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By Root 614 0

of duplicity; she had been drawn into dark places of the soul. In the cause of the greater good she saw that she had been sucked into wickedness. It did not come easily to her, she had no experience of deception and – vulnerable – she succumbed to the long sickness that follows a fall from grace. Where she had secretly hoped for a sense of purpose, the moral glow of a sacrificial act – to care for another woman’s child – she found that words could be more dangerous than blows, that nightmares can be experienced in waking hours, that one damn thing leads to another, though her mother would have told her to wash out her mouth for using such a word. She learned that guilt does not lessen with time.

Caring for the child was easy; giving him all the affection she could muster was more difficult. She told herself he was part of Ben, and she loved Ben, so she must also love his son, though there were moments when Joey turned his head to one side, when he flicked his eyes or turned down his mouth in a certain way that had nothing to do with Ben, when Nancy found herself fighting off disloyal thoughts.

But that was the least of it. The worm at the heart of her happiness, the barrier to her finding peace was the fact from which all the rest sprang: Nancy had lied. She watched herself as she talked and talked, spinning a lie that had seemed necessary at the time, a small transgression for the greater good. And then, faced with a situation beyond her imagining, she had lied to Ben.

Inside her head, over and over, she saw the paper house, the figure in a white robe, the child screaming. In true Methodist tradition she had felt herself to be embracing a good deed; words were her means to achieve the necessary end. But words led to action, and nothing was the way she had planned.

As a child she modelled herself on the good girls in Little Women but here she was, all grown, and she found she was living a story that was closer to Nathaniel Hawthorne. She was suffused with guilt.

Her parents met her at the dockside. Waving, smiling, they looked with interest at the child in her arms, a child who presumably belonged to someone on the boat. And then Nancy, reaching for words she had rehearsed, rewritten, reshaped, could find nothing more satisfactory than, ‘Ma, Pa, this is Joey, Ben’s boy.’ She set him down on the dockside and took his hand.

A handful of everyday words which in one breath smashed the pretty picture – fairytale romance, white wedding, honeymoon – with the finality of a boot on a beetle. Her mother stared at the blue-eyed, blond child, silenced, bewildered. Her father was quicker off the mark.

‘You taking him on?’

She nodded.

Louis looked down at the boy. ‘So. You’re Joey, right? Well, kid, I’m called Louis, but to you, I’m Gramps.’

He picked up the boy and turned to his wife: ‘Mary, let’s get these people home.’

What’s done is done.

When Nancy was out of earshot he shook his head and told his wife that Ben had clearly got himself into a pretty mess.

‘I hadn’t figured that young man for a fool, but—’

‘We can’t be sure what happened.’

Louis tilted his head. ‘Mark Twain said some circumstantial evidence is pretty strong, like for instance when you find a trout in the milk.’ He looked out at Nancy introducing Joey to the unknown territory of an American yard.

‘I guess we have the trout here.’

Mary called to the boy, ‘Joey! D’you like lemonade?’

He looked up at her consideringly with blue eyes that were, and were not, the same as Ben’s.

‘I don’t know. What is it?’

‘You’ll find out, I’m about to make some. You can help me squeeze the lemons.’

‘What is s-ukweeze?’

Louis murmured, ‘Oh boy, this is gonna take a miracle.’

‘No,’ Mary said, ‘just time.’ She beckoned the boy. ‘Okay, let’s you and me squeeze.’

To Nancy’s relief, her parents asked few questions. With old friends it was more difficult; there was the need to explain the presence of a child who looked too much like Ben for there to be any way around the fact of fatherhood. A story was devised – a tale of a faraway, long-ago romance, a marriage cut tragically