15.
When Ruby was twelve, she learned the history of the world. The history of all the world always starts with us: it starts
with our cells, and without it, we learn nothing.
Her mom had come home from work, and in every way, it was an ordinary night. Ruby was in eighth grade, kind of, when she went
to school. She liked the learning but not the walls. Desirée had been working in big hotels downtown—boy, she had some stories.
Even now when Ruby looked at a hotel, she wondered. You have to wonder. Do we need this many hotels? Do that many people travel?
She had the answer for you: They do not. Desirée said most of the hotels were used for affairs, prostitution, and drugs. Even
the fancy ones. They were sanctuaries, she said: no-man’s-lands where crimes could happen but because of the laws created
by hotel owners, the hands of police were tied. Ruby found that interesting, and still did.
Anyhow, her mom had come home, and it was late enough to be dark, and her daughter was at the battered kitchen table, reading
a book. It was West with the Night, and in her mind, she was flying over Africa.
Desirée went straight into the kitchen, hungry, and began cutting chunks of government cheese to make grilled cheese sandwiches.
They loved the cheese, and there had been nothing like it since: sweet and salty. She watched as her mom turned the thick
sandwiches in the old cast-iron pan, the butter sizzling.
“Baby girl, I want to talk to you,” her mom said.
This was unusual. Her mother never spoke like that. She never made proclamations like out of a book: She gentled into a conversation.
“All right,” her daughter said, setting down the book.
Her mom carried her twin sandwiches over, with two bowls of boiling tomato soup, and cut the buttery sandwiches in two, passing
one to Ruby. Ruby bit into it, feeling the cheese ooze, the tasty crust crunch.
“I want to tell you about me,” Desirée said, biting into the other half of her first sandwich. She stopped, spooning up soup.
Her daughter watched, knowing she was hungry after working all day.
“Sure,” she said.
Desirée was twenty-seven. She never dated, as far as her daughter knew. Maybe she had escapades—those were the days for them.
Sometimes she came home late smelling different, but that could have been from work. Her daughter didn’t ask, and she didn’t
tell. Neither of them wanted to disturb the precious bubble of their lives.
Desirée ate, crunching through the corners. She dipped one crust in the soup, then wiped her mouth, the edge taken off her
hunger. She wore her long hair in a low bun while she worked, and strands had escaped. The lines around her mouth were deeper.
She started by talking about the poorhouse.
Ruby was intrigued, and asked questions. The place she’d imagined actually wasn’t that far off from the truth. A big building
with two wings, sprawling and somehow both cold and warm. The long halls where little Desirée had run, the endless labor.
The fields where nothing worthwhile grew but the poor were forced to work anyhow.
“Most of the people there were sick. Or something was wrong with them,” Desirée said. “I worked with my mom in the kitchen. When I was your age, my mother, your grandmother, died. It was cancer. That’s what the matron told me.”
Her daughter listened to all this, amazed. What amazed her most was the fact that she had not been curious before. She had
been very curious about other parts of life, but not about her mother. Isn’t that something? We think our parents were the
first human beings.
“What was the matron like?” Ruby finished her crust and wiped the crumbs off her mouth. They kept a clean rag on the table
for wiping their hands—they were too poor for paper napkins—and she didn’t want to leave grease stains in her library book.
“Those were hard times, and she was a hard woman.” Desirée looked distracted with the memory. Ruby had a feeling there was
a point her mom was working toward.
“Do you miss your mom?” she asked.
“Yes,” Desirée said. “We all miss our mother when she is gone. She is the root. We are the tree.”
Until the tree drops a seed, the girl thought: me.
“My dad?” she asked.
She had never really thought of him before, either. She knew that everyone has a father, but he hadn’t really existed to her.
Now a big hope sprung up in her throat that surprised her.
Suddenly, questions were being raised that threatened to dismantle the gently idle way they spent their days, the candle at
Christmas, the fir bough they stole from the tree in the closest park and ran laughing all the way home with through the gritty
falling snow.
“He . . .” Her mother hesitated.
Later, looking back, Ruby would think, she knew she was twelve.
She knew her mother’s age, because they celebrated her birthday every year.
She could have done the math. Twenty-seven minus twelve was fifteen, and if she counted the months right, it meant she had been conceived when her mother was fourteen.
But she didn’t do the math. Not then and not for a long time later. Why? Why didn’t she count the most essential numbers?
Instead she asked the one question that was maybe designed to shut the conversation down.
“Did you love him?”