spring and thought the thing to do would be to build a grand hotel in the back pasture. No one was ever sure how he changed George Clatterbuck’s mind, but probably it was by telling him that a lot more people could be saved if there was a bigger place to stay and that George was being unchristian by denying them. It’s easy to imagine that Lewis had seen how well the hot-springs hotels had done in Arkansas and Tennessee and knew there was some real money to be made. Not long after that the architects came with their silver mechanical pencils, and after them the builders and the gardeners. In 1920 the Hotel Louisa opened its doors. They’d wanted to call it the Hotel June, but June, afraid of scaring off the few dates she had left, said thank you, no.

When the roses on the wallpaper were still in their first bloom and the carpet was soft and springy beneath your feet, there wasn’t a hotel in the South that could match the Hotel Louisa. People came from Atlanta and Chicago and New Orleans, some to be healed but most to play tennis on the grass courts and dance in the fancy ballroom. Lewis sent for his collection of horse prints in Lexington, and Louisa picked out velvet to cover the settees for the lobby. There were two formal dining rooms where people ate with real silver and drank champagne smuggled down from Canada. At five o’clock everyone went out and stood on the front porch to drink bourbon and soda. No one from Habit ever went inside after the opening day. It made them feel like they weren’t quite good enough. Even the Clatterbucks, who were supposed to be partners in everything, kept to the other side of the woods. You couldn’t see their house, not even from the third-floor rooms. The guests never knew they had ever been there at all.

The crash of the stock market in 1929 and the great drought that came over the land were so close together that it was hard to separate one from the other. Everything was coming to an end, and the spring would not except itself. Maybe there was a reason for it, that things got so hot that even the water underneath the ground felt the pull of the dry air. In no time it went from a trickle to a strip of mud and then not even that. But whatever it was, the town of Habit took its leaving as a sign, just as they had taken its arrival.

For the spring this was no hardship. It was just going back, folding into one of those underground rivers. It would break through later, years from then, someplace else. Next time people might not be around for miles. It was very possible that no one would ever drink from it at all.

Not long after all this, people stopped going to the hotel, though it would be hard to say if it was because of the spring or because they were the kind of people who had kept their money in banks. June used to walk across the field in the evenings and look at the place in the ground where her salvation had come from. She saw men in suits and women in silk dresses carrying out their own bags and taking hired cars north to catch trains.

The Nelsons tried for a long time to get the water to come back. They hired people who said they knew how to coax it out of the ground. But the spring was long gone by then. They stayed on in the hotel alone until the middle thirties, hardly coming out for anything. You could trail them as they moved from room to room, one light going off and another one coming on. People said they could set their watch by what window was bright at the time. Then one day the Nelsons packed up and left without saying good-bye.

Word came soon after that the Nelsons had made a gift of the Hotel Louisa to the Catholic Church, and this put the fear of God in everyone. It was one thing to have rich people in your pasture, but when the Clatterbucks thought of Catholics, they saw statues of the Virgin Mary going up in the yard, ten feet high. The Clatterbucks could have kept the Catholics off, since they owned the land, but nobody told them that. When the lawyers came and knocked on their door, there was nothing for them to do but look at the ground and shake their heads. A few weeks later two buses pulled up, and a group of little old women in white dresses were led or carried up the front stairs. The church had changed the name of the Hotel Louisa to Saint Elizabeth’s and turned it into a rest home for old nuns.

But the nuns were miserable. They’d been dirt poor all their lives, following the word of their church. The idea of spending their final days in an abandoned grand hotel made them restless. Soon the tiny women started wandering over to the Clatterbucks’ in their bathrobes, searching out a simpler way of life. The Clatterbucks, good Baptists every day of their lives, took pity on the old Catholics and overcame their fears. They served them platters of fried mush with sorghum, which were received with heartfelt prayers and thanks. It made the family feel needed again; the old women’s dependence called to mind the early days of the spring when the sick were healed. They thought that God had seen again what was best.

But the church did not agree, and two years later the buses returned and took the nuns to Ohio. Mrs. Clatterbuck cried when they left, and June touched the medal around her neck of Saint Catherine of Siena that Sister Estelle had given her. She wore it all her life.

The Hotel Louisa was getting worn, fretwork slipped from the porch, shutters hung down. In any other town it would have been ransacked, people breaking out windows and carrying off furniture in the night. But the people of Habit were true to their name and just kept on avoiding the old hotel like they did in the days when they wouldn’t have had the right clothes to go inside for a cup of coffee.

The Clatterbucks waited and watched. Then one day a station wagon pulled up the front drive and two nuns, dressed in what looked to be white bed sheets, and five big-bellied girls got out. June and her mother were just coming through the woods at the time, out for their daily walk.

The nuns cut across the dried creek bed, not knowing a thing. They didn’t know how the hotel had come to be or that they were standing on top of what might have been the closest thing to a real miracle that any of them was ever going to see. They were occupied, unloading the car.

“Pregnant girls,” Mrs. Clatterbuck said. “They’ve gone and made it into a home for pregnant girls.”

ROSE

[1]

I WAS SOMEWHERE outside of Ludlow, California, headed due east toward Kentucky, when I realized that I would be a liar for the rest of my life. There was plenty of time to think about things like that, headed into the desert alone, windows down, radio up. I imagined that it was possible for people to have talents, great talents, that they never stumbled across in the course of their lives. Somewhere out there, maybe in one of those African countries where all people have time to do is starve to death, was a painter who had never seen a canvas. Maybe he scratched simple pictures into the dirt with a stick, and it felt right to him even if he didn’t know what it meant. So maybe I was born to lie, and it just took me twenty-three years to find the reason to do it. I started out with a lie of omission, which some people might see as easier, but I think is actually more complex. I left my husband with only a note.

Dear Thomas,

I am unhappy and it cannot be resolved. Do not try and find me. I will not come home. I’m sorry about taking the car.

Rose

I reworked it two dozen times, but it was still not a good note. Writing is not my talent. It was stiff and formal, given the fact that we had been married for almost three years and that he was, at every turn, a good man. But I thought the smallest bit of kindness would send him out looking for me, and since he wouldn’t be able to find me, what kind of life would that be for him? Wandering in the desert, showing my picture in gas stations, pinning fliers that gave my height and weight, the place I was last seen, onto telephone poles. The hardest part was knowing how to sign the note, because Love wasn’t right and anything less (Sincerely, All best,) was worse than nothing. So I went with nothing.

But like I said, I started with omission, which means the contents of the note were true, but there was a larger, unmentioned truth which I took with me from Marina del Rey. I was pregnant. The beginnings of a child, his, mine, slept between my hips, a quarter-size life beneath the steering wheel of the blue Dodge Dart. Maybe you could trace the lying back further than that, to the darker issue of lying to myself. I lied to myself for three months, thinking that my period had gone someplace from which it would quickly return, that my body had simply forgotten and would remember. I lied to myself about wanting to be married, too. But I forgave myself that.

Forgiveness was at the heart of everything. Because I could not ask, I could not be forgiven. What would be the point in confessing a sin for which you had guilt but no remorse? Bless me, father, for I have sinned, I have lied to my husband, left him never knowing he will have a child, and would do it all again in a heartbeat. Bless me, for I will continue to lie until I go the way of all the earth. Bless me in my absence of remorse.

At nineteen I had been to Tijuana three times, drank mescal with high school boys, bet them money on dart games and let them kiss me, never anything else. I was saving myself for that one person who would be mine alone in all the world. That’s what I thought at nineteen. There was one out there who was looking for me like I was lost. I had been to Los Angeles a dozen times, and farther, up the coast to Malibu and Zuma and Ventura, names so beautiful you’d think they were someplace else, and all the time I watched the waves and let the boy who drove me put his arm around my waist and slip the ends of my hair into his mouth as if they’d just blown there by accident, I never cared. Never cared for any of them. I would go into the water all the way through late November, even when the waves were high and cold enough to cut you in half. I would swim out with long strokes while the boy quickly drifted back toward the shore, shivering in the daylight, looking for his shirt. He would try again, go up to his ankles, his knees, but the water would push him back as fast as it pushed me out. As long as it’s a regular day, not too rough to begin with, the ocean is pretty smooth once you make it out past that first set of waves. That’s why people are afraid to swim in the ocean. They try to jump over those waves and get slammed down to the bottom and pulled across the sand like a piece of shell. You’ve got to go through them, dive under just when they’re rising up for you, set your direction, close your eyes, and just swim like hell. Once you get through that, you’ll find there isn’t a better place for swimming because it’s the ocean and it goes on forever. You don’t have to see anyone you don’t want to. If you look out, away from the beach, it’s easy to imagine that there’s no one else but you in the whole world, you and maybe a couple of sea gulls.

I never turned and waved to the boy. I felt how cold the water was, but never like I felt him watching me. I knew how my arms would look, how a lump would rise in his throat as I dove down again and then stayed under too long. I swam until I got tired, and I didn’t get tired fast. By the time I walked out of the Pacific Ocean I could be sure he would remember this, and that I would remember it too: the swimming, not the boy.

In church I prayed to God. Every morning on my way to school, every morning before going to work when it wasn’t on my way anymore, I stopped and knelt before a rack of candles. The flames would tremble inside their red glass cups when my elbows pressed against the railing. I would pray for the soul of my father, who I said I could remember but could not, that his young and handsome face from my parents’ wedding picture was watching over me. I would pray for the exams I had not studied for and the small ruby ring in the window of Cantrell’s Jewelry. I would pray for high-heeled shoes, my girlfriends, and permission to do as I pleased. I would pray to be noticed, beautiful, and loved, but mostly for that sign to which I was rightfully entitled. Every candle I lit, every long wooden match I gave a dime for and struck against the bottom of the coin box, making a small disruption of sulfur and light in the church, was by way of reminding God that I was still here, waiting. I knew that it could come at any time, and that any time could be a long way off, but I thought that by constantly placing myself in God’s presence, He might be more inclined to think of me sooner rather than later. I did not ask for more than my share, one sign. That which was by rights mine because I believed and was so ready to listen.

Sometimes I prayed for Holy Orders, so that I would walk away from them in a way that would make me amazing; the strength of my will sanctified by God. Father O’Donnell had said that God called us to our vocations, in some kind of dog whistle voice that only we would hear, and if we kept our heart open, our ear to the ground, we would know what to do. Nun or Wife, my choices loomed above me like giant doors, and I waited, listening, for God to give me the word. But God was quiet in San Diego in the middle sixties. If He had an opinion as to which way I should go He kept it to Himself, or maybe He said it while I was in the shower, humming something, and the moment of my lifetime passed me by. But I was like a woman lost in the desert, her eyes trained for water for so long that she begins to think she could drink the reflections of light on the sand. What I finally accepted as my sign came in the form of Thomas Clinton, as Father O’Donnell told us God can come to us in many ways and we should never be quick to discount anyone. I was nineteen and working as a secretary at Simms candy factory on Pacific Avenue. I ate the lunch I brought from home on the beach. Thomas was in college, went to our church, and asked if he could take me to dinner some Saturday night.

“Which Saturday night?”

My mother was happy because he didn’t wrap chocolates or drive a truck. I said yes because it seemed so hard for him to ask me. I wondered how many Sundays I had walked by him while he watched me, how many times the words had come up in his throat, or he had started to reach out to touch the sleeve of my dress but I was past him already and he would have to wait another week. You think that sounds conceited, you think that maybe it was the first time he had seen me, thought to ask at all. But any girl who tells herself the truth knows differently. So I said yes to Thomas Clinton and later thought that I had said yes to God and later still realized I had said yes only to Thomas Clinton.

My mother and I had our own lives, our own schedules. Sometimes it seemed like the only time we managed to spend together was in the bathroom while one of us was getting ready to go to work or out for the evening. “This is going to be a good date,” my mother said. She said it every time, regardless of who I was going out with. “I have a feeling.” She was sitting on the edge of the tub, still wearing her dress from work. She sold cosmetics at I. Magnin’s. She used to work in hosiery. Cosmetics was a big promotion because she made a commission, and my mother knew that no woman thought she was beautiful, or beautiful enough, or beautiful in the right way. “They look into the mirror and all they can see is a collection of flaws,” she used to say. “I can fix that.” She sold to them gendy, she soothed them. When they said their eyes were small, she did not deny it, but instead brought up a thin blue pencil from someplace deep beneath the counter and showed them how to draw themselves on. “There’s no sense worrying about what you’re given,” my mother would say. “The important thing is what you do with it.”

I was working on my face from the vast collection of samples my mother brought home, overused testers with just enough left for us. She rubbed a Kleenex over the top of a lipstick and handed it to me.

“It’s too light,” I said.

“It’s not too light.”

My mother liked to watch me get ready, like I had watched her get ready when I was a girl. After my father died when I was three, after enough time had passed, she would get ready to go on dates herself. I would pick out her earrings, sniff the bottle of Rive Gauche which was her. The women at church were always telling my mother she should marry again, that she should give me another father. “Rose has a father,” she told them. “She doesn’t need another one.” My mother took marriage very seriously. It was a sacrament, the same as communion. It was a long time before she decided that maybe being married to someone who was dead wasn’t as binding as being married to someone who was alive. By the time I had graduated from high school, she had pretty much settled with Joe, who handled claims forms for an insurance company. But then it wasn’t a date anymore, only a series of nights she went to his house and nights he came to ours and they made dinner and watched TV and went home late but always went home.

“Your blush is too high.”

I looked in the mirror again and started to wipe it off. I had stopped fighting with my mother, at least over make-up, a long time ago. It was the thing she knew, I could give her that much.

There was a way she watched me when I was looking in the mirror. She thought I didn’t see her. She would stare at me so intently and I knew she was trying to see me like a stranger would, to judge me as harshly as the world would judge me. If she had that information, she thought she could prepare me somehow for what was to come. “Pretty girls have it harder,” she said while I brushed out my hair.

“What?”

“People think it’s the other way, that the ugly girls, the plain girls even, they’re the ones to feel sorry for. But they don’t have so many” — she stopped and pushed her eyebrows together, trying to think of the word — “distractions, I guess. There will always be people there to tell a pretty girl what she should be doing or thinking. At the counter, it’s the pretty girls you can always sell the most to. They never know their minds.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.” My mother loved to talk about things like that, but I wasn’t in the mood. I was going to be late. I pressed my mouth against my hand and then washed it off.

“You’re a pretty girl,” my mother said. “I was a pretty girl. I know what I’m talking about.”

My mother was a pretty girl. I had seen the pictures, her dark hair sweeping off her forehead in a wave, her head tilted imperceptibly to one side, her mouth open to show the rows of small, perfect teeth. There was a picture of her in her confirmation dress, standing on the steps of the church, another waving from the bow of the Queen Mary, a snapshot taken on a guided tour, her sunglasses on, her gloved hand raised to the camera. But as she grew older my mother became beautiful. I could never find the exact moment it happened. In the pictures she changed, her face had lost its sweetness but taken on another thing. You can see it best in the photograph taken at my father’s funeral. Who would have had the nerve to make a picture then, or how it came to be in her possession, I never knew, but there she was in a black dress, walking toward the camera but looking away from it. The cemetery is only a backdrop, the trees making an arch behind her, the headstones arranged like lilac bushes. She is more beautiful than a bride. Once, when I was ten and intent on finding every photograph of my father ever taken, I ran across this one. When I showed it to her, she closed her eyes and turned away. “Keep that if you want it,” she said, “but I don’t ever want to see it around. Do you understand me?” For the rest of the day she was quiet, and while I later understood it was because she didn’t want to remember the day she watched them bury my father, at the time I thought she was ashamed, ashamed of the beauty that seemed somehow to break apart the grief around her. I put the picture in my Bible between the Gospels of Luke and John. I took the Bible with me when I left. It is the only picture of my mother I have.

I left her in the bathroom and went into the closet, turned on the light, and shut the door. There was a full-length mirror inside and I wanted a minute to look at myself without my mother watching me. What would she say if she saw me coming to her counter? Would she run her fingers along the sides of my face as I had seen her do to other women and tell me what could be done about the shape of my mouth or the length of my nose? And would I think what all those other women must think, that no matter how beautiful she made me, I would never be as beautiful as her?

“I’m going to wear your blue dress,” I called out through the door.

“Sure,” my mother said, “that’ll look good.”

I pulled the dress on over my head, and for a minute I thought about staying. Locking the door from the inside for no good reason other than I couldn’t remember for a second what Thomas Clinton looked like. But then I did.

It was a night that at nineteen, in southern California in May, was like every other night you had seen so far, but a night that when you remember it years later in a place without an ocean, is like a powerful dream. Everywhere you went you heard the water, the same way you had always heard your breathing, and would later hear the highway, or trains, or women’s voices. But the sound was so much a part of everything that you couldn’t hear it at all then. This is what I took for granted: The sound of the water. The light on the water, day or night. The way you could look out for so long you couldn’t tell the difference between the water and the sky. The sand that blew onto the highway in sheets and formed small dunes against the curbs. The smell of the water. The tough grass that grew from nothing. The soft, hot tar and the birds which never occurred to me would not be everywhere I went. I am saying this from memory and there are things I am forgetting. But I remember this: I wore that blue dress of my mother’s which was spotted with holly leaves because I knew that when the wind caught it and blew it back, the skirt would press against my legs and be as big as a sail. I knew we would walk along the beach that night and he would have to remember the sight of me in that dress. I wore it because he went to college, and I liked the way he had to keep looking away from my face when he spoke to me. I knew that dress would break his heart.

Thomas Clinton was about my height, but there was a lightness to him, the size of his bones, the width of his shoulders, that made him seem smaller. Everything about him made me think he had been born late, that he would have been better off being his father, or my father. I could imagine him in a wide-brimmed felt hat, a newspaper folded beneath his arm. I could see him gladly giving up his seat on the bus to anyone who seemed to want it.

He picked me up in a blue Dodge Dart with wide bench seats. My mother and I didn’t have a car, and to ride in one was always an occasion. I rolled down the window and leaned my face into the night air while he drove me to dinner in silence. The streets were wide and lined with small houses, every one of them exactly alike except for some small thing: a hedge around the front, a bay window, a garage. They were painted in sherbet colors, pale orange or pink, a creamy yellow. The lawns and the sidewalks made neat lines. You could count on everything being just so. I looked at a house and then closed my eyes for a minute. When I opened them again, I would see the same house, a full block away. It was a game I liked to play whenever I was in a car, especially when I was in a car with a date who had nothing to say.

Words came hard to Thomas Clinton. He managed to tell me before our dinner arrived that he was studying to be a math teacher. He would have been better, I think, drawing equations on napkins to show me how he felt. What percentage of his heart he had given to me already, as opposed to percentages given to his family, his work. He was fluid in numbers, he could explain them, but in an Italian restaurant, pushing a veal cutlet from side to side on his plate, he was lost. It was not a romantic place, where long silences are full of meaning. It was bright and clean and the waitresses wore uniforms that made them look like nurses. Our waitress came by too often because it was late and all her other tables had paid up and gone.

“Don’t you like that?” she said to Thomas, pointing at his dinner. “If something’s wrong, you’d tell me, right?” She was a woman in her early fifties, whose bright blond hair looked like candy spun onto her head.

“It’s fine,” he said, and cut again at the meat. “It’s good.”

“Well, I hope so. Your girlfriend liked hers. Look, she’s almost finished.” She leaned over toward me, like she wanted to tell secrets. “The cheesecake is good,” she said. “You’re skinny, you can eat cheesecake. If you have the room, you should think about it.”

There was something about the way she talked, her easy manner, that made our silence singularly unbearable. “I’ll just have coffee,” I said.

“That’s why you can eat cheesecake,” she said, and sighed. “Because you don’t. That’s the way it works.”

As soon as she had gone I wanted her to come back. I was no stranger to first dates, to their special kinds of horrors, but the ones I’d had tended to talk more often than not, to try and make an impression any way possible.

“I know you work at Simms,” Thomas said finally, his eyes fixed down. Our plates had been taken away, but the waitress had insisted on bringing him his dinner packaged up, even though he’d said he didn’t want it.

“You might not want it now,” she said, leaving the folded white sack on the table between us, “but tomorrow for lunch, you’ll want it.”

“I work at Simms,” I said. “I schedule deliveries.”

“I know because I saw you once, going into the building in the morning. I drove past you.” He stopped and I waited, thinking there had to be something more.

“And you knew me from church?”

He nodded. “I’ve seen you at church. You go with someone.”

“My mother.”

“Your mother,” he said. “I thought it was probably your mother.”

I looked out the window because I was afraid I would embarrass him if I looked at him too long. I felt genuinely bad for him, not angry or bored the way I did with so many of the others. I wished I had an idea what to say myself, but somehow the tone had been set; the passage of words would be difficult between us. “I think I’d like to take a walk,” I told the window.

So he paid the check while I waited by the door and the waitress said good night and then came after us in the street to give Thomas the sack of cutlets he had left on the table. “You two look real cute,” she said. “You have a good night.”

I was right about the wind, but by then I was sorry about the way it made my dress into a flag that waved behind us. It was a dark night, and darker as we walked across the highway and down toward Imperial Beach, and I was hoping he wouldn’t notice it. There was only a little light on the waves, no stars. As hot as the day had been, it had cooled off, and I could smell the smell that wasn’t exactly sand or salt or water, but all three together. When we stopped I put my hand on Thomas Clinton’s shoulder to balance myself and take my sandals off, and I felt him tense, almost as if I startled him, as if he had forgotten I was there, but when I pulled away he put his hand over mine and held it there near the collar of his shirt. We stayed there, just like that. There was something about the gesture, which was so strange and unexpected, that I think I would have just stood there all night.

“I knew it was your mother you went to church with,” he said finally. He was facing the water. His voice was low so I had to lean in to hear him over the sound of the waves. I didn’t ask him to speak up. I knew if he stopped talking he’d never be able to start again.

“I knew it was your mother and I knew where you worked and I knew where you lived. I drove behind you one morning, all the way from your house to Simms.”

I looked at him, thinking it had to be a joke but then knowing for sure it wasn’t. The wind was high and it pushed the sand around. It threw my dress out straight behind me. “More than one morning,” he added quietly. “Don’t think I’m crazy, I’m not. My God, there is nothing crazy about me. It’s something about you, Rose. When I saw you in church. I saw the way you put your forehead on your hands when you’re kneeling there.” He ran his fingers along my fingers. His hand was shaking. “I would sit right behind you. The back of your neck. The back of your dress.” He pressed my hand into his shoulder, but he wouldn’t look at me. “Every week I thought I would talk to you and then I finally did. And tonight. All night I just sat there and in my mind I was telling you everything. Things I had thought. It’s been seven months. You’ll think I’m crazy, but I couldn’t not tell you this.”

My heart was beating so fast and all I could think of was, fast as his. My heart is beating as fast as his.

“I had to wait until the thought of not telling you was worse than the thought of telling you. Does that make sense? Once I saw you eating lunch by yourself. It wasn’t too far from here. I hadn’t even been looking for you but you were there. I used to think if I just had your picture that would be enough. Then I could look at your face. Your beautiful face.”

He stopped and drew in his breath. He was still watching the ocean. The waves were high from the wind. They were as black as the night was black, the same way they had been blue like the sky that afternoon. My eyes had adjusted to the darkness and I could see him. He wore small wire glasses and had pale hair. He was handsome. I hadn’t really thought about it before. I remember I started to cry, though I’m not sure why anymore. Maybe it was just that I had waited such a long time to hear someone say those things to me. It was romantic. What a thought, to be nineteen and be willing to give up everything in your life because someone says something to you on a dark beach that sounds romantic.

He didn’t make a move toward me, and somehow that made it all the more spectacular. All those boys I’d turned away, all those boys who when they kissed me slipped my blouse out of the back of my skirt and tried to run their hands along my stomach. All the boys who said what they wanted, told me my breasts, my neck, the sides of my legs. I was stronger than all of them. I could twist myself away and walk into the water, demand that they take me home, or take myself home. But I didn’t know until that night how they must have felt, wanting to press the side of their face against my breast bone and hold me. The comfort that would come from that, and I gave them so little. It was dark and Thomas Clinton could have been anyone, but I thought he knew me like God knew me. The longer we stood there in silence, my hand caught between his hand and shoulder, the more my memory set about improving his words, until they churned through my stomach and over my chest, spreading down through my arms and legs like my own blood. It was my own blood. The plainest form of nineteen-year-old sexual desire on a dark beach of the Pacific Ocean in southern California in May. And I knew so little that I took it to be a sign from God.

I faced him, pressed in chest to chest, bent his neck down with my hand, covered my mouth with his mouth, moved his hand down my back, pressed in like I was trying to pass through him, my whole body through his. I stood on one foot and wrapped my other leg behind his. I knew from every time I’d stopped before what the other body wanted from me. My hand raking up hard from the nape of his neck to the crown of his head, then down, inside the collar of his shirt, then back between us, working down the front of my dress until my arms came out of the sleeves and went back to his waist. Where was he? God help me, I don’t remember him, not until the point he held my arms and pushed me back. Held me there and looked at me, and when he was afraid and couldn’t look again he folded me back into my clothes and buttoned my dress and looked for the two buttons that were gone but couldn’t find them in the dark, in the sand. He picked up the white sack with his dinner which had fallen from his hand and brushed the hair out of my face and took my hand and led me back to the car. He drove me home without saying a word and walked me to my door and didn’t kiss me good night. He called me the next night for a date and the night after that and the night after that. He married me at the end of the summer in Our Lady of Lourdes and Father O’Donnell said the mass and his parents and his two sisters came down from Victorville and we moved into the married students’ apartments and my mother cried but did so quietly in the kitchen while I took out the last of the boxes, and the next year he got a job teaching math in a high school in Marina del Rey. That is everything. That is all there was to know.

[2]

MY MOTHER knew how to drive but didn’t. She said she’d forgotten. She’d forgotten how to ride in a car as well. She would walk everyplace she possibly could. If it was raining, she would wear jeans and a sweatshirt, wrap her work dress in a dry cleaner’s bag, and put it in with her shoes and purse in one of the large, plastic I. Magnin’s bags we kept stacked beneath the kitchen sink. If she had to go someplace far from home she took the bus, but she didn’t like to. She said it was dirty and crowded and she didn’t like to sit next to strangers. If there was an emergency, a terrible emergency, she would call a cab or Mr. Lipton, the superintendent of the building, to come and drive her. She did the night I was five years old and my eardrum burst. She did when I was fourteen and ran a fever so high I couldn’t tell her who she was, even though she asked me over and over again. They took my appendix out, and when I was well Mr. Lipton drove me home, but Mother walked, because going home was not an emergency.

It’s no great mystery. It was because my father had died in a car. But he didn’t die in a car. He died later, in the hospital, which is the thing that makes the story tragic instead of just very sad. The car got away from him somehow, forgot gravity despite its weight, and flipped three times before digging itself into a sidewalk where no one was walking. His spine was nothing but dust. “Bone dust,” my cousin told me secretly in the back yard of my uncle’s house when I was seven. He was the one who gave me the details. I never got them from my mother, I never asked. It took him five weeks in intensive care to finish what had been started. It was there my father died of pneumonia, which, from what I understand, is like drowning.

But I loved to drive, the way people love forbidden things. Thomas taught me soon after we were married. He was a patient teacher and loved the fact that he could do something for me, though I wondered if later he regretted ever showing me how. We would sit on the cement steps in front of our apartment building, next to the red hibiscus that the gardener was always having to clip back so it wouldn’t completely block the front door. I rolled my shorts up as far as I could, trying to get a little color on my legs while Thomas quizzed me from the safety manual. “At what point in a rainstorm are the streets most dangerous?” he asked. “Who would go through the intersection first, if two cars arrived at the same time?”

While I was taking the test, he went and bought me flowers and I wondered if the high school girls were in love with him. If they wrote their names next to his in a notebook during math class.

For a long time I couldn’t bring myself to drive in San Diego, for fear of passing my mother on the street. It was a ridiculous fear because I knew every route she walked and when she walked it. But once we moved to Marina del Rey, I drove everyplace I could think of to go. I would drive to the electric company to pay the bill in person, drive to one grocery store that had good prices on staples and then another one across town because the produce was nicer. I would take Thomas to school in the morning and wait in the long line of carpooling mothers to drop him off at the door, then rejoin the line at three, or five, depending on whether or not he was coaching basketball. But then one day I missed. I was too far away, driving up the Pacific Coast Highway, listening to the radio. I was looking at the hills, thinking about the fire that had swept through last year and left them a charred pile of prickly black sticks. Now here they were, one year and a couple of floods later, as thick and green as they had ever been. The hills were the reason I was so late, and when I was sure it was impossible for me to make it back in time, I simply didn’t try. Thomas was worried, he waited at school for a long time, then walked home and looked there. Then he started to think that he had possibly missed me, and that I was waiting for him, so he went back to school.

I can’t remember Thomas ever getting angry with me. Sometimes, in bed at night, he would retell the story of those seven months before we met, when he would watch me.

“I remember one day you wore a red dress to church,” he would begin.

“I never had a red dress,” I said, my head on his chest, his arm around my shoulder.

“It was a red dress with half sleeves and a round collar. You had on flat black shoes and a black belt.”

“It must have been my mother’s,” I said. “I don’t remember it.”

“You sat right in front of me. I would always get there late, so I could sit near you, but that day you came in after I did. You were alone. And you sat down right in front of me. I could smell your perfume, and your hair wasn’t completely dry. I never heard a word Father O’Donnell said.”

His sadness was a powerful thing then, and he never forgot it, the way my mother never forgot the Depression and so was forever saving little bits of things that might be useful later. Thomas said he made a promise to God and even though he never said exactly what the promise entailed, I knew it went beyond to love and honor and obey. This was a promise with desperation in its origin, the kind of deal that Jonah cut in the belly of the whale. The difference being that I’m sure Thomas kept his promise, in the years I knew him.

So if my driving bothered him, he didn’t say. If my lateness bothered him, sometimes all the way through dinner, he didn’t tell me. I did try to be on time, and nearly every day I was. It’s just that I had found a tightness in my chest. Some nights it woke me up, and I would lie there, taking shallow breaths. I would listen to Thomas, who slept so quiedy beside me, and feel the warmth of his body in bed with me, and I would think, what makes something a sign from God? What makes something right? I didn’t even know what I was thinking of, but I could feel it pressing down on me when I slept, when I ran the vacuum, when I picked out the wallpaper, bought cereal, wrote home.

The only time it seemed to go away was when I was driving. The world moved because of the directions of my hands. I rushed it past my windows as fast as I wanted. At first I knew where I was going. I would make up excuses, little reasons that took me farther and farther away, and then I gave up. I was never going anywhere and there was no sense lying to myself. People think you have to be going someplace, when, in fact, the ride is plenty. I loved to drive early in the morning, before the traffic started up. I loved to drive in the hard rains and see the world blur and clear beneath my windshield wipers. When it was dark I could see the lights of the other cars speeding by me and when it was sunny I would roll down the car window and look for the islands, Anacapa or Catalina, through a tangle of my own hair. I bought maps in every town, stuffed the glove compartment with directions. When I studied them late at night, after Thomas was asleep and the pain in my chest had gotten me up again, I was never interested in where I might go, only the contours of the roads, the kind of lines they made, their shape and width, the views I imagined they would afford me. This is what I was looking for.

I continued to light my candles up and down the Pacific Coast Highway, though I was less sure now of what to ask for. The first sign had simply changed the shape of my life, left me sharing an apartment with one person instead of another. There was a loneliness in being answered, as if God and I had less to say to each other now. I put in my coins and took my match from the box, pressed my forehead to my hands in prayer, but all I could think about were the candles that were already lit. Who had come here before me and what did they want? Did girls still want to be married and loved? Did they want to never be alone? Or had the priest lit these himself, a primer to bring the faithful from the street like moths? I could have prayed, Dear God, please keep me from Carmel, where every day my car was headed. It was a full day’s drive. I would have to sleep over and come home the next morning, and how would I explain that? And what if I went and Thomas never asked me where I’d been for fear I might go away again and come back in two days or three or not at all? Would I head on to Oregon, or south through Mexico? I had the maps. But I could not pray for what I didn’t want. I was careful with my prayers, now that they had been answered.

This is how the days passed, weeks and months. Places I could get to in time to come home. I worked as a temporary secretary and would call in to the placement office when the money I had didn’t seem like enough. I would stay in a job for two days, a week, typing or filing, answering the phones, until whoever was missing came back and I had time to drive again. I didn’t always stay on the freeways. Some things can be seen only by going off onto the secondary roads: the migrant workers moving through the strawberry fields, the palm trees. I liked to go down side streets, looking at the houses and the bicycles in the yard. Sometimes I would drive all the way to San Diego just going through neighborhoods. When I got into town I took my mother out to lunch.

“Why aren’t you home?” she said. “Doesn’t Thomas worry about you? My God, I hate to think of you just driving around out there.”

“I only drive to see you,” I said.

“I’d feel better to think of you home,” she said. Even though I knew which home she meant, I liked to think it was with her.

My mother had married Joe the spring after I left, and it made me sad in a way, not her marriage, but the fact that she felt she had to wait for me to go. “Who’d have thought we’d be a couple of old married women having lunch?” she liked to say to me. My mother was happy being married. It was a gift she had given herself, the permission finally to live again the way she thought was natural. Her life was good. She was doing well at work. She had regular customers who refused to talk to anyone but her. I tried to talk to her, to tell her about the pain in my chest that could be eased only by a drive, to tell her that May reminded me so much of October and this year of last year, but I couldn’t say things I didn’t have words for yet. All I was sure of was that I loved her, her red lipstick, her delicate hands. Sometimes I drove all the way to San Diego but would only stand in the accessories department, watching her over a counter of scarves while she told another woman how to be beautiful.

After I left the doctor’s office, after he had shaken my hand and said congratulations, I drove the car out onto the freeway and couldn’t remember how to drive. I pulled over into the breakdown lane and pressed my forehead against the steering wheel. I closed my eyes and listened to the sound of the traffic whipping past me. I kept thinking, someone is going to open the passenger side door and tell me what to do. Not Thomas, not anyone I know. Someone is just going to get in the car beside me and say, Martha Rose, this is what we’re going to do here. And I’d have done it, I swear to God, but no one came. Not even a cop to see if I was okay. For three years I hadn’t been able to say what was wrong with my life, but at that moment it all became very clear. I had married a man I did not love. I was mistaken in my sign. I would have to have something else because this could not possibly be my life.

In a way I thought it would get easier from then on, because knowing is easier. But how I would have rather known three months before, when I could have left with nothing inside me but guilt and sorrow. I kneaded my flat stomach with my hand. I dug the heel of my hand into the skin until I could feel a small pain, and then I pressed harder.

I slept at home that night and never said a word. In the morning Thomas sat at the breakfast table, grading a stack of papers. He was teaching summer school. “Show your work,” he wrote on the top of a paper, and then worked the problem at the bottom the way it should be done, line after line of numbers and letters I couldn’t understand. I had never done well in geometry.

“She got the answer right,” he said. “See that.”

I looked at the paper. The girl had nice handwriting. I wondered if she was in love with him.

“Are you going to work today?” he asked.

“At a lawyer’s office,” I said. “It should last all week.”

“Rose, Rose,” he said and leaned over the table, over the cereal bowls and cups of coffee, and kissed my cheek, my mouth.

A lump came up in my throat. He was never a bad man. No one will ever say that Thomas Clinton was a bad man. “Come on,” I said. “We need to get going.”

When we got to school he told me not to worry about picking him up. “It’s a nice day,” he said. But in Marina del Rey they were all nice days.

“Make them all smarter,” I said, because it’s what I said every morning when he left.

“I’ll do my best.”

And then he was gone, mingling in with a sea of children. He was twenty-six years old.

When I went to Father O’Donnell, it was not to confess but to make him my accomplice. I needed the name of a place to go, someplace far away, where women had babies and left them behind, like pieces of furniture too heavy to move. A place that gave the babies to remarkable people, so fit to be parents that their sterility was unconscionable. I also wanted him to tell Thomas, when he came looking for me, that my desire to leave was sincere and he should let me go without ever telling him where I had gone. I’m making this sound very easy, when in fact it was not. It was sad enough to change my life for good, to make the blood reverse the course of its flow in my veins.

I was going to Saint Elizabeth’s. Father O’Donnell had a file, which he brought out with great difficulty. It contained fliers, nearly advertisements, that addressed the problems of unfortunate Catholic girls. Words like comfort and prayer were scattered through the texts, along with moral guidance. But I was interested in the location more than the description. Saint Elizabeth’s was in Kentucky, a state whose capital I did not know. I had never wondered about Kentucky, never imagined it as a girl the way I had New York or Houston or Paris. No one I knew had ever been to Kentucky, or was planning on going, and so I thought it would be the last place anyone would look for me.

“Tell me you’ll wait until tomorrow,” Father O’Donnell said. “Go home to Thomas, just for tonight, or go to your mother’s. This isn’t a decision to be made quickly.”

Father O’Donnell had baptized me and given me my first communion. He had buried my father and married me. I had been in love with him when I was a girl. I had wished he was my father. Maybe once he wished I was his daughter, because it was plain that my news was hard for him to hear. His face was flushed and damp, and there was a trembling around his mouth not unlike my own. I may have made a mistake in going to him, though it seemed right at the time. California was full of priests who would try to dissuade me but not feel disappointed in me. It was his house, not God’s, that I had come to in my moment of confusion. His windows full of saints, his pews, his rack of candles. Whenever I kissed a boy in school, cut a day of classes, argued with my mother, over what I can’t remember, it was not God’s forgiveness I sought, but his. He was the one I told. We sat in a small room behind the altar which he used to dress in before mass. His vestments hung on wire coat hangers from the doorjamb, great satin robes that looked ridiculously beautiful with no one in them. The window in that room had plain glass in it, meant for looking out over the parking lot and not for inspiration. There was a crucifix over the washbasin where anyplace else there would have been a mirror.

“I have to go today,” I said. “I’ve made a mistake and if I don’t leave now I might not be able to straighten things out.”

“Divorce is a sin, Rose, I can’t tell you otherwise. People today think that whatever they want, right at that moment, will be fine. But there are larger things to consider. Can you not see that?”

It was a strange thing, but I never even considered divorcing Thomas. I was only leaving him. For some reason that seemed different, even if I couldn’t say what the difference was exactly. “I’m doing the only thing I can do,” I said.

When I wrote down the address of Saint Elizabeth’s, my hand was shaking. I asked if he would write a letter, telling them I was coming. “Don’t tell them about Thomas,” I said. I thought the fact that I was married might disqualify me from a home for unwed mothers.

I stood for a long time at the door, looking around the altar to the church where I had spent so much of my life. Mrs. Marnez was there lighting candles, as I had done year after year, asking God to show her His will. Old Henry at the front railing on his knees. A few people I didn’t know.

“What about your mother?” he said.

“Don’t tell her either.”

“Are you going to let her think you’re dead?” he said. His voice was a whisper but it carried, as the voice of a good priest carries.

“Don’t ask me this.”

“You’ve asked enough of me today, now I’m asking you, Rose. What will you do about your mother?”

I turned around to face him, but I shouldn’t have. I understood then why confessionals were dark places where you told your secrets through screens. “I’ll give her up,” I said, and went out to the car. The second I said it I knew that would be my penance, the worst thing I could bear. I was doing a terrible thing, but I would pay the price. If I gave up the thing I loved most in the world, then maybe God would respect my desperation.

Elizabeth was not the saint I would have chosen to name a home for unwed mothers after. She had wanted a child, prayed for one for so many years, and when John came to her late in life she was filled with joy. But then again she was a woman who found herself pregnant when she did not think that such a thing was possible. Maybe that was the part they wanted us to remember. I have always taken names very seriously, people or places. It’s because my mother took them seriously. It was my father who wanted to name me Rose. My mother told a story of being pregnant with me. “Big as a ship,” she liked to say. She would lie on a chaise longue in the little garden outside their apartment, her swollen feet sunk into a sea of pillows, and argue with my father over names. “He was sure I was giving birth to a flower,” she would say. “Lily, Iris, Daisy, those were the kinds of names he was interested in.” My mother believed that a name should come from the Bible or at least a saint. She settled on Martha, despite what Jesus had said. She understood how Martha felt, wishing her sister would give her a little help in the kitchen. Anyone would rather sit and listen, but there are some things, like dinner, that needed to be attended to. So I was Martha Rose, Martha until my father died and Rose after that. My mother had a sudden change of heart then. She saw my father’s need for a name that bore no more significance than the bush that grew alongside the house. A name that was as important as beauty itself. Elizabeth lost her child, too, in the end. That was another thing.

But I didn’t think about any of this for a long time, until I was nearly across the California state line. Until then I was crying for my own mother with such a fierceness that I twice had to pull the car over to the side of the road because I couldn’t see.

August was a lethal time to attempt such a drive, but there was no waiting. A seasoned liar, like the one I became, is in no hurry. But the one I started out as that day in the doctor’s office, my knees pressed together tighdy, had hands that shook. I looked over my shoulder, cried easily. All of that is gone now.

The backseat was lined with water bottles and they made a gentle sloshing sound that was almost like an ocean. It was all I could think of to bring. My life, the car’s life, were completely intertwined, and water, I thought, would save us both. The sun made waving lines of heat across the black highway. The land was so desolate, so untraveled, that I couldn’t imagine why they had built a highway there at all. It was not so much a place as much as a place to get through, a stretch you had to cross if you were ever going to get to where you were going.

It turned out I had a little money saved. I had started putting some aside when I was taking so many trips. I thought, what if something ever happened when I was on the road, something could break down. I kept a bank envelope under the tarp that covered the spare tire and whenever I had a job I’d put in ten or twenty. I didn’t take a dime from Thomas when I left, but I took his car. That car had become my best friend. I could leave my husband but not his car. By the time I pulled into a gas station in Barstow I had spent the little bit I had in my purse, and so I took out the envelope. There was more than six hundred dollars in there, and I kept thinking, I must have known, all the time I was slipping in money, never looking to see how much I had, part of me was planning to leave.

But worrying about the car made me careful, and most nights I just pulled over to a rest stop and put the water bottles on the floor and slept in the backseat. If something happened to the car I’d be wiped out, stuck in some desert town with no way to go on. In Barstow I asked a station attendant with the name Dwight stitched on his shirt in red cursive letters to look under the hood for me.

“I’m going a long way by myself,” I told him. I leaned under with him, trying to get a little of the shade. It was sickeningly hot, 105, maybe more. “I just wish you’d check to see if everything’s all right. I don’t want to get out in the middle of nowhere by myself and have something happen,” I said.

Dwight slipped his finger down into one of the belts, gave it a little tug. “Woman shouldn’t be traveling alone,” he said.

I knew it could go either way. He could help me out or drop an aspirin into the battery which would send me limping back to him as soon as I was five miles out of town. “I could use your help,” I said. “I’m going to have a baby.” It was the first time I’d just said it out like that. It was the first time it occurred to me that it could be something to use. “I’m headed just past Las Cruces. My husband, he’s stationed out at Fort Bliss. He didn’t want me to come alone, but he couldn’t get leave to get me.”

He looked at me under the hood. My dress was loose and blew around, there would be no telling for sure. “You’re in good shape,” he said, touching the spark plugs. “I’ll fill up the radiator, but you keep an eye on that. Pull over every hundred miles or so and check it. The water, it’s got to be up to here. But don’t touch anything. If it overheats, you just stand back and wait.” I thanked him. I meant it. When I got back into the car he came back and leaned in my window. “People will tell you your transmission’s going to go. But don’t listen to them. Your transmission is good.”

There were so many things I needed to know, how to fix a car, how to lic. My mother taught me how to put on eyeliner without smudging it, but life was going to take more than that.

This driving was not a game. My back ached down into my hips and I tried moving to one side and then another. Only the week before I had thought I wanted nothing more in the world than to drive in one endless direction. Highway 40 was exactly that. East was an endless direction. The radio came in and out in waves. I ran out of songs I knew the words to and then sang them all over again. I played games with myself. At the next town I’ll stop. I’ll take off a whole day, get a motel room, sleep. But the next town would come and I’d say, You’ve made it this far, you might as well keep going, one more hour won’t make a difference and that will be an hour you won’t have to drive tomorrow. When I did stop, it was to get gas, check the oil, fill the radiator. I would walk around the car a couple of times, lift my hands up over my head, stare at the landscape that looked the way it had on the stop before and the stop before that. I did not know how to keep going and I did not know how to stop, so I kept going.

I had started to doubt my body. When I got so tired that the cars in front of me began to sway on the road, I remembered my mother saying how tired she had been when she was pregnant, and I would think, so you’re not really tired. When I felt sick at my stomach, I wondered if I was actually sick, or if that was just part of it, too. Anything I could attribute to this baby I could dismiss, because I’d decided somewhere along the road that I was going to have nothing to do with it. I was following through on my part of it. I would see this pregnancy out, but that was it, no sickness, no side effects. It was enough that I was going so far to have it, and that I would see it delivered into the hands of those decent parents whose complete and wholesome lives I liked to contemplate. There was a difference, I knew, between being pregnant and being a mother. I was pregnant.

The steering wheel was so hot I couldn’t move my hands around. That was one of the worst parts about stopping, making a cool place for your hands again. I tried writing letters to my mother in my head, but they weren’t any better than the note I’d left for Thomas. I wanted to do better for her. I knew she’d been a good wife to my father, that she was a good wife to Joe, even if she could never love him in the same way. She took marriage seriously, as she had taken motherhood seriously. She would find a way to love me even if I told her the truth, but I could feel her disappointment like a hot wind on my neck. The truth was something that would have to be mine alone. It was something that receded as I drove east.

There was a time in my life when I’d wanted to know everything. I wanted to read the brutal details of every local murder. I wanted to know exactly how my father had died, the extent of damage to the car, the very place it happened. Facts had a certain irresistible quality. No matter how deeply they disturbed me, I thought I was better off knowing. But learning is easier than forgetting. The fact that my mother, that Thomas, didn’t know where I had gone or the reason, made my life easier, but I liked to think it made things easier for them as well. The world is full of things we’re better off not knowing.

But that didn’t mean I couldn’t lie to her. Late one night, after eating eggs and toast in a truck stop in New Mexico, I got all the quarters the cashier would give me and called her up. The phone was in the parking lot, and when I shut the door to the booth it gave off a blue fluorescent light. I put the change in a napkin and fed it steadily into the phone. When Joe answered I was so surprised that for a minute I couldn’t think of what to say.

“It’s Rose,” I told him.

“Rose? Rose?” He didn’t speak to me but dropped the phone on the bed and called out for my mother. Both of us were crying when she picked up, and it made it harder to understand what was being said.

“Come home,” my mother said.

I can’t.

“You will,” she said. “I love you. I’m not going to have you lost out in the world. You’re my daughter.”

I put a hand over my other ear, trying to block out the sounds of the traffic. “Things just weren’t right,” I said. “My life, it wasn’t right. I can’t tell you about it now, you’re just going to have to trust me. I’m doing what’s best.” It was almost exactly what I had written on the postcards I hadn’t mailed. It sounded every bit as wrong when I said it.

“Whatever this is, we’ll fix it. Thomas is going crazy. He’s terrible, Rose. You can leave if you have to but not like this.”

I looked out at the traffic going along the highway. “I’m already gone,” I said.

I stayed in the booth for a while after I hung up. Then I opened the door, which automatically snapped off the light. I had promised myself I would stay in that town for the night. But I didn’t.

There was nothing behind me and nothing ahead of me. The world consisted of as much road as I could see in either direction. I found myself looking forward to towns, counting down the miles to Albuquerque, Tucumcari, Amarillo. When I got close to a city I felt almost euphoric, as if I had finally arrived, but five minutes later I would be on the other side, looking at the mileage for whatever was ahead. I was disappointed in myself because it used to be I’d never care at all. But now I was tired in my bones. It was important for me to have something to concentrate on, because when my mind wandered it went to my mother, or worse yet, Thomas. I would picture him sitting in our house, the lights off, trying to watch television. I could see him going through my dresses in the closet, running his hands along the sleeves. The worst was to think of him eating. The thought of him at the table alone, trying to finish dinner, was nearly enough to make me turn the car around. Once I did, just before Oklahoma. I drove back twenty-five miles, and then turned around again just as quickly, because nothing looked any different. To be truly brave, I believe a person has to be more than a little stupid. If you knew how hard or how dangerous something was going to be at the onset, chances are you’d never do it, so if I went back I would never be able to leave again. Now that I knew what leaving meant.

Just over the Oklahoma border, thirty-five miles outside Elk City, I picked up a hitchhiker. I told myself I wouldn’t do it. It went against everything I believed about driving as something best done alone. But the sight of Oklahoma scared me to death. I pulled into a rest stop to refill my water bottles from a public spigot and spread the map across the hood. Arkansas was as far away as China.

“Where you headed?” a man said to me. He looked young, maybe nineteen or twenty. He was wearing jeans and a white tee shirt. His hair couldn’t have been more than a quarter of an inch long in any one place. He didn’t look like the kind of person who’d kill you. He looked like he knew how to drive.

“East,” I said, my hand trying to block out enough of the sun so I could see him.

“East isn’t a place,” he said.

“Well, I’m going east.”

“You taking Forty into Arkansas?”

I looked around. There were no other cars in the parking lot save one station wagon loaded up with kids. Someone must have left him there. I nodded.

“I could use a ride,” he said, “if that’s the way you’re going. I’d kick in for gas.”

Any other time in my life I would have said no, but I didn’t see that there was anything left to lose that I hadn’t already lost. “Sure,” I said. “Come on.”

He looked so pleased, and when he smiled, seemed even younger, sixteen maybe. “You know how to drive?” I asked him.

“You bet.”

“Good,” I said, “you’re driving.” I threw the keys over the hood and he caught them. It was a stupid thing to do, but I figured if something bad was going to happen, it would happen if I was driving or not. It would happen if I was awake or not. He got in the front and I got in the back. I asked him his name.

“Billy,” he said.

“Listen, Billy, keep an eye on the thermostat. Don’t let it overheat. Stay on Forty the whole time, promise. I’m going to get some sleep.”

We got into the car and shut the doors. He asked if he could play the radio and I told him that would be fine. He looked carefully before pulling onto the interstate and then got quickly up to speed. If he played the radio at all, he waited until I was asleep. Asleep and driving at the same time. It was like a wonderful dream.

When I woke up it was dark and we weren’t going anywhere. I thought that I had just pulled over to go to sleep, but then I remembered I hadn’t been driving. I remembered Billy and felt a wave of panic moving up from the soles of my feet to my throat. When I looked out the window I saw him standing in a bright light, talking to another man. We were at a gas station. Billy gave the man some money and got back into the car.

“You’re awake,” he said. “I hope I didn’t wake you up.”

“Where are we?” I pushed the hair out of my face. I wanted a bath.

“Maybe a hundred miles west of Fort Smith. You’ve been asleep a long time.”

I got out of the car and told him to slide over and let me drive for a while. He made sandwiches and cut up apples and we drank water out of one of the jugs.

“You didn’t tell me your name,” he said.

“Mary.”

“It was nice of you to pick me up. I’d been waiting at that rest stop a couple of hours. I had a real good ride before that, almost six hours. Some trucker hauling oranges from California. But it wasn’t as good as this ride, though.” He stretched one arm out of the open window and let the wind blow it back. “I love to drive,” he said. “Not everybody’d let you drive their car, but I’ve been driving since I was ten years old.” He spoke quickly and his voice was anxious and high. “That’s when my dad taught me. Soon as I was big enough to reach the pedals and see over the dashboard he had me driving a car. By the time I got my license it seemed almost funny, you know, ’cause I’d been driving for so long without one. That’s what makes me so careful, all those years I drove without one. I had to make sure I never got pulled over ’cause then there’d really be hell to pay.”

He looked happy, all fresh-faced and young, like he could stay up all night. I kept thinking I wasn’t that much older than he was, but I felt like I could have been his mother. “Where did you say you were coming from?” I asked him.

He looked out at the road for a little while, trying to decide how much to tell me. “West,” he said. “Just like your east.”

“I’ve been west,” I said.

“I’m going to see my folks,” he said, still watching the road. “They’re right before the Tennessee border, not too much off Forty, if you’re going that far.”

“I’m going that far.”

“My father needs me at home. I got older sisters, but they’re all married and gone. It’s not like he’s so old, my dad, but the place is too much for him and my mom to handle by themselves. I shouldn’t have gone away in the first place. I’m all the help my dad’s got now, nearly three hundred acres to work. It would be too much for anybody. Don’t you think that’s too much?”

I nodded, then took my eyes away from the road for a minute to look at him. “That’s a lot,” I said. You could tell what he would have looked like when he was young, the same way you could tell what Thomas was going to look like once he was old. His hair would have been redder, where it was nearly brown now. He would have been skinny with milky skin. “You’re right to go back if that’s what you think you should do.”

Then he leaned back against the door. He seemed relieved somehow, like all he needed was for one other person to tell him, to forgive him for running away. It didn’t take a lot to figure out he’d left the army someplace. “What about you,” he said. “Why are you going east?”

“I’m going to get my sister Lucy down in Pensacola.”

“She in trouble?”

“It’s her husband,” I told him. “He’s been drinking a lot. It’s gotten to be pretty bad for her. She’s got kids and everything. But she’s scared to go, you know how that is. She doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do. So I told her I’d come and get them.”

“Where’re you going to take them?”

“Home to live with me and my husband in New Mexico. We’ve got plenty of room. Maybe they’ll want to stay on, I’m not sure. We’ll have to see how it goes.”

“One of my sisters’ husbands ever crossed her, I’d kill him,” Billy said in a tired voice. “That is, if my dad didn’t kill him first.”

I thought about this for a while. I had always wanted a sister. “I may kill him,” I said. “I’ll have to wait and see.” But he didn’t hear me, he’d already fallen asleep.

I ended up driving Billy right to his parents’ place in Crawfordsville, Arkansas. It wasn’t too much out of the way, and he said if I wanted to come in for something to eat and rest up for a while, that he was sure it would be all right with his family. “I’ve never had a ride like this before,” he said. “To-your-door service.”

The house wasn’t much, but there was a whole lot of land. I stayed in the car while he went up to see his parents. He would be telling them a lie, some lie about getting out that he would have to keep up with for the rest of his life, if he was never caught. You could see on their faces how glad they were to have him back, how much they’d missed him.

“You shouldn’t have been picking up hitchhikers, young lady,” his father said to me. “But you couldn’t have picked up a better one than this fellow here.”

I couldn’t seem to get enough to eat at dinner, even though his mother brought out food like she’d been expecting us. I ate like I was desperate. I wanted to touch everything in the house, the backs of the chairs, the family photographs, the bowls that lined the cupboards. It seemed like the first time I’d been someplace in years, even though I’d had a home of my own just four days before. When they asked me to spend the night I was grateful. I was only a day’s drive away from Saint Elizabeth’s and suddenly I felt I had all the time in the world. What would the difference be, a day or two? My stomach was still flat, though harder now. I looked at it for a long time in the bathtub that night, deep in the hot water, beneath a film of soap, and thought, remember this, it won’t be like this again. I went to sleep in Billy’s sister’s room, in a single bed with a yellow flowered bedspread. I went to sleep in a girl’s room in her parents’ house, where people talked in quiet voices downstairs and the windows were open and the night blew in from the fields. I slept like his sister would have, without trouble or dreams.

Billy woke me up, shaking my shoulder, saying, Mary, Mary, in a whisper. He was kneeling beside my bed in his pajamas. Maybe he was only ten or twelve. Maybe he woke up in the night and was afraid and went to his sister.

“I have to tell you something,” he said.

It was such a deep sleep, I had a hard time coming up. I wasn’t afraid, or even surprised to see him there. “What is it?” I said softly.

“I didn’t tell you the truth,” he said. “I went AWOL. I just left and bought these clothes. I buried my uniform back in Arizona.”

I reached out and touched his head, ran my hand along the side of his face. It was still warm from sleep. I wanted to take him to bed with me, just to keep him under my arm until he could rest again. “Don’t worry,” I said.

“I’ve got to worry. What if they find me?”

“They’ve got lots of guys,” I said. I didn’t want to wake up, not completely.

“You think I should tell my folks?” he whispered.

“You should do whatever you want to, whatever you can live with best.”

He sat back on his heels and looked at me. He reached out very tentatively and touched my hair. “I know you’re lying, too,” he said quietly. “And if you need to stay here, I think it would be just fine.” He stayed for a while longer, just looking at me. Then he got up and left the room, shutting the door behind him.

In the morning I didn’t know for sure if he’d been there or not. I never knew for sure. I left before anyone was up.

[3]

I GAVE Interstate 40 up in Nashville. When you don’t have a home, it’s easy to get attached to things, people, highways. Wherever you are the longest starts to feel like the place you’re supposed to be, and I had been on 40 since California. Now I was on 65 going north. Then the Green River Parkway up toward Owensboro. I had good directions. You’d think I would have known by then that all roads are more or less the same, but as I pulled off the exit for Habit I started to think there was a lot out there I hadn’t seen, and I wondered if maybe I should.

I found a gas station off the highway and went in to ask about Saint Elizabeth’s. I knew how to get to the town but not more than that. There was a woman sitting in front of the station, sunning herself while three children who I guessed were hers sat dully in a small inflatable swimming pool half full of water. They were dark-haired and tan and they all three looked to be about the same size. It was hard to tell because they were sitting down. One of them tried to splash me as I walked by, but the water fell short, making a little muddy spot in the dust.

“Excuse me,” I said to the woman. I was waking her up. I didn’t want to, but I didn’t know what else to do.

“Ma!” one of the children screamed. “Somebody wants gas.”

The woman blinked her eyes open and pulled up the top of her blouse, which she had down below her shoulders to get some color on her chest. She looked exactly like the children in the pool. They were only smaller, tanner versions of their mother. She shook the sleep off of her. “Sorry,” she said. “I drifted off.”

“No,” I said. “It’s so hot. I know.”

She stood up and stretched her arms over her head. I imagined she didn’t do a lot of business. She looked over to the pool. One of the girls was trying to hold another girl’s face under the water, but there really wasn’t enough water to do it right. The boy sat on the edge, watching. “Stop that,” the woman said to them without much enthusiasm.

“What I need are directions, really,” I said. “I’m looking for Saint Elizabeth’s.”

The woman’s expression changed. She looked back at her children again and then back at me. “Up there,” she said, her voice flat. “Three miles past town. On the left.” Then she turned around and headed inside the station.

“Can I get some gas?” I said. I had half a tank, but I didn’t want to have woken her up just for directions.

“You got enough to get you there,” she said, and went inside.

“Boo,” one of the girls in the swimming pool said.

It wasn’t until I was back in the car and driving again that I realized what had happened. That just by saying where I was going she would know all of my business. She didn’t like it, either.

If I drove through a town, I didn’t see it. Habit was nothing but two stores and a dozen or so houses that were closer together than the others. Saint Elizabeth’s, on the other hand, would have been nearly impossible to miss. I came over the top of a hill and there it was, sitting back from the road. It was giant and white and looked more like a natural phenomenon, like the Grand Canyon, than a home for unwed mothers. I guess there was nothing peculiar about it as a building. It was beautiful because it was impressive; spires and latticework, jutting balconies, arched windows. It was just so completely out of place. Kentucky had been all mountains and fields of tobacco so far. I couldn’t imagine who would have built a place like this here. Who would have looked all over and come to the top of this hill in Kentucky, driven down the first stake and said, here’s the place we’re putting it.

But I got my answer soon enough. I pulled the car up near the front steps and got out to read a brass historical marker. That’s where I first heard the history of Saint Elizabeth’s, the Hotel Louisa and the spring. It told the story of how the Clatterbucks and the Nelsons came together, about a child named June falling ill and the wealthy horse breeder who built a hotel for a spring that eventually dried up. The letters were tiny and they managed to pack a lot of information on the sign. When I finished, I looked up to the massive front double doors and felt a sinking feeling all the way down to my feet. There was no more time, no more traveling. I had arrived. I read the sign again and then again. I thought about getting back into my car.

I must have made a sorry picture standing there, taking such an incredible interest in the hotel’s history. The suitcase beside me was so small it looked like something a child would take to spend the night with a friend. I rubbed my ankle up against it.

“It’s an interesting history,” a woman said. I turned and found a nun beside me, one who was obviously skilled in moving quietly from place to place. She wasn’t much more than five feet tall and was completely covered in white cloth, head to foot. She was clearly of a different breed than the nuns I was used to seeing in California. “You’ve come to stay with us?” she said, keeping her eyes on the sign, possibly so as not to frighten me off.

I told her I was.

“We always know the girls who are coming to stay,” she said. “Of course, sometimes you can just tell, but even when you can’t, they’re the ones who read the sign. We used to wait for them to come inside themselves, but they could read this sign for hours. Once a girl stood here halfway through the night, then she just went away and we never saw her again.” She reached down and picked up my bag. “Didn’t bring much, did you? Well, that doesn’t matter. Clothes are the one thing we have plenty of.” She asked me my name.

“Rose,” I said, “Martha Rose Clinton.”

“I’m Sister Bernadette,” she said, and then she stopped and looked at me. She tilted back her head, so that the light fell under her visor. She was possibly thirty herself, with small, bright eyes. She reached up and pushed some hair that had fallen into my face back in place behind my ear. “Mother Corinne hates to see girls with hair in their eyes. And you have such a pretty face, Rose.” She touched my cheek for a moment and smiled at me. “You’ll be glad,” she said.

I wondered what I would be glad about, having the baby, giving the baby away, coming here at all. None of them seemed like particularly joyful things. I followed her up the stairs and into the main lobby, keeping my eyes on the long black rosary that swung in and out from the folds of her skirt. Then I looked up and saw a sea of pregnant girls.

If you see a pregnant girl on the street, maybe you notice. There could be some brief registration in your mind about her or her child, and then it goes. But this room was full of girls, sitting on sofas, reading magazines, talking quietly among themselves, and each was more pregnant than the last. One girl’s size served only to exaggerate another’s. Their bellies were so uniformly large they overwhelmed the room, so that it wasn’t the girls you saw at all, only a gathering of distended abdomens, overinflated balloons from which small wisps of girls were attached. I felt that surely I had come to the wrong place, that whatever these girls had was not what was wrong with me. I was thin, flat, tall, and when they looked up at me, you could tell that was the very thing they were thinking. Or possibly they were thinking, wait and see.

Sister Bernadette pulled me through without introductions. I must have looked pale, and I felt pale. I knew now what was coming, my body was going to rebel, take on a life of its own, make decisions without me. All of this leaving, this sadness, this driving, had been about having a baby. I was going to have a baby. Until that exact moment I hadn’t understood this fact at all.

We went behind the elaborately carved registration desk, where a hundred wooden boxes stood without keys. Sister Bernadette knocked lightly on a door that read OFFICE. “Mother?” she said.

The nun who answered the door was as tall as I was but three times my size. She was a big woman in every sense, heavy-boned with weight besides. Her face was soft and red and a tuft of iron gray hair jutted coarsely from beneath her wimple. Her breasts were as noticeable and as awkward as the stomachs of the girls who filled the lobby. They created a shelf that ensured that anyone meeting her would have to keep their distance. I couldn’t help but think a nun must be embarrassed by such breasts.

“What have we here?” she said, as if I was another delivery, a carton of milk, a sack of flour.

“This is Martha Rose Clinton,” Sister Bernadette said.

“Yes, of course, from California.”

“California!” Sister Bernadette said. “What a long way to come.”

Mother Corinne made a strange movement, almost as if she was bowing her head for a moment, and Sister Bernadette was silent. She left as quietly and completely as she had arrived. “Come in, Miss Clinton,” she said, and I followed her into the office.

It must have been Lewis Nelson’s office. There was still a picture of a horse on the wall, along with paintings of Saint Elizabeth and the Sacred Heart. It was an office built by a man who was playing at running a hotel. The desk was big enough to sleep on, the chairs were leather, the big picture window looked out to the place where water once came from the ground.

“So you know Father O’Donnell?” she said.

“Yes, in San Diego. Did his letter come?”

“No, there’s been no letter, but he called. He had several interesting things to say about you.” She toyed absently with a silver cross that hung around her neck.

“What did he have to say?”

“That would be between Father O’Donnell and myself,” she said, opening up a file I couldn’t see. The distance created by the desk was formidable. She kept her eyes on the paper in front of her.

“Do you know Father O’Donnell?” I said. It never occurred to me that he might know people here. But she didn’t answer my question. I got the feeling Mother Corinne was in the habit of asking questions, not answering them.

“Do you know for sure that you’re pregnant?”

“Yes,” I said.

“So you brought a medical report.”

“No, but why would I lie about a thing like that?”

Mother Corinne looked up at me and shrugged. “It’s happened. You’re not showing and people will lie about strange things. Most girls wait until they truly need our services before they arrive, so it’s quite easy to tell. Other girls are vagrants, looking for a place to stay for a while.”

It had been a long drive and I was dred enough to want to kill her, but at the time I remember thinking she looked like someone who would never die. “You spoke to Father O’Donnell?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Then you know at least I’m not a vagrant.” I paused, wondering how to address the rest of it. “I’ll try to show as soon as possible,” I said.

“Don’t be fresh, Miss Clinton,” she said, marking something in the file and then closing it. “I’m here to look out for the welfare of all the girls, you included.”

I stared at the face of Saint Elizabeth, an older woman, so happy to be pregnant.

“About the father,” she said.

“Yes?”

“What became of him?”

“He’s dead,” I said. “It happened in a car.”

She sighed and shook her head, reopening the file and making yet another mark. “Dead,” she said. “Yes, of course.”

Then suddenly Sister Bernadette was back and leading me up the stairs to my room. What if he had been dead? That would make me a fairly sympathetic case, a pregnant girl with a dead lover, that deserved at least a few words. Sister Bernadette opened a door to what must have once been a lovely room. Now the worn bedspreads and thinning carpet seemed depressing. At least there was a bed, which meant I could sleep.

“You’ll be sharing a room with Angela,” she said. “She’s a sweet girl, you’ll do fine with her. You get some rest now, Rose. After a while I’ll bring you up a tray.”

I sat down on the edge of the bed. I was suddenly too tired to say anything, even to thank her.

“You’ll be fine,” she said, and patted my shoulder.

I dreamed of my mother at the cosmetics counter that afternoon, an endless line of women waiting as she tiredly told each of them how to apply their make-up. When I woke up I was crying, as I would do for many years whenever I dreamed about my mother, and there was a dark-haired girl sitting on the edge of the twin bed opposite mine, watching me cry.

“Hey,” she said quietly. “You okay?”

I wiped my eyes on the corner of the sheet.

“You don’t need to do that. Here, look here.” She handed me a box of Kleenex and I took one. “I’m Angie,” she said. “I’m your roommate. Did you have a bad dream, or are you just crying?”

“It was a dream,” I said, and blew my nose, but I couldn’t seem to stop crying. It wasn’t anything much, but it wouldn’t stop.

“I wake up that way sometimes,” she said, “lately, you know. I didn’t used to.” She leaned across the gap of our two beds. “It makes me feel a little crazy, like there’s all this stuff going on in my head that I don’t know about. It seems like a person ought to at least know what was going on in their own head.”

“It seems that way,” I said, and sat up. This was two times in a row now I’d woken up with someone watching me. I was starting to think that I was more interesting in my sleep.

“You’re not showing at all,” she said, looking at my stomach. “I’m not much, but you can see it.” She pulled her thin dress tight across her stomach to show me the little roundness that was there. “We must be pretty close together. That’s how they decide on who rooms with who. If they put a real pregnant girl in with a new girl, the new girl freaks out when the other one leaves, or she gets real scared about having the baby and all. Someone said that once a girl tried to do herself when her roommate had her baby.”

“Kill herself?”

“No, no, kill the baby, you know. She drank a whole bottle of castor oil. Can you believe that?”

I said I couldn’t.

“Well, who knows what’s true around here. The stories you hear. They told me your name was Martha.”

“It’s Rose.”

“That’s just the kind of thing I’m talking about. Rose. That’s a lot prettier. Where did you come from before?”

“California.” My head hurt, and I had that feeling that I’d been having lately, like the room was rocking.

“California? Well, why did you come all the way out here? Don’t they have places like this in California?”

“I wanted to get away,” I said. I wasn’t quite up to being questioned. I wasn’t quite up to anything, so I lay back down on the bed.

“Did something bad happen to you?”

“My husband died,” I said.

Angie began to giggle a little, and she covered her mouth with her hand. “I sure hope you didn’t tell Mother Corinne that.”

“Why not?”

“Because that’s what everybody says, stupid. Everybody says they had a really great husband but he died, in a car crash or something. Except now girls say he got shipped out to Vietnam and stepped on a land mine. Usually one of the older girls tries to tip you off before your interview. They say it’s best if you just look down at your hands and act all sad and penitent.”

“Great.”

“Don’t feel bad, you figure things out here in no time. I’ve only been here eight days and it already seems like my whole life.”

I tried to think of that, being here my whole lifetime. It made my head hurt worse. “So what do I need to know?” I said tiredly.

“Sister Bernadette and Sister Serena are the ones you want to go to if you’ve got something on your mind. Sister Evangeline is sweet but she’s older than time and pretty much blind. Sister Loyola is a snitch. She seems nice enough when you meet her, but she takes everything from your lips right to Mother Corinne’s ears.”

“And Mother Corinne?”

“Well, you already met her. And you can bet that anything you thought about her was right on the money.” Angie looked at me. “I wish you’d stop crying,” she said.

What I couldn’t understand was why, in a place with nearly a hundred rooms and only twenty-five girls, we had to have roommates at all. I asked it carefully, making sure Angie understood it wasn’t her I minded, I was just wondering. She told me that years ago they used to have the whole place set up like a hospital ward, with all the girls in rows of beds in the grand ballroom, but then one girl got the pox and they couldn’t control the spread at all. “All those little babies born blind or missing arms,” she said. “Can you imagine just waiting on that? All the girls in front of you having crippled babies and you know you will too but all you can do is sit around and wait for it to happen. After that they put people in rooms. They say we can’t have our own rooms ’cause of the heating costs, that they don’t like to open the whole place up, but really it’s because they don’t like for us to be alone, or they ‘don’t think it’s natural,’ as Mother Corinne likes to say.”

I had never shared a room with anyone but Thomas.

I put on a clean dress. Billy’s mother had washed and ironed the few things I had before I left Arkansas. The only vestige of the days of the grand Hotel Louisa was that people still met on the front porch at five o’clock in the warm months. The bourbon and sodas were strictly forbidden, but we went there as if pulled by tradition, just to sit in the chairs and look out over the Clatterbucks’ back pasture.

“You’ve got to be respectful to the girls ahead of you,” Angie told me as we were walking downstairs. “The farther along a girl is, the nicer everyone will be, like fixing her plate at supper and giving up chairs. It’s only right, you know, we’re all going to graduate sooner or later. There are three girls now, Charlotte and Nora and Lolly, who are already two weeks late. That’s a lot to have late at the same time. Everybody’s real nervous about it.”

The stairwell was lined with grand paintings, mostly of a beautiful, dark-eyed woman I later learned was Louisa herself. Louisa with her hair up, standing in front of the fireplace. Louisa with her hair down, walking through the gardens. Louisa with Lewis, his hand resting gently against her shoulder. I don’t imagine she had time to do much else but sit for paintings. At the bottom of the stairs was a small dish of holy water nailed up to the wall. Angie dipped in her fingers without looking down and crossed herself, and after thinking about it for a moment, I did the same.

We walked onto the porch in the late August afternoon of Habit, Kentucky. It was hot, but not like Flagstaff and Amarillo and Oklahoma City. There had been good rains all summer and the grass in the pasture was heavy and dark. I had never seen such thick banks of trees, such softness growing from every surface of a field. Kentucky was another country, and in that country, Saint Elizabeth’s was a country unto itself, where on the porch of a grand hotel, twenty-five pregnant girls drank sweaty glasses of iced tea and watched the sun set west while their loose dresses blew around their hips and pressed against their huge stomachs. I couldn’t imagine which ones were two weeks overdue. They all seemed two weeks overdue to me. I watched their faces carefully; they looked like they had forgotten themselves and maybe for a moment thought their husbands were upstairs changing in the room, and would soon come onto the porch and kiss them and look proudly over the beginnings of their family. Every now and then a girl broke away from the group and walked down the front steps and into the field, where she could imagine herself to be the only woman in the world about to have a child.

At six o’clock the one that Angie said was Sister Loyola stepped onto the porch and rang a small bell. The girls hoisted one another up from their chairs with exaggerated effort and laughed. “That damn bell of hers,” Angie whispered to me. “You think she could just say that supper was ready.”

As I turned to go in I saw a man walking up toward the hotel. He was the only man I had seen since my arrival, and I wondered for an instant if he was coming to get someone. “Who’s that?” I asked.

“Oh, that’s Son,” Angie said, and waved to him. He waved back to her and smiled. He was a giant man, maybe six foot six. He wasn’t fat, but as big and broad as an oak. His arm swept through the air like the branch of a tree. “He fixes things. Everybody’s in love with Son.”

I didn’t know how she meant that, really in love, or as a kind of joke, but she had gone into dinner before I could ask her.

We said our prayers standing beneath chandeliers, Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts.

At dinner we sat with girls who were closest to our class. Your class was the month you were due in, so I was the class of February. Charlotte, Lolly, and Nora, the class of August, sat at the head table with a couple of girls who were due any day. It made an odd kind of sense, their not wanting to get too close to the ones who were just coming in. By the ninth month, they were saturated with the things they were going to have to give up: their friends, their home, their child. They had no cause to take on new alliances. We sat with a girl named Regina, who was due in January, and Beatrice, who was due in December. Beatrice was a big-boned, strong-looking girl who claimed to work in the mines alongside the men in eastern Kentucky.

“I bet you worked ‘long side the men,” Angie said, laughing at her own joke. I was surprised at how bold she was, having been here only eight days herself. Beatrice was clearly a girl who could give you trouble if she was so inclined. But she laughed a little herself and poured another glass of milk. She was showing nearly as much as the girls in the class of October.

“Twins run in my family,” she said, and smiled to show her big white teeth, which were miraculously straight and even. “My grandmother was a twin.”

“What a nightmare,” Angie said.

“If I have two,” Beatrice said, “I might just take a mind to keep one for myself.” But no one laughed at that, and Regina, who was quiet anyway, turned her head. Even at the end of my first day I knew enough to know that keeping a baby wasn’t something to be joked about. None of us would. That’s why we were here.

We ate the rest of our meal quiedy. The food was not good, vegetables were overcooked, the meat sat in thin pools of grease, but there was a limitless amount of everything. “Sister Evangeline does the cooking,” Beatrice said to me in a low voice, as if that would explain everything.

I pushed back my plate, suddenly unable to go on. “Eat, eat, eat,” Angie said cheerfully. “That’s the war cry around here. I’ve gained four pounds in a week. ‘The success of a girl can be measured in the pounds gained,’ that’s what Sister Loyola says.”

She looked so thin to me, all knees and elbows. I couldn’t imagine where she put those four pounds.

“Can’t you just see what this place must have been like?” Beatrice said. “I mean, with white tablecloths and white napkins and fancy china that all matched. There must have been a guy in a white coat coming around with little bowls of water, asking you if you wanted to rinse off your hands. My sister ate dinner in a real fancy restaurant once, down in Lexington. She said that’s what you do.”

“That’s crazy,” Angie said. “Everybody washes their hands before they go to dinner.”

“Hey, she ate there, not you,” Beatrice said, helping herself to another slice of bread.

“Well, I like to think about what I’d wear, you know, if this was still a fancy hotel. Something low-cut with little pink beads on it. Something that kinda caught the light when I walked through the room.”

“I’d wear black,” Beatrice said. Her hair was thick and black and her eyes were nearly black. It would look nice on her. “I wanted to make myself a black dress once, and my mother nearly threw a fit. ‘Why do you want your one nice dress to be something you can only wear to a funeral?’ she said.”

“Black is very stylish,” Angie said. Then all at once all three of the women looked at me. “How about you, Rose. What would you wear?”

But somehow I just couldn’t get into the spirit of things. The idea of a pretty dress in a beautiful restaurant made me want to cry. We were all through with pretty things. We were all through turning heads, being young. “I don’t know,” I said. “I wouldn’t care. I’d just wish it was a little darker in here.”

“Candlelight,” Angie said softly. “We forgot about the candles.”

Then there was a commotion in the front of the room, and Lolly stood up and then sat back down again. Then other girls stood up and came to her table, and then the sisters came out, taking quick steps, their habits sailing out behind them, telling everyone to sit down and be quiet. A girl from the table in front of ours leaned over and whispered to us. “Water broke.”

“I can’t believe this is happening on your first night here,” Angie said. “I’ve been here eight days and nothing like this has happened to me before.”

In fact, it was happening to everyone. My throat closed up in such a panic I thought it was me they were coming to take away. As we watched Sister Bernadette and Sister Serena guide Lolly out of the dining room, we knew what was ahead of us. Lolly passed right by me, so close I could have touched her. She was younger than I was. She had a wide pink satin ribbon in her hair. Her hands were shaking. The back of her dress was soaked through.

“They’ll take her to Owensboro,” Regina said in a dreamy voice. It was the first time she’d said a word all evening. “I used to live in Owensboro.”

“What will happen?” I asked Angie that night when we were both in our beds. The room was dark, as dark as anything I had ever seen before in my life. The town was too far away for the lights to come to us, no streetlights, very little moon.

“They’ll take her to the hospital, that’s almost an hour away, and she’ll have the baby. The sisters stay with you the whole time. They’ll even go in the room with you and hold your hand if you want them to. Then after, they give you something to make you sleep, and in the morning you wake up and the baby is gone.”

“Doesn’t anybody ever keep it?”

“Hardly ever. Lots of girls say they’re going to, right before their time, they say they’re going to get married and all sorts of crazy stuff. Everybody always says they’re going to have their baby without making any sound, get through their whole labor right here at Saint Elizabeth’s without any of the sisters finding out. That way they’d have to call for an ambulance and you could ride all the way up to Owensboro holding your baby. But no one’s ever pulled it off. They get scared about something going wrong or they can’t keep from calling out, and so they wind up going and having the baby in the hospital.”

“Then what?”

“What do you mean, then what? Then you go home.”

“I don’t understand, if you had to come to a place like this, I’d think you wouldn’t have a home to go back to.”

Angie sighed, like she was tired of girls from California being so stupid. “When you leave you tell everyone a lie. You tell them you’re going to take care of your sick aunt, or you won a trip to Europe or something, then you come back six months later and get back your job and have dinner at your parents’ house and see your old boyfriend and everything’s just the way it was. Just exactly the way it was.”

[4]

“GIRLS AT SAINT ELIZABETH’S are the recipients of charity,” Mother Corinne informed me. “But that does not mean they are not expected to work so long as they are able.”

Clearly I was able. I kept my discomforts to myself. When I was sick, I was sick quietly and privately, so that even Angie commented that I wasn’t like the other girls. I was sent to work in the kitchen with Sister Evangeline. It was a job that few people were able to keep for long, as the smell of food sent them reeling sooner or later, but I found it comforting somehow. The kitchen was huge, with long steel tables for preparation, twenty-six gas burners and half a dozen ovens. Giant copper pans hung from the ceiling, and the bone handles of good knives jutted up from wooden blocks. The kitchen was the one part of the hotel which had maintained its glamour.

It was a room Sister Evangeline rarely left. She tied the middle of her habit with a piece of string to keep it from falling into the food and rolled up her white sleeves past her doughy elbows. Even when the meal was prepared, she wandered back and forth, touching things, moving the cinnamon back into line, checking the produce in the giant walk-in refrigerator. She was somewhere around seventy-five, and gravity had pulled at her through the years, making her heavier and closer to the ground with every step she took. Often her glasses would steam so badly while she was working that it was impossible to see her eyes. But Sister Evangeline, whose prescription had been out of date for years, didn’t seem to notice. When she was tired, she would sit in a chair next to the stove or next to the freezer, depending on the season, and say her rosary until she fell asleep.

I was not much of a cook in those days, but the kitchen inspired me. At night I would bring the heavy cookbooks back to my room and read them in bed while Angie talked dreamily about her favorite foods from home. I knew that even if I made mistakes, I could still do better than Sister Evangeline. She was nearly blind and very good-natured, so she never minded, or saw, when I slipped pans off the fire and went to work on them myself.

“You’re going to have a baby,” she said to me one day after I had been there several weeks.

I told her I was.

“Well, let me see it,” she said, and motioned with a big wooden spoon for me to come toward her.

I dried my hands on my skirt and walked over to her. There wasn’t much to see, but there was something. Proof had pushed against my skin and made me nearly as round as Angie. She covered my stomach with her hands and began to knead me gently like a delicate dough.

“It’s a girl,” she said, and smiled hugely, so pleased about the news. She leaned over and pressed her ear to my belly. “Oh, you sweet girl,” she said. “I love little girls. All God’s children, but little girls are so nice.”

She straightened up and pulled down my head so she could kiss me. Her face felt cool against my cheek. “God’s blessed you, Rose, just like Elizabeth.” Then she said in a whisper, “Mother Corinne doesn’t like me to tell the girls about their babies. That’s why she put me back here in the kitchen. But I used to be mother superior.” She smiled and put her hand back on my stomach, as if she couldn’t get enough of it. “So I say, if a girl comes into my kitchen I can tell her what I want.”

I felt uneasy. “You can’t really tell, can you?”

“Oh, don’t you doubt it for a minute. I’ve never been wrong, not even one time. It’s God’s gift to me, that I can hear the babies. I was born in Kentucky, you know, the only sister here who was. When I was growing up, folks liked to say we were the only Catholics in the whole state. People were afraid of Catholics back then, thought we were witches. Then here I come along, telling everybody about their babies and then they’re sure, like it’s all no good. But my mama never bade me stop. She knew I was with God and she was proud of me. She was a listener herself, heard voices in the garden sometimes. Folks grow up around here, they know things, like your baby’s going to know things.”

I didn’t like to think about the baby that way. I didn’t like to think about it all. The more that it was just something taking up space in my body, the easier it would be. If I thought of it as being something, a girl, a boy, mine, Thomas’, it all became too confusing.

“Never you mind, dear.” She rubbed my stomach like a lucky charm. “You’ve got a good girl. You’ll do right by her.”

“I’m giving her up,” I said quiedy. “I’m not keeping her.” I didn’t like it. Her. It made me shiver.

Sister Evangeline laughed and headed off toward a pot of something boiling. “Not you, Rosie. Everybody else, but not you.”

That night in bed I tried not to think about it. I had never thought about it, what it might be like to keep this baby. I whispered to Angie in the darkness what Sister Evangeline had said.

“Lord,” she said back quietly. We had to keep our voices down, as the halls were checked for sounds, stray words seeping out underneath the doors.

“Do you think she knows anything?”

“They say she does. They say she knows about babies. I didn’t know about her being mother superior though. That’s something.”

I was always happy to be able to give Angie a piece of news she didn’t have before. “I wish I didn’t know about the baby.”

“I’d love to know. A boy or a girl. You could picture what it was going to look like once it grew up. You could know for sure what you’d name it. What would you name it?”

“I don’t think about it.”

“You can’t keep yourself from thinking of things. It used to be if I had a girl I was going to name her Sharon, just because it’s a beautiful name.” She stopped for a minute. “But now I’d name her Rose of Sharon. Maybe I’d just call her Sharon, but her name would be Rose of Sharon.”

It was all talk. Angie and I would never name our children, but her saying that put such a tightness in my throat I couldn’t reply.

“And if it was a boy I’d name it for my boyfriend at home.”

“Who’s that?” I whispered.

She was quiet for a long time and I could hear her steady breathing. She wasn’t crying, because no matter how softly she did that, I could always tell. “Duane,” she said.

“That’s the father?” There were girls who told stories about the fathers. They were the ones who said he was away and would come back and marry them the day the baby was born, but no one ever really told the truth. The truth, I imagined, was almost uniformly the same, someone who said he loved you but didn’t, someone who loved you but got scared. Within that truth were an endless number of stories, each so personal that no one could believe theirs was like anyone else’s, as I believed mine was like no one else’s. Maybe I shouldn’t have asked, we were so careful not to ask things, but in that dark room I felt like a girl telling secrets.

“No,” she said, “that was Mr. Price. He owned the drugstore where I worked. I mostly worked the fountain, making sundaes and milkshakes and stuff like that. Sometimes I worked up front.” She rolled over onto her side to face me and pulled the blanket way up over her shoulders. Angie got cold when it wasn’t cold at all. I put my face right to the edge of the bed and listened.

“Duane’s my boyfriend. We’ve been dating pretty steady since I was fifteen and everybody thought me and Duane would get married. I guess we probably will. He’s a really good guy, you’d like Duane. But we never, you know, did anything, ’cause we were going to wait.” After that she just trailed off, and for a while I thought she might have gone to sleep.

“What about Mr. Price?” I whispered.

She reached her hand out and touched the edge of my mattress, ran her fingers back and forth along my sheets. “You won’t ever tell?”

“Promise.” And I wouldn’t, we were friends. It all happened so fast it hardly made sense to me. I had never had a girlfriend like this before. But that’s the way it was at Saint Elizabeth’s. It was like the army. It was like the war. You stuck with people because your life depended on it.

She tucked her hand back inside her covers. “Mr. Price was older. He was a little older than my dad, and he was married. I went to school with his daughters. We all went to the same church. That’s why he gave me the job, but later he said he gave me the job because he liked my ass. He’d say things like that to me, you know, after. He told me I was beautiful. He said I wasn’t like any other woman in the world. God, nobody ever said something like that to me before. I felt so daring, so … so, grown up. The first time, it was a slow day. I’d been working there for months already and he was always real professional, like he didn’t notice me at all even though he was always polite. There was no one in the store and he came up behind me and put his hand on my chest. Didn’t say a word, just touched me. I was so scared I couldn’t move, I didn’t pull away from him. I just stood there, so then he ran his hand under my sweater and went inside my bra and then he sort of pressed me back against him. Anybody could have walked in, his wife, his daughters, but he didn’t seem to care. I guess I’d always had a sort of crush on him. He was smart and good-looking, but I never really thought about it. Duane was so good to me, and there I was, letting Mr. Price put his hands in my clothes. It didn’t even happen that time. He never said anything to me about it. It made me so nervous, I kept thinking I should just quit the job, but that feeling, it didn’t leave me. Every time he’d tell me to do something he’d stand real close and I could feel him breathe on my neck, I’d think I was going to pass out.

“The next time I was behind the back counter. I was waiting on somebody, and he came up behind me, crawling, and he starts running his tongue along the backs of my knees. He was licking my knees. I thought I was going to buckle, fall over on the floor. There’s a customer right there and everything. Then he pulled down my underwear and started touching me, real lightly. Duane had never tried to touch me there, I wouldn’t have let him, but Mr. Price was. When that woman left he kept going, running his hand all over me. I never told anyone this. I never said it in confession: he had his head up under my skirt.

“The crazy part is neither of us said a word about it, it just kept happening, until one day he says he has to leave early and he wants me to close the store for him. He left, and at five o’clock I changed the sign and turned out all the lights and locked the front door. It was winter then, so it was nearly dark outside. We always went in and out the back way, but when I get back there he’s waiting for me. He was leaning up against one of the storage shelves, all those bottles of pills, and he tells me to take my sweater off, just like he would tell me to ring up an order or take out the trash, he says, ‘Angie, take off your sweater now.’ And I did it. Then he told me to take off my shoes and stockings. He didn’t make a move, he just watched me. He told me piece by piece, until I wasn’t wearing anything, and then he came over and put his arms around me and kissed me and said my name and that was it. He had never kissed me before. We did it right there, in front of a half a dozen different brands of birth control.”

“And that’s when it happened?”

“Not the first time. We went on like that for a while. I wonder sometimes what I could have been thinking about. I sure wasn’t thinking about Duane or Mrs. Price or my family. I’m not even so sure I was thinking about him. It was more just me, the way I felt. I’d been such a goody-goody, you know, but all of a sudden I was walking around town and I’d think, none of you know what I’m doing. I thought I was such a big damn deal. I thought I was so in love.”

“What did he say when you told him?”

“He said he’d pay for everything.” She drew in her breath. “Part of me thought, what does it matter? If I’m the kind of girl who’d sleep with a married man, then I can be the kind of girl who doesn’t have a baby, too. But I couldn’t, you know, when it came right down to it I just couldn’t do it. None of us could,” she said. “That’s why we’re all here. So I told my mother I was pregnant. I didn’t say who, but I knew she’d think it was Duane. She said, ‘Does Duane know?’ and I said no, so she made up some big lie about me going off to my cousins’ and she sent me here, so that when I came back everything would be just the same.”

I lay there for a while, thinking about Angie, her brown eyes and heart-shaped face, her dark hair that fell halfway down her back. It was like my mother used to say, about the pretty girls having it harder. I finally understood what she was talking about.

“Promise me something,” she said.

“You bet.”

“Promise you’ll take me to see Sister Evangeline, so she can tell me if it’s a boy or a girl.”

“Sure,” I said.

“I’d feel better. If I knew that much I’d feel better.”

“We’ll go tomorrow.”

“Rose,” she said.

“Yes.”

“What about you? What was the name of the boy you slept with?”

“Thomas,” I said.

“Did you love him?”

I waited for a minute, because I saw a light pass by our door, Sister Loyola out looking for wakeful girls. “No,” I said. “I didn’t.”

When I went to the kitchen the next morning long before breakfast to start baking rolls, I found Sister Evangeline and Son peering in between the stove and the cabinet.

“I dropped my rosary,” she told me. She kept folding and unfoldiug her hands, which seemed helpless and small. “They were around my wrist while I was stirring something and they just slipped off.”

Son was shining a flashlight into the slim divide, trying to see, but there was no telling. “Are you sure they went in here?” he said.

“Right there. Right down in there.” She leaned over his shoulder, as if she was trying to see. “They were my mother’s,” she said. “She gave them to me when I entered the convent. I’ve had them forever.”

Son asked me to get him a yardstick and I brought one out of the pantry. He stuck it down into the crevice and tried to slide it back and forth. He paid close attention to his work. His hands were so huge that they made the yardstick into a twig. I didn’t know Son much at all then, other than to say hello when passing him on my walks. He seemed to bear all of our pains. When he saw any of the girls his face looked just for a second as if he understood that it was a man who had led us here, and he took the burden of that upon himself. He was only forty-five then, but I thought he was ten years older. The sun and wind and work had shaped him like the bed of the dried spring. He was a man who could never commit a crime because everything about him was so recognizable, his enormous height, the way one of his feet turned in and gave him a little limp, his hair that had grayed only on one side. I had never seen him wear anything but overalls and white shirts, and his boots looked like they would hold an entire watermelon.

Soon there was a jingle, and the rosary shot out across the floor. I reached down to pick it up. The little wires that connected the beads and the metal crucifix on the end were hot from the stove. I held them for a second to cool them and then gave them back to Sister Evangeline.

She hugged Son, barely coming up to his waist. “I thought I could do without any one thing,” she said. “But not these. It would have broken my heart to have these gone.” Then she Went off to show them to the other sisters. What was lost is now found.

Son wiped the dust off the edge of the yardstick and put it back in its place. “I worry about her down here,” he said to me. “Too many hot things, too many knives. But I expect it would kill her quicker to be taken out of the’ kitchen. This is the only place she feels to home. But you seem like a smart girl, and Sister Evangeline, she sings your praises, so you’ll watch out for her.”

“I watch out for her,” I said. It was early, not even light outside, and I asked Son if he wanted some breakfast.

“That would be nice,” he said, “if you’ve got the time.”

He had left his house, which was the old groundskeeper’s cottage behind the hotel, when Sister Evangeline had called him, breathless and frightened for her beads. He didn’t take the time to get himself some coffee, so I poured a cup for him and put it down on the small table we sat at to shell peas.

“You’re not from around here,” he said.

“No, I’m from out west, California.” How many times had I said that already? Kentucky wasn’t a place you could just be in, you had to be from there, or everything about you was strange.

“I could tell from the way you talk.” He took a long drink of his coffee. “Well, it’s not just the way you talk, it’s the way you move around too, look people right in the eyes, hold your head up. You don’t see too much of that around here.”

“We’re all pretty much alike,” I said.

Son shook his head. “These girls get all round-shouldered, like they’ve been broken down. It’s a sad thing to see. Used to be, when I first came here, I’d holler out to them sometime, say hello or something, and it liked to scare them to death. I felt so bad. It was like I had murdered somebody.”

“How long have you been here?”

“Oh, Lord,” he said, smiling a little, “a long time, since I was eighteen. Who’d a thought, you know? I was just bumming around, wandering, taking in odd jobs where I could get them. I thought I’d go all over the world, but I just kept going around Tennessee and Kentucky.” He laughed. “Like I didn’t have a sense of direction, I kept going in circles.”

“Maybe you didn’t want to leave,” I said.

“Well, I guess you may be right.”

“How did you come to Saint Elizabeth’s?”

“I came to Habit first, and I met somebody who sent me down here. Sister Evangeline was running things then, and I asked her did she need some work done. Anybody could see she needed work done, this place. A mess. You think it’s not so great now, but before I came here, the pipes were half rusted through and the lights only worked if you jiggled the sockets, and the roof. Lord. So she says I could stay on a few days, until I could straighten things up, and here I am, still straightening things up.”

“So you never saw the world,” I said, putting down a plate of eggs in front of him.

He went to the cupboard and took out a little bottle of Tabasco, which he poured over his food like it was catsup. “I suppose I saw as much as I was meant to see. Not as much as you, though. California.”

I rinsed out my pans and started work on the rolls. Saint Elizabeth’s would be waking up soon, and the girls who didn’t get sick in the morning were always fiercely hungry. “I used to drive a lot,” I said. “But I was never very good at getting anyplace, so I guess I was like you. Lots of moving without covering a lot of ground.”

“You got this far,” he said.

It was nice to have a man to talk to while I worked. I could understand what Angie meant, about all the girls being in love with him. It wasn’t love, but the relief that came in a moment of something different. Our days were very much the same. Charlotte and Nora had had their babies, though they left without any of Lolly’s production. Once they had gone, they sent us notes from the hospital saying they were fine, and then we didn’t hear from them anymore. They didn’t come back. Now there were new girls at the head table and we talked about when they were due. We talked about our sore backs and our hair, which seemed to grow an inch a day. We invented secret histories for the nuns and played Scrabble in the afternoons, but we didn’t talk to men. In fact, we talked very little about men. Having Son in my kitchen made me feel extremely normal somehow, normal in the way my old life had been, fixing breakfast for Thomas. It comforted me.

He took his dishes to the sink and washed them, thanking me for the breakfast, saying my eggs were better than Sister Evangeline’s but I was not to tell her. Then he reached out his hand to shake mine. It was an awkward gesture. When I took his hand mine was lost, swallowed whole. “You let me know if you need anything,” he said, and then he lumbered out of the kitchen. That was just the word I thought as I watched him go, lumbered.

By the second rising of the dough, Sister Evangeline was back, happy and clucking, her beads attached to her belt tightly. All morning she touched her hip to check them, make sure everything was still in place. I had made breakfast alone, and quiet Regina and a new girl named Helen I had never seen before came in to serve it. Helen was already showing as much as I was. I imagined she stayed home as long as she could, wore loose dresses and stood behind counters. I hoped someone had told her not to say anything about a dead husband. I had forgotten to, when she was right there.

After the dishes were washed and put away, Angie came into the kitchen. Her hair was up in a high ponytail and she had on a couple of those cheap, dime-store bracelets that Mother Corinne was always yelling at her about wearing. She looked so impossibly young, like a girl who had stuck a sofa pillow under her dress as some kind of joke. “This is what I’d look like pregnant,” she would say to her friends, and they would all laugh until their sides ached.

“Did you ask her?” she said to me in a low voice.

“Ask who?”

“Sister Evangeline, about my baby.” She was clearly irritated that I had forgotten.

“It’s been a big morning,” I said. “Lots of kitchen drama.”

I went over and asked Sister Evangeline, who was trying to find some cream of tartar, if she wouldn’t have a talk with my friend’s baby.

“Now I’m not supposed to do that, Rose. I told you that’s how I got in trouble, that’s how I wound up here in the kitchen.” She laughed and put her hand on my wrist. “I get in trouble again, they’ll have me out back mowing the lawns.”

“Angie’s sweet,” I whispered, “a lot sweeter than I am. And she can keep a secret.” I doubted the last part was true, but I knew the first was.

“Well,” she said, still so happy from her morning’s misfortune and good turn of events, “I always like to see the babies.”

I introduced them. They would have met before, but as Sister liked to say, so many girls coming and going. They all start to look the same. Which in our case was true.

But when she put her hand on Angie’s stomach, I knew it was all a mistake. Sister Evangeline’s face dropped and her eyes half closed behind her glasses.

“What is it?” Angie said, meaning the sex of the child.

“It’s hard to tell,” she said quiedy.

“I want to know.” Her voice was impatient and high. “You told Rose.”

Sister Evangeline leaned over to touch her cheek to Angie’s stomach, but it was more like she was trying to touch her cheek to the burner of the stove. All she could do was bump against her lightly, and even that seemed to cause her pain. I held onto her arm and helped her straighten up. “It’s a girl,” she said.

Angie clapped her hands and kissed me and kissed Sister. “I knew it would be. I knew it would be all along. Rose of Sharon.” She kissed me again. “Rose of Sharon.”

“Take me to sit,” Sister Evangeline said. “This tires me out. I shouldn’t do this at all.” But before she left she touched Angie’s face. “You’re a sweet girl,” she said. “God will stay with you.”

I told Angie to go on, that I was going to take Sister Evangeline to her room, but once she had left, Sister said to just take her to a chair. She sat down heavily.

“Are you going to tell me?” I said.

“The baby dies,” she said. “Not until the very end.” Her voice was half choked and her cheeks were flushed. Yesterday I doubted what she had said about me, but today I believed.

“Maybe she won’t know,” I said. “She’ll be asleep and they’ll take the baby from her and she’ll never know.”

“You always know,” Sister Evangeline said.

Sister Evangeline did go to bed. She tried to find comfort in cooking, but she was tired and I took her to her room. It was a maid’s room, down the back hall from the pantry. It was small and spare with white walls and a little bed near a window. I knelt on the floor and undid her heavy black shoes. I helped her under the blankets and covered her up like a child.

“Stay with me awhile,” she said. I sat on the edge of the bed and held onto her hand. “Tell me something,” she said.

“What do you want to know.”

“Anything,” she said. “Tell me about your mother.”

It caught me off guard. My mother. It would be the thing she would think of now, the thing we all had in common. “My mother is beautiful,” I said. “How is she beautiful?”

“The way her hair smells, the way she crosses her hands over her knees, like this.” I thought about it. I saw her sitting on the edge of the tub, laughing. “The way she always came home from work telling stories about something that happened that day.”

“And you miss her.” Her voice sounded small. I reached over and took off her glasses and put them close beside her on the night table, near a glass of water.

“Yes.”

“I know,” she said, and squeezed my hand.

I stayed there until I thought she was asleep. I looked out her window and saw fall coming up in the back pasture. I thought about my mother. I wondered if she would still be waiting for me to come home or if she would have given up hope by now. As much as I wanted her to be able to go on with things, the thought of her forgetting took my breath away. I stood up from the bed and started to go back to the kitchen.

“Rose?” Sister Evangeline said.

“Yes.”

“Sing me something.”

“I can’t sing.”

“That’s all right,” she said.

So I sang her a song, but I don’t remember what it was now, and by the time I was finished she had fallen asleep.

I was only responsible for working one meal that day, but I did all three. I chased the other girls away when they came in to take their turns. I was becoming more and more like Sister Evangeline. The only place I felt safe now was in the kitchen. I labored fiercely. I cooked with anger. I thought, damn you all, I’ll feed you and make you strong, I’ll feed you until you can’t eat another bite, until you drop your forks and push your chairs away. I’ll feed you until you want for nothing in your lives. I’ll feed you until you’re able to save yourselves. I pounded out the chicken with a spiked mallet until the breasts were thin as writing paper. I brought out frozen chunks of stock and melted them into soups. I filled the pots with potatoes and carrots and celery. I was careful to remove all the bay leaves, any tough ends. No one will choke on this food. No one will be hurt by what has come from my hands. I made rice pudding. I put in as many raisins as they might dream of having, made it sweet and warm, food to send you to sleep. Food to keep you safe.

I’d hardly looked at my car since my arrival. I’d had enough of driving, but tonight I thought of getting in, driving everyplace, never coming back. I could drive back to California, see Interstate 40 with the sun setting ahead of me rather than behind. I could go into I. Magnin’s, where my mother would be selling lipsticks, and stand on the other side of the counter in my big winter coat, which would be far too warm, and she wouldn’t notice this baby. All she would see was her baby. The joy on her face. I closed my eyes and savored it. I wanted to never comfort. I wanted to be comforted. I wanted to be wrapped and held and kissed and rocked.

I stayed in the kitchen. At five o’clock the residents of Saint Elizabeth’s went onto the porch without me and drank their tea, even though the evening was turning cold, and pretended that someone was coming for them. They looked at the red leaves, on certain trees so bright already they made you look away, and thought of last fall. Where had these girls been then, with their flat stomachs, never thinking how much could go wrong? I stayed in the kitchen and made their dinner, sent it out to the table, and waited to wash their dishes. And when the last dish was put away, Mother Corinne came in and told me it was not up to me to decide who should have a day off from work and that we were to keep to the schedule and all I had to do was look at her, simply raise my eyes from the sink I was scrubbing out and meet her eyes, and she left without a word.

When it was dark I went out to my car and got inside. I took a map out of the glove compartment and spread it over the seat, leaving the car door ajar for a little light. California was so far away. I wondered if Billy had told his parents. I thought maybe I would go to see him, sit at his bright kitchen table while his mother made coffee and cut us thick slices of cake. For a minute I thought about Thomas, and I wondered if things were easier for him by now, but then I stopped because I just couldn’t. There was no place to go but away. I looked at the maps for a long time, tracing my finger along roads, trying to imagine that there would be someplace I could go and not know about Angie. Someplace I could go and not be pregnant, as the thing I wanted most to get away from was inside me.

I got into the backseat of the car. I pulled the old wool blanket over my shoulders and fell asleep.

I woke up to a tapping on the window. I could hear a man saying my name and in the darkness I thought it was Thomas. “Rose. Rose.”

I sat up and peered out the window. It was Son. He had a flashlight but was careful not to shine it in my face. I unlocked the door and slid over. An old habit, sleeping with the doors locked. He leaned inside.

“They sent me to find you,” he said.

I nodded.

“You’re gonna freeze to death out here.”

“Is it late?”

“Naw, only ten or so, but they don’t like you just wandering off. Why’re you sleeping in the car, Rose?”

“I just wanted —” I stopped and rubbed my face. I was crying again. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Wait here,” he said, and headed back toward the hotel. I pinched the bridge of my nose and took deep breaths, trying to quiet myself down. After a while Son came back and handed me a heavy jacket. “I told them I found you. It’s Sister Bernadette doing bed check. I told her you wanted to take a little walk.”

“I want to take a walk?” I said.

“Come on. Come on out of the car.”

I got out and put on the jacket. It was one of Son’s and it came down to my knees. It was so heavy I put my hands in the pockets, thinking they must be loaded down with sand, but they were empty. The weight of it felt good, it seemed to push me into the ground. We walked straight across the back pasture, not out toward the road where I went for my walks in the mornings but out toward the bank of trees we watched from the front porch. Son was pulling in his steps, going slow so I wouldn’t have to fight to keep up with him. He kept the flashlight in front of us. The dew was already starting to come up, and it soaked through my shoes and chilled my feet. When we got to the other side of the pasture, he showed me a break in the trees and we followed a path into the woods, the same path George Clatterbuck had taken the morning he found the spring. Son put his hand under my elbow, lightly, as if he were afraid he might frighten me, and led me over the fallen logs and around the blackberry branches. I was still half asleep, and it never occurred to me to ask where we were going, or to think there might be something unusual about the groundskeeper leading me off into the woods in the middle of the night. I just wanted to follow.

When we got to the other side of the woods, I saw a small white farmhouse, all lit up. “I wanted you to meet a friend of mine,” Son said.

“Isn’t it a little late to be visiting people?”

“Miss June’s always up,” he said. “I’ve never been by here when she hasn’t been up.”

He knocked on the door and sure enough, the woman who answered looked like she’d been expecting us. She was a thin woman of maybe sixty-five or seventy, with her hair done up in an elaborate twist on the back of her head.

“Miss June,” Son said, “this is my friend Rose. Rose, this is Miss June Clatterbuck.”

She took my hands and pulled me inside, saying how glad she was to meet me. “I can always count on Son to make my day. It used to be girls came down from the hotel all the time, but I’m starting to think that back pasture must be getting wider. No one comes to visit now, it’s not like the old days at all.” She put me down in an old flowered armchair and went off to get us some drinks.

“So do you like living at the hotel?” June called out to me from the kitchen. I wasn’t exactly awake yet. I wasn’t sure what I was doing there at all.

“It’s fine,” I said.

“Not something a person could get very excited about, I suppose,” she said happily. “Living in a home for unwed mothers and all.”

“No,” I called back. “I suppose not.” I shot Son a look. He nodded at me. I took it to mean that everything was all right.

“Miss June owns Saint Elizabeth’s,” Son said.

“I do not,” she said.

“Well, you sure own everything under it. It was criminal the way they took that place from you. If you ask me, they ought to at least be paying rent.”

“What am I going to do with rent from the church? It’s not the kind of money a person can enjoy.” She came back in, carrying a tray that she put down on the table. “When I’m dead,” she said, “they’ll find a way to get it once and for all.” She seemed a little too bright about the proposition, like she’d cheerfully resigned herself to both facts: her death and the Catholic Church winning out. “You’ve just got to promise me, Son, you won’t let them take down my sign.”

“Not while I’m around,” he said, putting a couple of cookies on a napkin and handing them to me.

“Oh, they hated that sign,” she said, and laughed. “Did you see it?”

“First thing when I came in,” I told her. That’s when I put it all together. This was June Clatterbuck, the little girl. She was the three-year-old whose father made her drink the water and saved her life. She was the reason Saint Elizabeth’s was there at all.

“I had that sign made after my mother died. Cost me a fortune, solid brass. I had it made up to look just like one of those historical markers the state puts up.” She stopped and poured herself a Coke. “She wouldn’t have liked it, my mother, she would’ve said I shouldn’t do anything that might upset the sisters, but that was only because she was afraid of the big one. But I did it as soon as she was gone. They’re fine over there, they do good by you girls, but no one likes to admit that Saint Elizabeth’s used to be the Hotel Louisa, and that before that it used to be my father’s field and my father’s spring.”

“They were supposed to call the place the Hotel June,” Son said. He was sitting on the couch, which was too small for him. His knees came up nearly to his shoulders.

“There never would have been a Hotel June, I wouldn’t have stood for that, even at seventeen. There aren’t too many people who remember the spring anymore. I’m not saying it was any sort of miracle, mind you. It was a long time ago, maybe it wasn’t anything at all. But it did put Habit on the map for a while, and I think folks ought to be respectful of that.”

“That’s right,” Son said.

“Catholics think they’ve got the market cornered on miracles. Fatima, Lourdes, that’s where they want to see their miracles. If something happens in their own back yard, which just happens to be a Baptist back yard, well then, that’s really not worth a thing. When Lewis and Louisa Nelson first came here and they saw all the spring had to offer, the first thought in their heads was, let’s make it Catholic. Sort of like America trying to get to the moon so we can say it’s ours. I keep thinking, I just bet the Pope is doing a slow burn over this one. He’d like to send some priests up there and say the moon was Catholic.” She looked at me and smiled. “Are you a Catholic, dear?”

“I am, actually,” I said.

She put down her Coke on the table next to her. “I don’t mean any offense,” she said. “Why, some of my best friends are Catholic. Sister Evangeline, up at the hotel. Do you know her?”

“Rose works in the kitchen,” Son said for me. “She and Sister are thick as thieves.”

“You bring her by for me,” she said. “It’s getting hard for us to make the walk alone. I don’t see her as much as I’d like to anymore. They keep her too busy over there.”

“Things are better for her,” Son said. “She’s got Rose now.”

“I like nuns,” she said. “Of course, not all of them. That would be like saying you liked all people flat across the board, and that would be foolishness. We used to have a lot of nuns around here, back when Saint Elizabeth’s was a retirement home. They were the best thing that spring ever brought here, not that you girls aren’t fine, but I loved those old nuns.” She paused and thought about it all. “Sometimes I think that maybe I’ll become a Catholic and become a nun, just so I could retire with women like them. Course, with my luck, Mother Corinne would retire in the bed right next to mine.”

We stayed for a while, but I was tired. June had enough energy to burn a hole in the carpet. It wore me out to think a woman three times my age was wide awake past midnight.

“Best stay with us,” she said at the door.

“I’ve got to get her home,” Son said. “I shouldn’t have kept her out this long.”

“Listen to me,” she said, and took my hand,” ’cause this is important. You come back here. You visit me.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“I’ll watch for you, from this window right here.” She kissed us both good night, and Son led me back through the woods, toward the Hotel Louisa.

“She’s a live one,” I said. “I’m glad you took me there.”

He stopped before we got to the front steps. He looked up at the hotel, like he was trying to get what he wanted to say exactly right in his mind. “They’ll have you thinking that what’s going on right now is the only thing happening in the world, but there were all those other people living here before you, and there’ll be a lot of them here after you. Go on now,” he said. “Go on up to bed.” And then he headed off toward his house, the beam of his flashlight cutting a path into the darkness.

I went up to my room. Suddenly I was so tired I could barely make it up the stairs. I got into bed without taking off my dress.

“Where have you been?” Angie said.

“I fell asleep in the car.”

“What were you doing in the car?”

“I don’t remember.”

“Well, Lord, I’ve been wanting to talk to you all day. I got so excited about what Sister Evangeline told me, about the baby being Rose of Sharon. A girl, we’re both going to have girls.”

“Yes,” I said softly.

“She seemed awful depressed about the whole thing, though. Sister Evangeline, that is. I thought maybe she goes into some kind of trance or something when she’s talking to the baby. Was she that way with you, too?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Well, good. I was a little worried at first.”

“Don’t be,” I said.

“Good night, Rose,” she said.

“Good night, Angie.”

“Sleep well,” she said.

But I didn’t sleep at all.

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