"Kiss."
"Kisses don't grow on trees, you know. I've got to get to work." She kissed her again, quickly this time. "Out of here." She pried Sissy off her neck and sent her off to a whole stream of girls who waited to see her Band-Aid and kiss her for it.
Rose just never seemed to have much time for Sissy. Every last thing, from a chicken in the oven to the sad story of one of the girls, came first. One night we were lying in bed, not sleeping, and since it was what I was thinking about, I finally asked her. "Why did you keep Sissy?"
"What do you mean?" she said, tired, her thoughts someplace a long way from that bed and that night.
"Why did you go through everything to keep her? Why didn't you just let her go like all the other girls do?"
She sat up on one elbow and stared at me. "What an awful thing to say. Cecilia's my daughter. I kept her because she was mine."
"But you weren't going to keep her. I'm not trying to make you mad. You came here because you wanted to give her up and then you didn't, you married me, you stayed here, and now it all doesn't seem to matter very much, and sometimes I wonder why you did it, is all. I just keep thinking, it couldn't be because you wanted to spend the rest of your life cooking at Saint Elizabeth's, or even because you wanted to take care of Sister Evangeline. Those are good things, but they just aren't enough, not to change so many lives around. Don't look at me like that, Rose. All I'm saying is, I wonder, that's all."
Rose got out of the bed. "I can't believe you," she said. She pushed her hands through her hair. She'd gotten thin in the last couple of years and it made her face sharper and so beautiful I could hardly believe it sometimes. "Are you not happy?"
"No, I never said—"
"Do you want us to leave?"
A tightness came up in my throat. "Oh, Rose, Jesus, you know I love you. And Sissy. Dear God. That's not what I meant."
"This is what I'm supposed to do: be married, raise my daughter, do my job. This is my life." She was slapping her hand against the bedpost, punctuating every word with a slap. "I don't know how to do this another way."
"I'm sorry," I said. "I'm sorry. Come back to bed."
"No," she said. She stood in her nightgown by the window, shivering.
"Please. I was wrong to say it. I never should have brought it up."
"You think I don't love her. Well, to hell with you." She took her pillow off the bed. "I'm going to sleep with Cecilia." She went into the living room and left me alone in a bed I had been alone in half my life. I could still feel her warmth in the blankets.
The next morning Sissy was in heaven. All the way to Saint Elizabeth's she held Rose's hand. "Mommie slept with me last night," she told me for the fifth time. Rose had braided her hair. She almost always waited and let Sister Evangeline braid her hair. "And Mommie's going to sleep with me tonight," she said.
"We'll see," Rose said.
I did love Rose. I loved her strength and her pride. I loved the way she just got things done and never cared what anybody else might think about it. I loved the look that came over her face when she helped Sister Evangeline up from her chair or when she talked to one of the girls or when she closed her eyes and prayed. I loved the feel of her body beside me in bed at night and the way she brushed her hair without looking in the mirror and the shape of her fingernails. I thanked God for her and hoped that she would stay with me in Habit for the rest of our lives, but I could do without her. What I mean is, I could conceive of that loss, life with no Rose. It would be a terrible thing, but I had lived through losing a woman before and if it happened I could live through it again. It was Sissy I flatly could not do without.
The love for a woman and the love for a child are not the same thing. With a woman, there's always the sense that they're loaning themselves to you. You have to remember that they could go at any time, and if a man's smart he never forgets that. He's just grateful for every minute she's there. But a child you come to expect. Their love is so much like breathing that it's a part of you, a leg, a lung. The look on Sissy's face whenever I came into the room was something I now depended on, the feel of her arms wrapped around my neck, the way she called for me when she was scared in the night. After she was born I never thought about her father again because in the center of my bones I was her father and no one will ever tell me that me being the one to make love to Rose nine months before Sissy's birth would make me any more so. When new girls came to Saint Elizabeth's and said, Who are you? What is your name? she always said, Cecilia Abbott. That's who she was. Abbott. Mine. I couldn't see how Rose could be more of a parent than me. Didn't I rock her to sleep? Didn't I tell her stories and show her the woods and buy her penny candy in town? Didn't I love her with my whole life? That one night Rose slept with Sissy was the only time she threatened to take her away from me. As mad as she was, I think she saw it would be the one thing I'd never come back from. Even if Rose didn't love me, she didn't hate me either.
There were always so many girls coming and going, I never knew how they kept a balance. Every time a girl went off to Owensboro, a new one appeared at the door, flat-stomached, suitcase in hand. When one would disappear, sometimes Sissy would think to look for her. "Where's Stella?" she would ask her mother.
"She's gone off to have her baby."
I don't know. I'm old-fashioned. I didn't like a four-year-old having to spend every day thinking about who was having babies and where they came from. I'd get flustered when Sissy would ask me why everybody had a baby but us. Rose, on the other hand, wasn't bothered by anything.
"Why do they have to go away when they have the baby? Where's the baby then?"
"In the hospital," Rose said, pinching in the edges of a pie crust, or maybe it was a tart. Nothing was a plain old pie with her anymore.
"The baby lives in the hospital?"
"No," Rose said, "the baby goes home to its parents."
"Then why don't they come back?"
"This isn't their home. This is just a place girls go to get ready to have a baby. Like a chicken sits in a nest. This is the big nest for pregnant girls."
Sissy thought about it for a while. "But we live here all the time."
"That's because I'm the keeper of the nest," Rose said. "If I went away, nobody would get dinner."
Sometimes, if it was somebody Sissy especially liked, she would sulk for an hour or two once she realized that girl was gone, but she always got over it. There were so many girls in the world.
Just before Sissy's fifth birthday, a girl named Alice came to Saint Elizabeth's. Sissy took to her like a duck to water, the very first day Alice arrived. There were many girls over the years that Sissy fixed herself to, and because Alice was the first, we used the name to mean anyone Sissy loved. "I think this one's an Alice," we would always say when Sissy came in, talking a mile a minute about some girl who had just arrived. It would be hard to say exactly why Sissy settled on Alice, the first Alice. Maybe it was because she was getting older and she didn't want to spend her days with so many different people anymore. Sissy was at a point that she needed one mother, and since her own mother wasn't available, and she was getting too big for Sister Evangeline and June to pick up anymore, Sissy chose Alice.
There was nothing so out of the ordinary about Alice. She was more of what they called a hippie girl than most that came through. She wore her blond hair long and straight with bangs that fell into her eyes. She wore a lot of beads around her neck which Mother Corinne was quick to talk her out of. But it was 1973 by then, and we were used to seeing all kinds, not like the old days when the girls were all nervous and well mannered. Once the sisters had given her some clothes and talked her into combing back her hair, she looked a lot younger than you would have thought at first. Whenever I saw her, I would think to myself that she was somebody's daughter. That was the kind of look she had.
It was Sissy who introduced us to her. I was in the kitchen, having lunch with Rose and Sister Evangeline after everybody else had eaten. Sissy came in holding Ali
ce's hand.
"There's my big girl," Sister Evangeline said. "Where's my kiss?"
Sissy came over and kissed her. "This is my friend Alice," she said, grabbing hold of Alice's hand again.
"Nice to meet you," I said. I shook her hand and brought her a chair that was over next to the walk-in. I noticed that she had on the same old blue cotton dress Rose was wearing the first day I saw her standing on the porch drinking tea. It was big on Alice, and she had an old cardigan sweater wrapped around herself. Seeing that dress again made me feel so in love with Rose that my face turned red. I wondered if she would remember it, but it wasn't like Rose to remember something like a dress.
Sister Evangeline said hello, and Rose got up to get Alice a cup of coffee from the stove. "Alice is my best friend," Sissy said. "Right?" she asked.
"You bet," Alice said.
Sissy got out of her chair and sat in Alice's lap.
"Cecilia," her mother said. "Don't climb all over people like they were furniture."
"She's all right," Alice said, and looped an arm around her waist.
Sissy stroked the blond braid lying over one shoulder. "I look just like Alice."
We all looked at the two of them, sitting there together. "You do," Sister Evangeline said. "Now that you mention it, you do."
"Alice is from Katie's," Sissy said.
"Cadiz," Alice said.
"But she lives here now," Sissy said.
Alice bounced her knees up and down a couple of times. "You bet."
"When did you get in?" Rose said.
"Just last night. It took me longer to get here than I thought it would. I shouldn't have come so late."
She smiled at Sissy and tickled her side a little to make her squirm. I liked Alice. She seemed more like she'd just come into the Hotel Louisa than Saint Elizabeth's. It was almost like nobody had told her that this was a home for unwed mothers and she was there because she was one of them. If she felt uncomfortable about the whole thing, she didn't let on.
"I'm going to show you the lookout now," Sissy said, and jumped onto the floor. The lookout was a balcony off one of the third-floor suites. It gave you the best view of Habit for your money.
"Maybe Alice isn't finished having coffee," Rose said.
Alice took another sip and put down her cup. "Now I'm finished," she said to Sissy. "It was nice meeting everyone. I'm sure we'll see plenty of each other."
"The kitchen is the place to be. If you ever need anything," Sister Evangeline said, "why, you just come to the kitchen." She leaned out and patted Alice on the hip.
"I will," Alice said, and got up to leave.
"Did you have your interview with Mother Corinne yet?" Rose said.
Alice smiled. "That's why I'm dressed like this."
"I never get to girls in time," Rose said. "I should convince Sister Bernadette to bring everyone in here first. Did she give you a hard time?"
"Nothing much."
"I hope you didn't tell her your husband died."
"What?"
"When she asks what happened to the father, everybody says they were married but their husband died in a car crash."
"Really?" Alice said. She tilted her head to one side and gave a small shrug. "I just told her it was none of her business."
Alice was good for Sissy, she settled her down. Other girls passed her around, mothered her for a spell and then let somebody else have a chance, but when Sissy spent time with another girl now, it was clear that she was just on loan from Alice and should come back as soon as possible.
"Alice and me are going to Egypt," Sissy said one night when I was tucking her into bed.
"Egypt," I said. "That's pretty far away."
"You bet," Sissy said. "That's how we like it."
"Won't you miss your old dad?"
She thought about it for a minute. Sleep was dragging down her eyes. "Yep," she said dreamily.
It was Alice who started teaching Sissy how to read, even though she already knew the alphabet. She taught her how to tell time and cut snowflakes out of sheets of paper. I wondered at what point it would all start to bother Rose, since all Sissy had to say anymore was Alice this or Alice that, but she didn't seem to notice. It was all the same to her, one girl or two dozen girls paying attention to her daughter. But it worried me. Rose would say, everything worries you.
"Is it dead?" Alice asked me. She was standing down under a sycamore tree I was sawing on.
"Naw, just a little bit. Lightning hit it, here. See? Mother Corinne's always worried that somebody's going to hurt themselves, tree'll fall on their head or something, so I just go ahead and saw the branches off right away. Don't really need to, though, nobody comes all the way out here."
"I do," Alice said.
"I guess you do." It was a nice day, too nice for March. Spring had come on early and strong and stirred everything up. It wasn't even the end of the month and there were daffodils. You could count on it, sometime in April it would snow and kill everything off. That's the way it worked in Kentucky. "Where's your shadow?" I asked her.
"Cecilia's asleep. Out like a light. I've never seen a kid who sleeps that hard."
"She sure is crazy about you," I said, reaching over for a smaller branch. It's not often I have to use a ladder, but these were pretty far up.
"She's a sweetheart, no doubt about that."
"Well, we appreciate it, me and Rose, all the stuff you've done for her."
"It's good for me," she said. Alice pulled on her braid for a while and then twisted it around her fingers. "There's something that's on my mind, Son," she said.
I looked down at her, but she was staring off toward the back pasture. Alice had gotten big overnight, the way girls around here will do. One day they just look like they've got a little belly and the next morning they're full-blown pregnant. I came down off the ladder. "What's that?"
"Cecilia's been asking me to teach her to swim this summer. I'd told her awhile ago about the lakes down where I'm from in Cadiz. You know Cadiz? Lake Barkley and Kentucky Lake right there together. I told her about how everybody there knows how to swim as soon as they know how to walk and she tells me she doesn't know how to swim and would I promise to teach her." She stopped for a minute and pulled on her hair again. "The thing is, I won't be around this summer, and I'm not sure she understands that. It makes me think that maybe I've done her a disservice, getting so close to her and all."
Alice looked so young standing in that field where everything else was growing alongside of her. I felt like she was just a baby, closer to Sissy in age than a few years younger than Rose. She was a good girl. "What about you?" I said. "Maybe there's been a disservice done to you, too. It won't be so easy giving her up."
Alice smiled. "But that's what we do here," she said. "We give things up. For me it's just a matter of fact, but I'm twenty, Cecilia's five."
I wanted to ask her how she got so smart by twenty, but I guess it was clear enough that she'd had a tough go of things. "It'll be hard for her, no doubt about that, but I think she's better off knowing you than not. I think it would be worse if you pulled away from her now than waiting a couple of months until you had to."
She nodded her head and dug her hands into the small of her back. "Good," she said. "That's what I wanted you to say."
"I'll walk you back," I said.
"Stay with your work. That's all I needed to talk about."
"This tree would be happier if I left it alone."
She nodded her head and we walked back to Saint Elizabeth's without talking. Alice seemed to be concentrating on everything very hard, the field and the sky and the edge of the woods that led to my house. It was almost like she was trying to memorize it all, get it fixed in her mind so that when she was gone she'd have something to remember all this by. I just stayed quiet and left her alone.
"I'm going to go see if Cecilia is up from her nap," Alice said once we got inside.
"Sure," I said. We went our own ways, and I was feeling bett
er for having talked to her, not that I thought things were going to be any easier now, but it seemed better, having them out in the open. I went into the kitchen to get myself a glass of water and found Rose sitting at the kitchen table talking to some woman holding a baby in her arms.
"Son!" Rose said. "Look at this. Angie's here." I had never heard Rose sound so happy about anything.
"Hey, Son," Angie said, and got up and kissed me. Her hair was shorter and combed neatly and she didn't have on any dangling jewelry, but it was Angie all right, still as skinny and wiry. Still looking seventeen.
"How have you been?" I said. I was so happy to see her. Rose and me both had done so much worrying about Angie over the years that we just gave up talking about it.
"Bad for a while, then real good," she said. "It was like I was telling Rose. I was down for so long after I went home. I kept wanting to call but my mother said that I should put the whole thing behind me, you know, past in the past and all of that. Then once I cheered up and I realized that my mother was, as usual, full of shit. I felt embarrassed that so much time had gone by without me calling, so I didn't call because of that. But this is Duane, this is my son." She held the baby up and jiggled him around a little until he looked at me. "I figure a baby is a new start, clean slate. So here I am."
"Angie married Duane," Rose said.
"Who's Duane?"
"This guy I used to go with a long time ago, before I was here. Everything was such a long time ago." She laughed. "God, it's weird being back. You still in the kitchen, Mother Corinne still in her office, pregnant girls still running up and down the halls. Girls are always going to get knocked up," Angie said. "That's just a fact."
"Did Duane ever know"—Rose tilted her head to one side—"about all this?"
"Nope," Angie said. "And he never will. That's why it was hard for me to come and visit. I told him I was visiting a cousin in Lexington. It would be pretty hard to explain that my best friend is someone I met in Saint Elizabeth's if I say I've never been here. I should have called, but I wanted to surprise you. If you're gone, I figure you might as well make a big deal out of coming back."