sipped on the coffee and closed her eyes.
I charged down the stairs, two at a time, not considering, until I reached the drugstore, the ramifications of leaving a total stranger sitting at my kitchen table.
“You been down to the wreck?” the clerk asked. “They’re saying a hundred people are dead.”
“It’s a pretty bad accident.”
“Some folks,” he whispered conspiratorially, “are saying it ain’t an accident at all. My uncle’s got a scanner. Picks up everything .”
“How much do I owe you?” I asked, eager to get back to my apartment.
“Fifty cents,” he said, reaching under the counter for a bag. “I’m going down there as soon as my shift lets out.”
“Thanks,” I said, grabbing the toilet paper, and rushed back to my apartment.
When she wasn’t in the kitchen, I felt something sink inside me, and a sort of panic set in. I set the toilet paper on the kitchen table and peered down the dark hallway. I opened the door to my bedroom and to Shelly’s room. Nothing. I returned to the kitchen and went into the living room, my heart racing.
I’d been too out of it that morning to even pull the blinds; the room was completely dark except for the dusty rays of light shining through the cracks in the shades. I flicked on the overhead lamp worried that this room too would be empty. And so I was startled when I looked down to see the girl curled up on the couch, clutching the green afghan Hanna had made for Shelly’s last birthday. I felt my body sigh, my limbs relax.
In sleep, she looked even younger than she had at the river. Sixteen at the oldest, I imagined. She was holding the edge of the afghan against her cheek with one hand like a child would. Her other hand was cradling her rounded stomach, which poked out from under Shelly’s T-shirt.
I looked at my watch. It was nearly eleven o’clock already. Only four hours until Shelly would be home from school. I worried that if she saw my bicycle out front she’d come straight to our apartment rather than going to Mrs. Marigold’s next-door. And there still was the matter of work. I paced around the living room, trying to figure out what to do about the girl sleeping on my couch, until she stirred.
“You can go back to work,” she said softly. “I ain’t going to steal nothin’.”
“I know that,” I said, stung.
As she slept, I went next-door to Mrs. Marigold’s and told her that my third cousin, a relative of my mother’s, by marriage, my adopted cousin from Louisiana, had just come visiting, that she was sleeping on my couch. Mrs. Marigold stood with her hands on her hips, scowling at me as she abandoned a pile of half-peeled potatoes. I told her about the train wreck, that my cousin had gotten off the train unharmed, but that she was exhausted from the trauma of it, and that I was headed back to work and maybe back to the river to help out with the accident if they needed me. And finally, when she looked at me, confused not only by my convoluted story but by why I was telling it to her at all, I asked her if she could make sure Shelly got a good dinner tonight. That she did her homework. That I might be later than usual but that I would be by to pick her up after supper. Mrs. Marigold smiled and picked up the potato peeler. “Honey, don’t you worry yourself about Shelly. You come by to get her whenever you want.”
I checked on the girl one more time, and she was still asleep. I pulled the afghan gently up over her and turned off the light again. I found her pile of wet clothes on the bathroom floor and put them in the dryer. The wet fabric slapped around the inside of the machine, thumping rhythmically as I locked her inside the apartment and bounded down the stairs. I would figure out what to do after I got home. Maybe by then the girl would be having second thoughts and would call her father. She was probably still in shock about the accident. A good rest was probably all she needed. Some dinner. Some nice warm, dry clothes.
The Folding Machine
I n the summer of 1958, my father set out to invent a machine that would automatically fold freshly laundered clothes. Most of his inventions were aimed at making my mother’s life easier. She was an accidental housewife, a college graduate and once-aspiring musician whose life took a turn for the ordinary, as many extraordinary women’s lives did, when she fell in love. My father’s efforts at easing the burden of laundering and dishwashing and floor scrubbing were like small apologies for something understood but unspoken between them.
My mother, Helen Wilder, met Charlie Montgomery at Middlebury College, where Charlie, my father, was studying engineering, and she, music. They married not long after they graduated and, despite more grandiose plans, moved to Two Rivers when my grandmother died, leaving them the house that my father had grown up in. Convinced that they might be able to save some money before moving on, my mother agreed to spend the first few years of their married life in Two Rivers. My father accepted a job at the Two Rivers Paper Company, and my mother taught piano. But when she became pregnant with me, she must have known that her tenure in Two Rivers would last more than a few years. And before she knew it, I figure, she had probably resigned herself to bake sales instead of classical performances—to the quotidian life of a New England housewife instead of the glamour of a concert pianist’s.
The truth was, though I adored my mother, I was also embarrassed by her. She wasn’t like anybody else’s mother. Not my best friend, Ray’s, not Betsy’s either. She was fluent in French ( Parisian French, she emphasized, not the bastardized French of Two Rivers’s French Canadian population), and she had even been to France as a foreign exchange student while in college. She was constantly using French vocabulary when English, in her opinion, would not suffice. This, like much about my mother, was upsetting to the regular people in Two Rivers. First of all, she hadn’t taken my father’s name when she got married, convincing many people that they weren’t married at all but simply living in sin. She didn’t cook and she didn’t know how to sew. She wrote angry letters to the editor of the local paper and she refused to wear skirts. And, perhaps worst of all, instead of reading Redbook or Ladies’ Home Journal , she had the Rexall order one issue of The New York Times every week. This would have been fine, except that she insisted on picking it up each Sunday morning when everyone else was just getting out of church and stopping at the drugstore for their Sunday sundries. Thanks to The New York Times , everyone in Two Rivers knew that Helen Wilder did not believe in God.
Betsy’s mother, on the other hand, had learned everything she knew from magazines: glorious glossy magazines that were spread out in full-colored fans on every end table in the house. She made cupcakes that looked like witches at Halloween and robin’s nests at Easter. Mrs. Parker believed wholeheartedly in God and went to church every Sunday in dresses she made herself from crinkly patterns that smelled like dust. Later, Betsy would let me hold the fragile parchment only after I’d washed my hands.
The summer that we were twelve, I fell in love twice. First with Betsy Parker, and then with her mother.
For a whole week after I’d spoken to Betsy outside her father’s barbershop, I’d been trying to come up with an excuse to go see her again. I didn’t need a haircut, or else I would have just returned to the barbershop. My father considered himself a competent lay barber and methodically cut my hair on the last day of every month (outside so as to avoid getting any hair on the floors, which already generated near tumbleweed-sized dust balls). Finally, after much rumination, I concocted a story about needing to borrow sugar.
It was a typical Saturday; my mother was curled up on the overstuffed chair in our living room lost inside a book, and my father was in the basement working on his folding machine. It had to have been eighty degrees outside, but my parents were inside people. Especially in the summer. My mother abhorred the sun, and my father preferred his basement workshop to the outdoors. As soon as I was allowed to operate the lawn mower, I took it upon myself to tend to the overgrown and unruly chaos that was our yard, but then, when I was only twelve and not allowed to touch anything with a motor, I made my way through the shin-high grass to the sidewalk and across the street to the Parkers’ tidy plot.
When Mrs. Parker