The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [29]
“I don’t want to be any trouble to you,” he said.
“Trouble?” she said. “I’d still be stranded in a parking lot except for you.”
He grinned then, went to his truck, and came back a few minutes later with a small duffel bag of dark green canvas.
“Someone was watching from a window downstairs. You sure I won’t be causing you any grief, here?”
“That was Lucy Martin,” Caroline said. Phoebe had been stirring, and she took the bottle from its warmer, tested the formula on her arm, and sat down. “She’s a dreadful gossip. Trust me. You just made her day.”
Phoebe wouldn’t drink, however, but began to wail, and Caroline stood, pacing the room, murmuring. Al, meanwhile, got straight to work. In no time at all he had pulled out the sofa bed and made it up, sharp military folds at each corner. When Phoebe finally quieted, Caroline nodded at him and whispered good night. She closed the bedroom door quite firmly. It had occurred to her that Al would be the type to notice the absence of a crib.
During the drive Caroline had been making plans, and now she pulled a drawer from her dresser and dumped its neat contents in a pile on the floor. Then she folded two towels in the bottom and tucked a folded sheet around them, nestling Phoebe amid the blankets. When she climbed into her own bed, fatigue rolled over her like waves, and she slept at once, a hard and dreamless sleep. She did not hear Al snoring loudly in the living room, or the noise of snowplows moving through the parking lot, or the clatter of garbage trucks on the street. When Phoebe stirred, however, sometime in the middle of the night, Caroline was on her feet in an instant. She moved through the darkness as if through water, exhausted and yet with purpose, changing Phoebe’s diaper, warming her bottle, concentrating on the infant in her arms and the tasks before her—so urgent, so consuming and imperative—tasks that now only she could do, tasks that could not wait.
Caroline woke to a flood of light and the smell of eggs and bacon. She stood, pulling her robe around her, and bent over to touch the baby’s tranquil cheek. Then she went to the kitchen, where Al was buttering toast.
“Hey, there,” he said, looking up. His hair was combed but still a little wild. He had a bald spot on the back of his scalp, and he wore a gold medallion on a chain around his neck. “Hope you don’t mind my making myself at home. I missed dinner last night.”
“It smells good,” Caroline said. “I’m hungry too.”
“Well, then,” he said, handing her a cup of coffee. “Good thing I made plenty. It’s a neat little place you’ve got here. Nice and tidy.”
“Do you like it?” she asked. The coffee was richer and darker than she usually made it. “I’m thinking of moving.”
Her own words surprised her, but once they were out, in the air, they seemed true. Ordinary light fell across the dark-brown carpet and the arm of her sofa. Water dripped from the eaves outside. She’d been saving money for years, imagining herself in a house or on an adventure, and now here she was: a baby in her bedroom and a stranger at her table and her car stranded in Versailles.
“I’m thinking of going to Pittsburgh,” she said, surprising herself again.
Al stirred the eggs with a spatula, then lifted them onto plates. “Pittsburgh? Great town. What would take you there?”
“Oh, my mother had family there,” Caroline said, as he put the plates on the table and sat down across from her. It seemed there was no end at all to the lies a person could tell, once she got started.
“You know, I’ve been meaning to say I’m sorry,” Al said. His dark eyes were kind. “For whatever happened to your baby’s father.”
Caroline had half forgotten that she’d made up a husband, so she was surprised to hear in his voice that Al didn’t believe she’d ever had one. He thought she was an unwed mother, she marveled. They