Rosalind (6 page)

Rosalind looked back and forth between the ladies. She didn't know the wisdom of hiding her name, and it wasn't like she was on the run from a crime or something. But she did run from the fire, and the man in the uniform already knew about the fire that killed her family. She pondered the gravity of disclosure, but decided that these women were not like her momma or any man she'd ever encountered in her short life. She wasn't familiar with the word trust, but she was familiar with the concept.

S
he looked at Nancy and said, "Rosalind."

A week had passed since she had watched her family burn to death, but Rosalind did her best to put that out of her mind. Her life at the boarding house had at first been difficult, and every night when she went to bed, she expected to see her father walk through the door and have his way with her.

She hid her morning sickness from Mrs. Peterson the best she could, mainly because she didn't know how to explain it. Her body was changing and she knew it, and deep down she suspected that something was wrong with her, but it wasn't until another week had passed when she sat down with Mrs. Peterson for a sandwich that she came to understand.

"Sheriff Hanes was asking about you. I told him you were doin' just fine. He'd still like to come check on you," she said, swallowing the last of her lemonade.

"Is he go
nna to take me away?" Rosalind asked, putting her last half of the pastrami and mustard sandwich on the plate.

"
No, honey. He just wants to make sure you're okay." That was the second endorsement by as many people she'd heard about the sheriff, and it didn't sound like she had much of a choice in the matter anyway, so she nodded her head.

"But we need to talk about something before he gets here, and trust me, it'll be our little secret," Mrs. Peterson said. Rosalind nodded. "How do I say this?" Mrs. Peterson hemmed and hawed, sipping at lemonade that was long gone and finally put the glass down. "Honey you're pregnant, aren't you?"
Rosalind hung her head like she always did when a difficult question came her way. Mrs. Peterson scooted her chair around and put her hand on her back, just like Rosalind's momma had done the day she killed her father. Mrs. Peterson just looked into the distance and said, "Oh my."

Rosalind knew what pregnant was, but until then, she never made the connection, at least consciously. Subconsciously, however, she knew that the thing that was wrong with her had something to do with what her
father had been doing to her and the sickness she felt every morning. Add to that her mother's reaction when she told her she hadn't gotten her monthly in over forty days, and it was all there in plain sight. She thought about that for a moment and wondered if she had known the whole time, or was it that she was too stupid to make the connection? She didn't try to answer it or analyze the situation. She threw her arms around Mrs. Peterson. Mrs. Peterson hugged her tight and whispered, "It's going to be just fine."

Sheriff Hanes came by that evening, this time in casual clothes. Mrs. Peterson suggested that that might make Rosalind feel more at ease, and she was right. The rest of the tenants had finished the supper that Mary and Rosalind had prepared, a few of them commenting on how tasty the chicken had been and that they'd ne
ver seen French fries quite like that. Mrs. Peterson gave all of the credit to Rosalind. After the last of them had gone upstairs to their rooms, Mary, Rosalind, and the sheriff sat in the living room.

"Mrs. Peterson, would you mind if I helped you with that fire?" he asked, noticing that the embers from the kindling hadn't quite taken. Rosalind
stared at the fireplace. The sheriff noticed.

"That'd be just fine. I'll make us some more lemonade," she replied.

The sheriff huddled over the fireplace, grabbing the fire-iron and rustling the kindling around. He grabbed a long match that sat next to the wood tray and struck it against the brick wall inside the pit. It lit on the first stroke and he lowered it to the wadded up newspapers. They caught on fire instantly and the flames rose high around the few logs that were in there. Rosalind continued to stare almost catatonically at the blaze.

Mrs. Peterson returned with three glasses of lemonade on a
tray. Rosalind took hers and gulped it down, but even though it was sweeter and more tart than any she had ever had at home, it was nothing compared to the Coca-Cola she'd had a week ago at the diner. The fire began to roar and the chill of the room disappeared. Rosalind closed her eyes and let the warmth wash over her.

"So, Rosalind. Mrs. Peterson tells me you're getting' along just fine here," he said.

Rosalind nodded.

"She also tells me you're not much of a talker, but I guess I already knew that."

"She's…she speaks when she needs to. I think that's a quality that a lot of people in the world could use," she said with pride.

"I reckon you're right about that." He sat back down in the winged chair next to the window and took a sip of the lemonade. "Not bad at all," he said, raising his glass. "But there's a little matter we need to discuss.
" Rosalind squirmed in her seat. She didn't know that being pregnant was necessarily a bad thing, but like her father's visits to her bedroom every night of her teenage life, she knew that something was off about it. She knew that the two together might be something even more than off. "There's the matter of your parents, young lady." Mrs. Peterson hadn't told him their secret. She knew she liked her. But a panic grew inside of Rosalind. Did he say parents? Did he suspect that she had a connection to the fire and the family that died in it? Rosalind gripped her glass tight, ignoring how cold it was making her hands. "Mrs. Peterson was kind enough to tell me when I asked that you were old enough to work here on your own. But sixteen is still pretty young in my household. And if it was my daughter, who just so happens to be your age, told me she was leaving or worse, run away without telling me, I'd want to at least know she was safe. So that brings us to it." He settled back and took another swig. "Do you think your parents would want to know you're safe?"

Maybe they would,
she thought.
If they were alive, that is.

She shook her head back and forth.

"Honey, if you don't mind me asking, what's your last name?"

Without thinking about it, and because Mrs. Peterson and Nancy had both said that the sheriff was a good man, she answered him. "Stump. May I be excused?"

Mrs. Peterson nodded and Rosalind darted upstairs, closing her door and locking it from the inside. She'd never had a lock when she lived at home, but she became intimately familiar with the one on her new door.

She ran to the window in her bedroom and looked out at the street, hoping to see the sheriff getting in his car.

Downstairs, the sheriff stood up and looked up at the stairway and then at Mrs. Peterson. The family that had burned to death in the fire a few weeks back had little there to indicate who they were, but after asking around, he'd found out. He was no Sherlock Holmes, but the girl had shown up out of nowhere on the very morning the fire had killed that family, and he knew that she was involved.

He thanked
her for the lemonade and for looking after Rosalind. She replied that Rosalind had become quite an asset around the house, paying for her room and board by doing chores and cooking dinner.

He got in his car and drove away while Rosalind watched him from her
bedroom window.

Joe Hanes jolted upright in his bed and looked furiously around the room. He zeroed in on the clanging sound of metal coming from his nightstand and slammed his hand down on the round button.

The room was quiet.

He wiped the sweat from his face and threw his legs over the side of the bed.

He started to speak, but the cold reality hit him like a bomb. His wife wasn't there anymore. She hadn't been there since she passed four years ago. He reached over and ran his hand across the bedspread where she used to sleep.

When the doctors told her they had found a cyst in her uterus, they were optimistic. It had been the size of a golf ball, but it was a singular mass that they said they could remove without danger of it spreading further into her body. What they didn't know until they performed surgery was that behind the uterine wall lay a much larger mass that had reached her spine and had begun to wrap itself around it. What started out as minor numbness in her back and occasional weakness in her legs ended in lower body paralysis by the time she had started measuring her life in weeks. Words like 'hope' and 'cure' had left her physician's vocabulary and other words like 'acceptance' and 'preparations' had moved in.

On March 3rd
of 1955, Stella Hanes had passed away, and Joe was left to raise their only daughter Betty by himself. She made it easy. She was her father's daughter and her logical demeanor provided more support to Joe than his sympathetic ear had offered her. And after the first year, life in the Hanes household returned to a faint shadow of its previous self.

Joe got dressed and went into the bathroom to shave. A few minutes later, Betty knocked on the door and without a word they switched places with a small hug in the hallway
. They were like a well-oiled, predictable machine of human interaction. They had performed this ritual for the past four years and some mornings they didn't even know they were doing it.

Joe sat down at the kitchen table. Betty grabbed the skillet from the right burner on the stove and brought it over to him, slipping her spatula under an over-easy egg and putting it on his plate. She slipped the last egg onto her own plate and put the skillet back on the burner and turned off the gas. With mechanical grace, she grabbed the two pieces of toast from the toaster that had just jumped out and buttered each one. With a small spoonful of jelly, she spread a conservative layer of purple glaze over each piece, put one in her mouth, and took the other over to her father.

"Thanks," he said. He took a bite of the toast and flipped open the newspaper. Betty poured them both a glass of milk from the glass bottle and sat down in the chair next to her father.

"I have cheerleader tryouts today. I'll get a ride home," she said, finishing her bite of toast.

"Straight home," he replied.

"You're such a square," she said, sulking over her egg.

"That's my job. Do I know them?"

"Who?"

"Whoever is bringing you home."

"Isn't that your job too? To know everyone and everything?"

"It is. So who is it?" 

"I'm sixteen. If mom were here, she'd understand."

For a moment he thought about Rosalind and how different both of the girls were. He thought about how quiet she was and wondered what kind of life she could have had that made her so. He turned his attention back to his daughter. "What's his name?"

"How do you do that?" she said with a laugh.

"I'm a cop," he replied, smiling down at the newspaper.

"His name is William."

"William. Parker?"

"Yes," she
replied, rolling her eyes.

"I know him. Alright, no later than five o'clock young lady."

"But practice ends at 4:30."

"It shouldn't take you thirty minutes to get home from school. That gives you plenty of time to hold hands or whatever it is you kids do. Can you do me a favor?"

"What?" she asked, exasperated.

"Remind him that I carry a gun," he said.

"Very funny."

"No later than 5:30, sweetheart. I'm not kidding about the gun."

She jumped in her seat and clapped her hands. He looked at her as she smiled at him. She reminded him of Stella and he had to conjure the hardest, coldest memory to stop himself from crying.

She put her arms around him. "I love you, daddy."

"I love you too. I'll take you to school."

He dropped Betty off at the high school and started making his way to the station and found himself turned around on Main Street. He had gone the wrong way back to the station and laughed at himself until he saw the Whispering Pines cemetery now sitting on his right. He pulled his cruiser over to the side of the road and into the grass and killed the ignition. He didn't know what had brought him here, but instead of starting the car and going to work, he got out and stood in the gravel drive that separated the graveyard into two sections.

The rows of headstones varied in size and decoration; the older, smaller ones populating most of the right hand side and the larger, more detailed ones residing mostly on the left. He looked at the names on them and saw the history of the town and the county—some of them a solemn reminder that he too would find his rest here like his ancestors before him.
He would be next to his wife. It was a comforting thought on an otherwise difficult morning.

He turned left and walked between the more modern headstones until he came to an ordinary, upright slab of stone that had the
name Hanes on it. His heart fluttered slightly as he knelt down and put his hand on it.