Ginny put Tiffany into her Snugli carrier and slipped the carrier on her back.
“You take care now,” she told him. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
It was morning, but David didn’t bring that up. It was barely eleven o’clock. He watched Ginny leave the study and all the while he was wondering what fool nonsense Zhondra Meyer and her band of merry ladies were getting up to up at the camp.
2
THE TEMPERATURE DROPPED SHARPLY at just about eleven o’clock, but Rose MacNeill didn’t notice it. Rose MacNeill was having a hot flash, the worst she’d had yet, and to make sure nobody caught her at it she had locked herself in the little storage room that had once been the kitchen pantry of her big Victorian house. It was the only Victorian house in all of Bellerton, North Carolina. All the other big houses in town were pre-Civil War Greek revival. There was a little square window in the pantry that Rose could look out of, down Main Street to the old Episcopal Church. She could see the trees being bent by the wind. She could see Maggie Kelleher nailing boards across the plate glass windows of her bookshop and Charlie Hare folding up the plywood display tables he usually kept feed and fertilizer on. Rose had known both of these people all their lives, and most of the rest of the people in town as well, and it suddenly struck her that she hated them all with a passion.
There was a plaque hanging on the wall next to the little square window that said: Jesus Loves You. Out on the street, Jim Bonham stopped to help Maggie Kelleher with her boards. Bobby Marsh went by without talking to anybody. Rose closed her eyes and pressed her forehead against the wall. Her head hurt. Her whole body was hot. She could feel rivers of sweat running down the sides of her spine. She had spent her entire life in Bellerton, North Carolina, and all she had ever really wanted to do was get out. Even back in high school, when she was president of the best school sorority and the steady date of the nicest boy in town, all she had been able to think about was other places, other people, going north to live in New York City or out over the ocean to stay in Paris. Instead, she had stayed here to be safe. She had learned to wear very high heels with very tight skirts and to pin her blond hair into a French twist. She wore enameled tin pins on her dresses that said things like Let Go and Let God.
She was supposed to be safe.
Once she stopped feeling hot, she was suddenly cold. She stepped away from the window and squinted through the glass. Maggie Kelleher was mostly done with her window. Bobby Marsh was gone. Jim Bonham was talking to Charlie Hare. Rose wondered where all the rest of them were. Had they all taken care of their places early, and ridden out to stay with relatives inland? And what about those women up at the camp? They didn’t have any relatives. That was why they were up at the camp. That was what the paper said. Rose thought for a moment of the women up there. Then she tried to think of what they did with each other, and her mind went blank. Lesbians. The word was a hard crystal rock in Rose’s head. There didn’t used to be lesbians in places like Bellerton, North Carolina. Rose had been nearly forty before she even knew what the word meant. There were lesbians here now, though, and an atheist, too, and with all the publicity they got, Bellerton was getting to be famous. For all the wrong things.
There was a sharp rap on the pantry door.
“Rose?” Kathi Nelson asked. “Are you in there? I need to talk to you.”
Kathi Nelson was Rose’s assistant in the shop. She was seventeen years old and not very bright—and not very popular, either. Rose would have preferred to hire the kind of girls she had been herself at seventeen, but those girls didn’t come asking for jobs in a Christian gift shop. Those girls took cram courses for the Scholastic Aptitude Test and went away to Chapel Hill for college. Things had changed a lot since Rose’s day, when a girl who wanted to go away to college was assumed not to want to get married at all, ever, no matter what.
“Rose?” Kathi asked again.
Rose pulled herself away from the little square window. She was surrounded by shipping boxes: one thousand blue enamel angel pins; thirty-four engraved brass desk plaques reading Christ Is the Only Answer You Need; forty-two copies of a book called Help, Lord! The Devil Wants Me Fat! Rose shook her head, hoping to clear her eyes. She didn’t want to rub them, because she had makeup on them and she didn’t want to smear it.
“I’m here,” she called out to Kathi. “I’ll be right out.”
“Are you feeling okay, Miss MacNeill? Is there anything I can get for you?”
“I’m fine.”
“Lisa Cameron came in here just a little while ago and bought that great big angel statue to take to her niece’s christening—can you imagine? In this weather. In my church, we don’t believe in people getting baptized until they’re all grown up and know what they’re doing. I mean, what does a little baby know about resisting the snares of the Devil?”