The Patron Saint of Liars (9 page)

"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 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 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.

"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.