Baptism in Blood(10)

“There was a story about it in the paper,” Carol Lit­tleton was saying. She had a hitch in her voice and a wet smear of tears running down the right side of her face. Maggie found herself wondering, absurdly, why the smear was only on the right side.

“I got the library to subscribe to the papers,” Carol was going on. “My newspaper from home, you know. They’ll do that if you ask them.”

Maggie knew that the library would do this if some­one asked. She was the one who had talked Naomi Brent into instituting the policy. It was a small part of the project Maggie had set for herself since coming back to Bellerton from New York. It was time to modernize this place a little. It was time to drag Bellerton into the new multicultural universe. It was at least time for the people of this town to accept the fact that half of them were now transplants from somewhere else, settling in a town that was both small and within reasonably commuting distance to Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill.

Maggie brushed wiry black hair off her forehead and felt the line of sweat there. The motion made her oddly aware of the thinness of her arm and the fluid way it arched in the air: dancer’s movements, because Maggie had been a dancer once, good enough to get work but not quite good enough to get any more than that. Maggie had been part of Martha Graham’s dance company in New York, a very small part, not a featured principal. She had been on half a dozen television commercials, including one that was still running five years after it had been made, sending her nice but not spectacular residuals. She had even had a small part on General Hospital for a while. Always almost but not quite, Maggie decided, whenever she thought about it. She had come home exactly three hundred sixty-three days be­fore her fortieth birthday. She could read the writing on the wall, so to speak. There were dozens of women like her, almost but not quite, good but not good enough, singing in second-rate lounges and doing off-off-Broadway plays, staying in the city, staying active, going down for the count. Maggie had decided that she didn’t want to be one of them.

Joshua Lake was trying to get all the volumes of the Ignatius Press edition of the works of G. K. Chesterton into a single box. It wasn’t working. Carol Littleton was turning the picture of the Madonna over and over in her hands, and staring at it, as if it were the picture of someone she knew. Maggie went to help Joshua.

“I don’t mean to be rude,” Maggie said over her shoulder, “but there’s a storm coming. We’ve got work to do.”

“I don’t think you’re being rude,” Carol said.

Maggie got a flattened packing box from the pile next to the front desk and popped it into shape.

“The thing is,” Carol said, “it was in the paper. You know. The announcement about the christening. And it made me feel so awful, because I never saw anything about the birth.”

“This is your daughter Shelley you’re talking about,” Maggie said.

“Shelley Littleton Wade.” Carol made it sound like a title. President of the United States. Supreme Pontiff. Boss of all Bosses. “She was pregnant the last time I saw her, but not very pregnant. Four months along. I remember thinking, in the middle of that awful fight, I remember wor­rying that she’d give herself a miscarriage, and then that would be my fault, too. But she didn’t.”

“She must not have,” Maggie agreed.

“But I didn’t see the birth announcement,” Carol continued. “I read every word of that paper every day, and I didn’t see it.”

“Maybe there wasn’t a birth announcement,” Maggie said. “Not everybody sends one to the paper.”

“Maybe she didn’t send one because of me. Maybe she was afraid I’d try to send something to the baby. Or even come to see her. It’s a girl she’s had, did I tell you that?”

“I think you did.”

“Melissa Jeanne. She didn’t name her after me. Not that I would have wanted that. Carol is such an—an ordi­nary kind of name.”

“We should have talked to old man Martin upstairs,” Joshua Lake said. “That would be the best way to do this. Move all the stock up to the second floor.”

“Martin would go through all the titles and reject the ones he thought were full of atheistic humanism,” Maggie said. “He thinks Charles Dickens is full of atheistic hu­manism. Just pack, Joshua.”

Carol sat down in one of the beige metal folding chairs that were scattered around the center of the store. She still had the Madonna in her hands, and her shoulders hunched.

“I wouldn’t try to see the baby when she didn’t want me to,” she said. “I wouldn’t just go to the hospital and visit when I knew Shelley didn’t want me to see her. I’m really not a person like that.”