The Wednesday Sisters(39)

I told Danny I wanted to publish under Mary Frances, my way of saying that was my dream, to be published, without having to say it directly. He responded with an easy “What about M.F.? Or M. Frances? Men won't realize you're a woman. You'll get more male readers that way.”

Readers. A word Bob had used, too, in that Christmas-party conversation: “Will you meet your readers, or will you be one of these famous recluses people want so badly to know?”

“It's the weirdest thing,” I said, and I hadn't planned to tell Danny this any more than I'd planned to spill my dreams to Bob at that party, but I wanted him to know suddenly, I didn't want to have anything to hide from him. “The first time I met Bob, last December? I told him I was writing. I don't even know why.”

“Bob?”

“Bob Noyce.”

Danny laughed uneasily, with the oddest expression behind his black-rimmed glasses, an expression that looked so like Maggie when she was about to cry. He focused on my page in the typewriter, the carbons flopped forward where I'd been correcting my mistake.

“Bob has that effect on people,” he said, light words, but something in the hesitation before he spoke left me thinking of Bob and his mask designer, the Purple-Jesus-cocktails-and-airplane-views gal. I wondered if she'd fallen in love with Bob, or if it was the image of herself she saw in his mind that had turned her head. I wondered if she was married, if her husband had seen them together. I imagined her husband feeling betrayed by the simple act of his wife having a conversation with Bob, across the room. I wondered if he'd asked what they had talked about, and if she'd answered, and if her husband, seeing how she felt with Bob even if she'd never slept with him, even if she never imagined she would, had gathered his pride and left her, without warning, maybe, without any idea at all why he'd left.





LINDA WAS THE LAST of us to arrive the following Wednesday, and she looked awful. As little as I'd slept that week, she must have slept even less. We all wanted to say something about it, you could see that by the glances we threw each other, but we had promised Linda we wouldn't, and it was one thing to break that promise among ourselves and quite another to do it in front of her.

No one else had written a word that week. “

Okay, we'll read Frankie's, then,” Brett said. Kath, as always, seemed most to have the pulse of what I was trying to do. “I love the nun,” she said. “She just springs to life. She breathes on the page.”

The other Wednesday Sisters agreed, although Linda did say, “She's awfully frank, though, isn't she? Is anyone really that frank?”

Kath suppressed a smile. “I like the theme that's developing here, too, Frankie,” she said. “How the Catholic Church shapes its congregants, especially women. How it herds women down this narrow little path, ties their corsets so tightly they can't catch a breath.”

I nodded as if I had any idea I'd written that.

“And I like Risa, too. I really do,” Kath said, her insistence betraying that she did not like Risa one little bit. “But . . . God knows we all wail the wide Mississippi over the wrongs our men do us—look at me, of course—but I'm not sure about the business with the beau. And her friendship with the nun—”

“You call that friendship?” Linda flung her pen on the table. “She's not the nun's friend at all! She doesn't do anything to prevent her dying. She doesn't even call her, not once!”

“Doesn't telephone?” Ally said in her hushed voice. “But they didn't have—” Then, “Oh.” Followed by, “But you told us not to, Linda.”

Before anyone could respond, little Carrie ran up to Ally, incensed beyond consolation. J.J. had taken a shovel from her and said it was his and she couldn't use it. “It's my shovel,” she wailed—taking us all aback because Carrie rarely said a word, and even when she did it was in the same you-could-barely-hear-her voice Ally had. Then, with a good foot stomp for emphasis, she insisted, “It is, Aunt Ally, it is.”

Silence around the table. Even Linda seemed to have forgotten herself.

Ally inhaled once, deeply, then reached down and tucked Carrie's dark hair gently behind her ears. “It's not your shovel really, honey,” she said, focusing on the girl's long-lashed, uncertain eyes, not meeting any of ours. “We didn't bring any shovels, remember? Your mommy accidentally left your shovels at the beach last weekend. But there are lots of shovels. Look, there's a blue one just sitting there, by Arselia.”

Carrie, though, wanted the red shovel. No other would do. Even if it wasn't hers, she'd been playing with it and she'd just set it down and J.J. took it. He hadn't taken it from her hand, no. But she'd still meant to be using it.