"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 unfolding 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 w
as 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 mor
ning'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 quietly.
"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.