“Your father will pay for—”
“I don’t want him to pay for, except nursing school if he’s willing. It makes perfect sense. It’s a good field. If you specialize in surgery or crisis pediatrics you can make a pile of money. I can turn it into something else later. It’s a start, Mother.”
“It’s the kind of thing the girls I grew up with did, if they were considered bright. Nursing and teaching. The two main professions for lower-middle-class women.”
“You care too much about class.”
“The world cares too much about class,” Sally said. “What do you think would happen to us, if we did what you want us to do? Do you think we would still have any friends? People would mean well, of course, but it wouldn’t last long. They’d get sick of our poverty and drift off. We’d be—alone out here.”
“We’re going to be just as alone out here if you go to jail for embezzlement,” Mallory said. “You’re not making any sense.”
“I kept thinking I could do it,” Sally said. “I went out there and I played the slots for hours. Hours and hours. I worked so hard. When I was growing up, it was a kind of truism. If you worked hard you got what you wanted. But it didn’t happen this time.”
“I don’t think working the slots is what they meant by working, Mother.”
“No,” Sally said. “I suppose it wasn’t.”
Mallory went back to the stove. She was cooking dinner. That was good. Sally could use something to eat. She hadn’t eaten for hours and hours. She hadn’t wanted to waste the money, in Ledyard, on food.
When she was growing up, the purpose of her life had been clear: to get out, to get free, to escape. If she was going to end up right back where she started, then what had been the point of it all? Had she really had to come to Connecticut to see her daughter train as a nurse, or to live out her life in a little ranch house with a patio out back? Had she really come all this way just to be the person she could have been if she’d stayed at home? Life was a tunnel, that was what she thought Life was a black hole that sucked you in and kept you captive.
Mallory came to the table, bearing a small plate of fried chicken.
“You’d better call Mrs. Grandmere back,” she said. “It’s not going to do you any good to postpone all this until tomorrow.”
2
Ever since Jennifer Crawford had come out to Margaret Anson’s house to pick up Annabel in the Volvo station wagon that served as the family “country” car, she had been nattering—and all the time she had been nattering, Annabel had been trying not to listen. Now that they were at home, the nattering had gotten even worse. Jennifer fussed, that was the problem. Jennifer always fussed. At the moment, she was fussing about the state of Annabel’s sweater, which she thought of as completely inadequate.
“In my day, sweaters were made of wool,” she kept saying. “I don’t know who got this idea to make them from cotton. At least wool sweaters kept you warm.”
Annabel was warm enough. She was almost hot. Toward the end of the time she had spent at Margaret Anson’s house, a woman who had identified herself as a doctor had come along and made her drink two stiff shots of Johnny Walker Black. Annabel had had to swallow them in two swift single gulps, like guys doing divebombers in a bar.
“It’s what they seem to have around this place,” the doctor had said cheerfully. “At my house, all we have is beer.”
Truthfully, Annabel couldn’t quite understand why she wasn’t drunk. She thought she ought to be flying. Instead, she was just a little hot, and desperately tired. She just didn’t want to sleep. Every time she allowed her eyes to close, she saw Margaret Anson’s face, in death, with the eyes bugged out and the neck at that uncomfortable tilt. She put out her hand again to touch the body and felt that it was already cold. What she couldn’t get out of her mind was the really important question. She wanted to know if Kayla had felt like that, too, when she was dead.
“I’ve been thinking,” Jennifer said now. “Maybe we ought to go back into the city for the rest of the fall. You’re coming out in the city as well as here. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be in Manhattan.”
“I’m all right,” Annabel said.
“Well, yes, sweetie, I know you are. It’s not that I don’t think you’re all right. It’s me, really, I guess. I’m sure this has upset you enormously. It’s upset me. And I suppose I don’t really want to be around it while it’s going on.”