Chapter 10
When I started wearing Leonard’s jacket to school every day, my friends said nothing.
I assume they believed I was trying to hide the weight I’d gained, which showed in my face and arms. Mae, on the other hand, was convinced my attachment to the jacket was the sole reason I hadn’t been asked to any dances that fall.
“Honey, you’re still beautiful. But you need to wear clothes that fit. And no boy is going to stick out his neck for a girl wearing another boy’s jacket. They all probably think you’re taken.”
I’m ashamed to say that in response, I reminded her she wasn’t my mother. She was unfazed.
“I can still care about you,” she said. “And I know how much you love to dance.”
She knew, as I did, the Harvest Bash was fast approaching, and this, during my senior year, would be the first time I would miss it. Just seeing the flyers around school for the costume contest was painful. The morning of the dance, Mae told me I should go without a date.
“I bet plenty of people would be glad to see you there. And lots of boys will want to take a break from their dates and dance with you.” She and Janet were at the kitchen table, shaping a pot of syrupy popcorn into little balls for trick-or-treaters.
“I’m sure we could come up with something cute for a costume. ”
“I’m done with those dances.” I said this lightly. I was washing my hands, my back to Mae and Janet. Janet got up to hug me from behind.
“I’d dance with you,” she said, and squeezed me with all her strength, pressing her cheek against my lower back. Her hands were still sticky with syrup so she held them out, away from the jacket’s zipper. “I love you, Nora. I love you sooooooo much.”
“I love you, too,” I said, my voice tight with fear.
I tried to turn to face her, but she held on, and I could only turn halfway.
When I looked up, Mae was staring at the front of the jacket.
Her gaze moved up to meet mine just as Bobby walked in, reeking of sweat, and announced that he was starving.
He wore only shorts and a baseball glove, palm-down, on top of his head.
He moved around me and Janet to the refrigerator.
“Wait,” Mae said. “I’m out of cigarettes. Bobby, if you go put on a clean shirt right now and get me a pack, and you take Janet with you, I’ll send you each with a dollar extra, and you can both get what you like.”
He and Janet exchanged looks.
“A dollar each, ma’am?” Bobby asked.
Mae said yes, that was what she’d said, and she told him to get her purse.
I stepped away from the sink so Janet could wash her hands.
What I remember is looking down at the jacket’s zipper, shiny in the window’s sunlight, feeling both terror and relief.
What was coming, what I’d known was coming, would finally happen.
I went back to the table and sat across from Mae.
We were silent as Janet searched for her shoes, as Bobby used the bathroom.
The moment we heard the back door shut, Mae asked me to stand and unzip the jacket.
When I did, she leaned forward in her chair and pressed both hands against the front of my skirt, and I actually attempted to suck in my belly.
But when she removed her hands and leaned back, I could see in her face that she was not fooled.
She reached into the pocket of her apron, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it.
The smoke irritated the back of my throat, but I didn’t dare cough.
“Have a seat,” she said.
I sat.
She tapped out ash in a saucer. “Tell me who. And when.”
To me, the question was insulting. I pointed at the collar of the jacket.
She shook her head. “You said he’s been gone since January. It’s October.”
I held up a hand to show I needed time before I could speak.
A fly hovered over the bowl of syrupy popcorn.
She waved it away, then stood and went to the sink, where she wet the tip of a dish towel.
She brought the dish towel back to the table, but for a while she just stood there smoking, holding the dish towel by her shoulder.
When the fly landed again on the table, she cracked the towel down like a whip, then leaned over and blew a stream of smoke at the dead fly, blowing it off the table’s edge.
“We don’t have much time.” She sat again. “You’re gonna need to start talking.”
I leaned forward and used a sleeve of the jacket to wipe my face. Then I sat up again and, without looking at her, told her about our night in Bradenton.
She rested her hand on her own belly. “When was this?”
“April,” I said. “I told you I was spending the night at Roberta’s.”
She stood and went back to the sink, running the faucet over the cigarette, which she then tossed in the trash. Instead of sitting back down, she motioned for me to stand and face her. Mae had never laid a hand on me, but as I stood, I braced myself to be slapped.
“You wrote to him?” she asked. “You told him your condition?”
I nodded.
“When?”
“June. And July.” My voice wavered. “And August. And September.”
She half smiled, as if in recognition. “And nothing from him?”
I shook my head. She covered her eyes. I wanted to tell her she was wrong to think what she was thinking.
Leonard loved me. I was the reason he’d joined the army in the first place.
But that wasn’t entirely true. He’d said he’d done it for himself as well.
Even when he’d asked me to marry him, he’d been mad at his father. He’d wanted out of the house.
Mae lowered her hand, and I could see in her eyes that she was torn between revulsion and sympathy for me.
She started to say something, then closed her mouth.
I could hardly look at her. What should have been a happy time for her was now compromised, embarrassing.
She raised her arm, and I shielded my face.
But I felt only her hand on my shoulder, pulling me close, and she kept her arms tight around me, the top of my head tucked under her chin.
Her hair smelled of smoke, and she had syrup on her collar.
“I’m not sure how to help you,” she said. “But I’ll try. I’ll do what I can.”
—
The next day, she made an appointment for me with a doctor way over in Clearwater.
I understood we’d gone out of town for discretion’s sake, but this doctor was unfamiliar to me, and I’d never before had to take off all of my clothes for any kind of exam.
He was an older man, and I could tell right away he didn’t think much of me.
When I had my feet in the stirrups, he said, “You’re going to have to unlock your knees, honey,” and I was scared, but I did, or I thought I did.
He said, “I know you can do better than that.” The way he said it, I knew what he meant.
But he was the one to tell me that I would have a baby in January—he guessed around the middle of the month. When Mae came in, he told her this. She crossed her arms over her belly and he said, “And I’d guess February for you.”
She nodded, and this doctor smiled and said, “Well, that should be an interesting time at your house,” and Mae paid and we left.
She said she would tell my father that night, and she had a plan for how she would do it: When he got home from work, before he even came in the house, she would go out and tell him her friend Sheri couldn’t get her car started.
Sheri was a real person, single and approved of by my father, and Mae was confident that if she asked him if they could go help Sheri get her car running in time for her to get to her evening shift, my father would say yes, even if he was tired and hungry.
Once they were far away from the house, Mae would tell him to pull over, and she would explain that there was nothing wrong with Sheri’s car.
She would get his keys before she told him anything about me, and she would keep them until he calmed down.
My job would be to supervise dinner for Bobby and Janet. Mae said I was otherwise free to do as I liked, though she suggested that as soon as I hear my father’s car out front, I should go back to my room and stay there.
—
That evening, Bobby and Janet clearly sensed my distress. But rather than showing sympathy, they both poked at me, seeming to want any kind of reaction. Janet wanted to know why I didn’t have to have milk with my meal, and I reminded her I was eighteen and could drink or not drink what I wanted.
“Why’s your hair wet?” she asked.
“I took a bath.”
“Why before dinner?”
I told her I wasn’t feeling well. Another truth.
“Fevered?” This from Bobby, watching me from across the table.
I shrugged, which he took as a yes.
“Then maybe you should take off that big jacket,” he said. Janet laughed, covering her mouth. I stood and told them they could do the dishes. I needed to go lie down.
Mae had warned that I shouldn’t be wearing Leonard’s jacket when she and my father returned.
She said if she were me, she’d throw it away, or she’d at least keep it far out of sight.
Back in my room, I hid the jacket under a blanket, then changed into my nightgown.
Already the light from the window was dim enough that I needed to turn on a lamp.
My father and Mae had been gone for over an hour.
I was still lying in my bed, eyes open, when I heard the car pull into the drive.
The front door whined open, and I heard my father’s voice only briefly.
Footsteps moved down the hallway, but no one knocked at my door.
Mae was still in the front room, talking to Bobby and Janet, when I heard the door across the hall, the door to the room my father shared with Mae, shut with a click.
I understood that he, too, had barricaded himself.
When Janet came in and turned on the light, I didn’t move or make any sound. She either didn’t believe I was sleeping or she didn’t care, because she sat on the edge of my bed, reached across me, and pressed her palm to my forehead.
“I’m okay,” I said. “Just need to rest.”
She nestled in behind me, her nose against the back of my neck. “If I get what you have,” she whispered, “we’ll both get to stay home.”
I told her what I had wasn’t contagious, but she said I was wrong. My father had been fine that morning, she said, and now, according to her mother, he was sick as well.
—
The next morning, he left early for work, backing out of the driveway while the sky was still dark.
I took advantage of his absence to use the bathroom, then I got right back in bed, and there I stayed, pretending to sleep even as the room filled with light, and even as Janet tried to convince Mae that she, too, was too ill to go to school.
Once she and Bobby left for the bus, Mae came back to my room and told me what I already knew: My father had taken the news hard.
She said that they’d been gone so long because at first, he would not, or could not, believe what she was telling him.
“But then he did,” she said, tightening the sash of her robe. She’d already put her hair up. “Let’s just say it’s a good thing for Leonard that he’s as far away as Japan.”
I spent most of that day doing laundry, partly to show my gratitude to her, and partly to keep myself occupied.
We had a washer with a manual wringer, and I wore myself out, using both hands to turn the crank, my arm muscles burning, my forehead sweating.
When I came in from hanging the third load out back, Mae told me she’d called Leonard’s mother.
“You already told her?” I asked. “She knows?”
Mae looked at me like I was crazy. “Not over the phone. You don’t know who shares their line.
And I know darn well who shares ours.” She glanced in the direction of our worst neighbor’s house.
“I told her that your father and I have something to discuss with them at their earliest convenience.” She paused. “What’s she like, his mother?”
“She’s nice,” I said. I had to steady myself against the wall. I didn’t want this meeting to happen. “What’d she say?”
“That she’ll check with her husband about his weekend schedule.” Mae lifted her nose as she said this, as if to imply Mrs. Lifton had been putting on airs. “She said she’d call me back.”
I was in the tub when the phone rang. When I got out, Mae said the meeting would happen the next morning, a Saturday.
Mrs. Lifton had said that because it seemed they would likely be discussing a private matter, it would be best, perhaps, if Mae and my father could come to their house.
She’d asked Mae if she was familiar with Snell Isle, and when Mae said she was not, Mrs. Lifton gave her directions.
She and Mr. Lifton could host as early as ten in the morning, she said, or, if that was too early, any convenient hour after that.