The Personal History of Rachel DuPree_ A Novel - Ann Weisgarber [27]
Mama loved to tell stories about the Palmer Hotel. It was ten stories high and had a long view of the lake. Shiny black horse cabs waited out front to take the white gentlemen guests to the downtown skyscrapers. Sometimes it was their wives, wrapped in furs, what rode in the cabs. These women shopped in the department stores and when they wore themselves out doing that, they had afternoon tea in the hotel dining room. Dinners on silver trays were delivered to their rooms at seven, and later the gentlemen and their wives left together, that time wearing evening clothes for the theater.
When we moved to Chicago, it took Mama just one day to find her job at the Palmer. After Sue finished the tenth grade, she went to work with Mama deep in the basement far below the guest rooms. Not me. I had to have windows. My first job was rolling pie crusts in a Michigan Avenue bakery. I was almost fourteen. But before I had to quit school, I liked meeting Mama at the end of the day so we could walk home together. I waited for her beside the department store catty-corner to the hotel. In the winter, I hunched up inside my wool coat and pulled my hands high up into my sleeves. There, I watched the doorman in his red velvet cape sweep guests in and out of the hotel’s yellow-gilded tall front doors.
“Liz,” I called as the three of us left the outhouse. “Your turn.” She was nowhere to be seen. I called again. Still no answer. That rubbed me wrong. Liz knew better than to go off without telling me. The Badlands was a dangerous place for children. They could lose their bearings and get lost, they could fall into a narrow slit in the earth, or they could, like our Isaac Two, slip from a low boulder.
“Where’s Liz?” Alise said. The look she gave me said she hoped Liz would get a spanking. She wouldn’t be disappointed.
I looked around as we walked up to the house. Star and High Stepper had wandered to the cottonwood and stood switching their tails at flies. Jerseybell was gone; Liz must have gone off to help Mary move her to another patch of grass. She was always trailing after Mary. Maybe Liz had called through the outhouse door asking permission, and I hadn’t heard her. Maybe she hadn’t had to use the outhouse after all. No matter. She was still going to hear about it.
Alise and Emma went back to playing with their rag dolls under the table. I stirred what was left of the beans, not wanting any of them to stick to the bottom of the pot. I looked out the window and my heart nearly stopped. Mary was in the near west pasture putting cow chips in the wheelbarrow. I pressed closer to the window. Mary was alone.
I went outside and waved her in.
“Isn’t she with you?” Mary said when I asked about Liz.
My chest seized up. “Look in the barn and the root cellar. I’ll look in the dugout and the outhouse.”
I went back into the house, told Alise and Emma to get their dolls and come with me. “Why?” Alise said.
I said, “Never mind, just do it.” I yanked them up by their arms, hurried them into their room, told them to be good. I was scaring them but I didn’t care. Without another word, I latched them in and rushed off to the dugout the next rise over. Likely that was where Liz was. In good years, during planting and harvest seasons, Isaac hired a few of the boys what rode the train west to find work, and we put them up in the dugout. We kept beds there, and Liz was probably hiding under one of them.
Halfway up the rise, I had to slow down. Winded, I tried to pull in some air, but I couldn’t get much. The baby took up all the space in my belly and chest. My breath came out in short puffs.
“Liz?” I called when I finally got to the dugout. Nothing. I knew she couldn’t be there—the cobwebs in the doorway hadn’t been torn—but I went in anyway. She could have gotten in somehow. I called again as I looked in the kitchen and in the two bedrooms. She wasn’t there.
I hurried out of the dugout. She better not be hiding in the outhouse thinking that’d be the last place I’d look. The little girls knew they weren’t allowed in there alone. The larger hole