The Patron Saint of Liars (25 page)

"Cecilia's been asking me to teach her to swim this summer. I'd told her awhile ago about the lakes down where I'm from in Cadiz. You know Cadiz? Lake Barkley and Kentucky Lake right there together. I told her about how everybody there knows how to swim as soon as they know how to walk and she tells me she doesn't know how to swim and would I promise to teach her." She stopped for a minute and pulled on her hair again. "The thing is, I won't be around this summer, and I'm not sure she understands that. It makes me think that maybe I've done her a disservice, getting so close to her and all."

Alice looked so young standing in that field where everything else was growing alongside of her. I felt like she was just a baby, closer to Sissy in age than a few years younger than Rose. She was a good girl. "What about you?" I said. "Maybe there's been a disservice done to you, too. It won't be so easy giving her up."

Alice smiled. "But that's what we do here," she said. "We give things up. For me it's just a matter of fact, but I'm twenty, Cecilia's five."

I wanted to ask her how she got so smart by twenty, but I guess it was clear enough that she'd had a tough go of things. "It'll be hard for her, no doubt about that, but I think she's better off knowing you than not. I think it would be worse if you pulled away from her now than waiting a couple of months until you had to."

She nodded her head and dug her hands into the small of her back. "Good," she said. "That's what I wanted you to say."

"I'll walk you back," I said.

"Stay with your work. That's all I needed to talk about."

"This tree would be happier if I left it alone."

She nodded her head and we walked back to Saint Elizabeth's without talking. Alice seemed to be concentrating on everything very hard, the field and the sky and the edge of the woods that led to my house. It was almost like she was trying to memorize it all, get it fixed in her mind so that when she was gone she'd have something to remember all this by. I just stayed quiet and left her alone.

"I'm going to go see if Cecilia is up from her nap," Alice said once we got inside.

"Sure," I said. We went our own ways, and I was feeling better for having talked to her, not that I thought things were going to be any easier now, but it seemed better, having them out in the open. I went into the kitchen to get myself a glass of water and found Rose sitting at the kitchen table talking to some woman holding a baby in her arms.

"Son!" Rose said. "Look at this. Angie's here." I had never heard Rose sound so happy about anything.

"Hey, Son," Angie said, and got up and kissed me. Her hair was shorter and combed neatly and she didn't have on any dangling jewelry, but it was Angie all right, still as skinny and wiry. Still looking seventeen.

"How have you been?" I said. I was so happy to see her. Rose and me both had done so much worrying about Angie over the years that we just gave up talking about it.

"Bad for a while, then real good," she said. "It was like I was telling Rose. I was down for so long after I went home. I kept wanting to call but my mother said that I should put the whole thing behind me, you know, past in the past and all of that. Then once I cheered up and I realized that my mother was, as usual, full of shit. I felt embarrassed that so much time had gone by without me calling, so I didn't call because of that. But this is Duane, this is my son." She held the baby up and jiggled him around a little until he looked at me. "I figure a baby is a new start, clean slate. So here I am."

"Angie married Duane," Rose said.

"Who's Duane?"

"This guy I used to go with a long time ago, before I was here. Everything was such a long time ago." She laughed. "God, it's weird being back. You still in the kitchen, Mother Corinne still in her office, pregnant girls still running up and down the halls. Girls are always going to get knocked up," Angie said. "That's just a fact."

"Did Duane ever know"—Rose tilted her head to one side—"about all this?"

"Nope," Angie said. "And he never will. That's why it was hard for me to come and visit. I told him I was visiting a cousin in Lexington. It would be pretty hard to explain that my best friend is someone I met in Saint Elizabeth's if I say I've never been here. I should have called, but I wanted to surprise you. If you're gone, I figure you might as well make a big deal out of coming back."

That was when Alice and Sissy came in. "Mommie, Alice and me are going to have tea on the porch."

"Alice and I," Alice said.

"Not just yet. Come here and say hello to my friend Angie, Mrs.... What is your name now?"

"Tyler," Angie said absently.

"Mrs. Tyler. Mrs. Tyler and I were friends before you were born."

Sissy came up and looked at the baby carefully. He was a good baby, quiet and settled like she had been.

"She's so big," Angie whispered. "I never thought she'd be so big already."

"You'll see," Rose said. "That's the way it goes."

"Maybe we should go on outside," Alice said. "What do you say, give the grown-ups some time to talk."

"Wait a minute," Angie said. She gave Duane to Rose and got down on the kitchen floor on her knees. She took the barrette out of Sissy's hair and smoothed it down with her fingers, then clipped the barrette back into place. "There," she said. Her voice was shaking a little. "Now you look better."

Sissy touched her hair.

"What do you say?" Rose said.

"Thank you," Sissy said. She looked at Duane again. "Bye, baby." She started to go and then stopped, suddenly remembering why she had come in in the first place. "Can I sleep with Alice tonight?"

"Here?" I said. "All night?"

"It's okay," Alice said.

"No," I said. "I don't want you over here all night."

"Sister Bernadette said yes. She said yes if it was just once," Sissy said.

"Fine," Rose said. "As long as Alice doesn't mind."

Alice and Sissy went out through the back door and Angie stayed on the floor for a few more minutes. I turned to say something to Rose, but Angie beat me to it. "I never thought about her getting big like that," she said, but not really to anyone. Then she shook her head and smiled at Rose. "She must look just like Thomas, 'cause she sure doesn't look a thing like you."

The words hung in the air for a minute, and none of us knew for sure what to say. Rose turned her face toward the baby, but I don't think she saw him. Then finally Duane started to fuss a little and Angie took him back and everything went back to the way it was before.

"I'll let you two alone," I said. "I know you have a lot of catching up to do."

"It was good to see you," Angie said. "I think about you, Son. You were so nice to me, that night you drove me to the hospital. I never thanked you for that."

"Don't think about that," I said, but I didn't just mean that. I meant everything. Don't think about any of it. I kissed her again and touched the baby's cheek and headed outside, back out to the field to pick up the branches of the sycamore tree.

All the way there I heard his name. It was better before, when I didn't know his name.

Angie and Rose stayed late in the kitchen that night and Sissy was with Alice and I went home and felt sorry for myself. Being alone is something you have to be good at to enjoy and over the last five years I had forgotten how. I started to pull out the couch to make up Cecilia's bed, and then saw what I was doing and felt foolish. I decided I would build her a bedroom as soon as I was sure the spring rains were over. Her own room on the side of the house. She was getting too big for sleeping on the couch and as little as any of us were home we never saw the sense in moving. I didn't like being home without her, and I was mad at Rose for letting her go so easy.

I heated up some soup for dinner and ate it standing up next to the sink. Then I washed my bowl and went on to bed.

When Rose came in I woke up, even though she was trying to be quiet. "Is it late?" I asked her. I was glad I was up, I wanted to tell her about Sissy, that she should care a little bit about where she was spending the night.

"Not too bad," she said. "Midnight."

"Angie's driving back this late?"

"She called Duane, she told him she was having fun so he told her to stay awhile." Rose's voice sounded light and girlish. I watched her take her dress off in the dark. She sat down beside me on the edge of the bed, wearing her panties and a bra. "We had such a good time," she said, and put her hand over my hand. "I had forgotten how nice it was to have—" but she didn't finish her sentence. She ran her hand absently up and down my arm. "Did you miss me?" she said. "I did."

"That's good to know." She looked at me lying in the bed. She ran her finger up my arm and down the center of my chest. "I said good night to Cecilia. I tucked her in. Alice's roommate had her baby, so Cecilia had her own bed. She said, tell Daddy good night." She put both hands flat out on my chest and leaned toward me. I watched her breasts curve down into her bra. I watched the way they moved with her breath. I thought of how I had been alone a few hours before and now here Rose was, with her hair falling forward on her face, close enough that I could smell the warmth of her. I put my hand back behind her neck and brought her face to mine.

So many girls came and went over the years, after a while it seemed like everybody only stayed for a few days. You get one of their names, and the next time you think to ask someone says she's been gone two weeks already. I wished I was better at this. I used to be.

Alice managed to slow time down. We all got used to her, came to like having her around. But by June it was clear she wasn't going to be there much longer. I tried to tell Sissy, Alice tried. We explained to her about the baby and that when it came Alice would have to go just like everybody else, but Sissy wouldn't hear it. It was summer and she was running all over the place. It was hot that first week in June and Alice had to stay inside near a fan. The weather made her sick, her ankles were swollen. She was sad in her last weeks, as if she suddenly understood after all that time what she was there for. Sometimes when she watched Sissy from the window she looked like she was going to cry, even though Alice wasn't the kind of girl you'd think of as crying.

"I want you to have my parents' address," she said to me one afternoon. "Write me a letter every once in a while and let me know how she's doing. This place is hell," she said, printing out the street name on the back of an envelope. "Who would of thought I'd want to stay on?"

Alice left in the middle of that same night with Sister Bernadette and Sister Serena.

Rose and I talked it over at breakfast. "We have to tell her now," Rose said, "before she starts asking where she is."

I twisted a napkin up in my hands. "She's going to be so hurt."

"It's not you hurting her. It's not anybody hurting her. This is the way things go around here."

Sissy came in and looked around. "I can't find Alice," she said.

"Come here," Rose said. Sissy came over to the table, and Rose pulled her up into her lap. "Alice had her baby last night."

Sissy's face lit up. "When are we going to see it?"

"We can't," Rose said. "Alice is gone. You knew that she would have to leave once the baby was born."

"She's coming back," Sissy said.

"She can't, sweetie. That's the way the nest works. You knew that."

Sissy looked horrified, like you do the first time you lose something in your life, the first time you understand that things can be lost. "She's upstairs," Sissy said, and was up in a flash, but I caught her with one wide sweep of my arm. She buried her face in my chest and cried, worse than she had as a baby, worse than she ever did with a fever. Her back heaved up again and again against my shirt and I rocked her and made clucking sounds. "Alice isn't gone," she sobbed.

"Alice is fine," I said. "She's A-number-one-okay. She just had to go with the baby." I wanted to eat her pain, take it into me and make it my own.

"I want her to come back," she cried.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"I want my mother," she cried.

"Here I am, baby," Rose said. "I'm right here."

But when Sissy looked at her she turned her face away. "No," she said, crying like it was the end of all the earth. "I want my mother."

4

I
TRIED TO STAY
in the marines after I was shot. It was almost like somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that things would be worse, even worse than the hospital and doctors, once I got home. The bullet and the knee were nothing compared to what was coming. Remember, this was 1942, when everyone was going off to war, and the ones who came back to their hometowns wounded or crippled came back that way because they'd been fighting, not because they were screwing around on a marine base in the middle of the night.

So the first thing I said when I woke up in the hospital was, how long before I'm healed up and you can ship me over? It was stupid, because I knew the second that gun went off there wasn't going to be any war as far as I was concerned. The military takes their time in these sorts of things. Even when they knew how it was all going to go as clear as I did, they waited a couple of extra weeks to make sure. Or maybe they forgot for a while and then remembered. But finally I got the word and it was medical discharge. The hospital was pretty much empty. I had a whole ward to myself. It was so early in the war, guys hadn't been shipped back yet. I lied. I told them I had a feeling that when this thing healed up I was going to be good as new, so why didn't they just keep me around awhile and let me do what I could.

The marines may be slow to make up their minds, but once they do they never changed them. Even if I healed up all the way, they said, the chance of reinjury was too great. The hole in my knee was something that I'd have with me, to one degree or another, for the rest of my life.

And that was true, 'cause my foot turned in some and gave me a limp, but it doesn't bother me now unless the cold turns bitter. Even then, I don't think about it. I know there's some pain in my knee, but I never stop and think about where it came from.