The memory keeper's daughter - Kim Edwards [44]
“Is it bad?” she asked. “It sounds just awful. Should I get the car?”
“I don’t think so. But could you shut the door? The steam helps.”
Doro pushed the door shut and sat on the edge of the tub.
“We woke you,” Caroline said, Phoebe’s soft breath against her neck. “Sorry.”
Doro shrugged. “You know me and sleep. I was up anyway, reading.”
“Anything interesting?” Caroline asked. She wiped at the window with the cuff of her robe; moonlight fell into the garden three floors below and shone like water on the grass.
“Science journals. Dull as dust, even for me. Sleep being the goal.”
Caroline smiled. Doro had a PhD in physics; she worked in the university department her father had once chaired. Leo March, brilliant and well-known, was now in his eighties, physically strong but subject to lapses of memory and sense. Eleven months ago, Doro had hired Caroline as his companion.
A gift, this job: she knew that. She had emerged from the Fort Pitt tunnel onto the high bridge over the Monongahela River, emerald hills rising out of the river flats, the city of Pittsburgh gleaming suddenly before her, immediate, vivid, so startling in its vastness and its beauty that she had gasped and slowed, afraid of losing control of the car.
For one long month she had lived in a cheap motel on the edge of town, circling want ads and watching her savings dwindle. By the time she’d come to this interview, her euphoria had turned into dull panic. She rang the bell and stood on the porch, waiting. Bright yellow daffodils swayed against the overgrown spring grass; next door, a woman in a quilted housecoat swept soot from her steps. The people at this house had not bothered; Phoebe’s car seat rested on the gritty accumulation of several days. Dust like blackened snow; Caroline’s footprints were stark and pale behind her.
When Dorothy March, tall and slender in a trim gray suit, finally opened the door, Caroline ignored her wary glance at Phoebe, lifted the car seat, and stepped inside. She took a seat on the edge of an unsteady chair, its wine-velvet cushions faded to pink except for a few dark places near the upholstery studs. Dorothy March sat down across from her, on a couch of cracked leather supported on one end by a brick. She lit a cigarette. For several moments she studied Caroline, her blue eyes quick and alive. She did not say anything right away. Then she cleared her throat, exhaling smoke.
“Quite frankly, I wasn’t counting on a baby,” she said.
Caroline pulled out her résumé. “I’ve been a nurse for fifteen years. I’d bring a great deal of experience and compassion to this position.”
Dorothy March took the papers in her free hand and studied them.
“Yes, you do seem to have a lot of experience. But it doesn’t say here just where you’ve worked. You are not at all specific.”
Caroline hesitated. She had tried a dozen different answers to this question at a dozen different interviews in these last weeks, and they had all come to nothing.
“That’s because I ran away,” she said, nearly giddy. “I ran away from Phoebe’s father. And so I can’t tell you where I’m from, and I can’t give you any references. That’s the only reason I don’t already have a job. I’m an excellent nurse, and you’d be lucky to get me, frankly, given what you’re offering to pay.”
At this Dorothy March gave a sharp, startled laugh. “What a bold statement! My dear, it’s a live-in position. Why in the world would I take such a chance on a perfect stranger?”
“I’ll start now for room and board,” Caroline persisted, thinking of the motel room with its peeling wallpaper and stained ceiling, the room she could not afford to keep another night. “For two weeks. I’ll do that, and you can decide.”
The cigarette had burned to nothing in Dorothy March’s hand. She looked at it, then ground it out in the overflowing ashtray.
“But how would you manage?” she mused. “And with a baby too? My father is not a patient man. He will not be a patient patient, I assure you.”
“A week,” Caroline had replied.