The Patron Saint of Liars (35 page)

"I guess I never thought about it."

Lorraine took my hand and put it on her flat stomach. "Can you believe there's something in there?" she said.

I left her there on the front porch. She said she wanted to see me again, maybe walk into town and have a Coke, and I said sure, but I don't know that I meant it. Something about Lorraine unnerved me. I could still feel the warmth of her skin beneath her dress. She talked to me like any girl would if she was in the desk next to mine. She was like someone asking for answers in the middle of a math test. Even with Sister Bernadette telling her different, she didn't seem to understand I wasn't one of them.

I went past the lobby and the dining room and through the big swinging doors into the kitchen. Sister Evangeline was back in her chair, which Dad had recently moved next to the window. My mother was at the stove, making Cream of Wheat, so Sister must have slept through breakfast. She was the only person that my mother was willing to cook for after a meal had been served.

"Hey," I said, and kissed Sister Evangeline's cheek. "Are you better?"

Sister nodded. "Still a little tired, but the worst is behind me. How about you, angel?"

"Don't change the subject, we're talking about you. What was wrong?"

"She's turned into such a worrier," Sister Evangeline said to my mother.

"She gets it from Son," my mother said.

"There's no telling what was wrong, just a little bedevilment. I'm at an age where it doesn't need to be a thing anymore. My body just goes on holiday, like the banks."

I looked at her hands and saw that one of them was wrapped in gauze. "You cut yourself?" I touched her fingers, which looked nearly as white as the bandage and the white skirt they were resting on.

"This, I don't know. Who cuts themselves in bed? It's nothing big, though. Doesn't hurt." She held up her hand so that it faced me, palm out. "Your mother wrapped it up. Didn't she do a nice job?"

"It looks pretty professional," I said. I ran my fingers along the top of her bandage. Sister Evangeline was my grandmother. She was my aunt and my cousin. I wouldn't think about her age. If anything happened to her, it would be like losing all the family I had outside my parents.

"Mom's teaching me how to drive," I said.

Sister Evangeline beamed. She was like Dad. She took every piece of news that my mother and I were doing something together as a sign of change. "Oh, that's good. Rose loves to drive. That's her hobby, you know, that car. This will be good for her, for both of you."

My mother spooned the cereal into a bowl and brought it over to Sister Evangeline on a tray. "I don't know how teaching Cecilia to drive is going to be good for me," she said.

"It gets you out. It puts the two of you together." Sister Evangeline was always saying things to me and my mother that I could see her saying to either one of us, but not when both of us were in the same room. I looked at my mother, who didn't look at me.

"Eat your breakfast before it gets cold," she said. "You're getting thin, that's half your problem right there. You need to eat more."

"Everything tastes the same these days," Sister Evangeline said, blowing on a spoon of cereal to cool it off. "It's taken all the fun out of it."

"Do you have time for a lesson now?" I asked my mother. It shouldn't have mattered to me, I wasn't doing anything all day, but I wanted to get going. There were things I wanted to know.

My mother looked at her watch. "This is as good a time as any, I guess. You're all right?" she said to Sister Evangeline.

"I'm popular," she said. "There'll be girls in and out of here all day. You two go."

So my mother and I headed off to the car. I didn't say anything on the walk over. I was superstitious. I believed that the secret was to do our talking in the car. Outside of the car we should remain as normal as possible, which is to say, not talk.

I got in on the driver's side, turned the key, and slipped into reverse.

"What are you doing?" my mother said. "The car isn't warm."

"Sorry." I could actually feel my heart beating faster. I checked both my mirrors and sat up straight. I waited until the idle dropped and then I slowly backed out of the garage. Then we were out in the bright field. I went all the way around without saying anything. I tried to look like someone who was concentrating hard on her driving.

"That's good," my mother said.

I went around another half field for good measure. "I've been thinking about your father," I said, keeping my eyes straight in front of me, my speed down.

"My father?"

"Well, yeah. I mean, he would have been my grandfather. I've been thinking about that. I was wondering what his name was."

"Calvin," my mother said.

"How old were you when he died?"

"Three, I guess." My mother straightened out her skirt with her hands. "I used to think about him a lot when I was growing up, when I was your age, but then I stopped. Sometimes, every now and then when I read about someone in the paper who died in a car accident, then I'll wonder about him." She stopped and shook her head. "This is a morbid topic of conversation to have during a driving lesson."

"Did your mother ever get married again?" Every word out of my mouth felt like a step farther out onto the ice. I kept thinking she would tell me to pull the car over and just get out. She would just take her history and her privacy back to the kitchen.

"My mother did get married, but not for a long time." She stopped and thought about it for a minute. "It was almost twenty years, I guess. I'd already left home. It was good for her, though. I think she was happier being married." She leaned her head on her hand.

What I wanted to know about the most was her mother, but I couldn't imagine her ever telling me anything about that. My mother stared out her window, watching the same things go by again and again. I wondered if she was thinking about her father.

"I used to drive a lot," my mother said.

"Where did you go?"

"Anyplace. That was never the point. I just liked going. I used to go anyplace that I could get to in a day."

She trailed off and was quiet for a while. I didn't so much care about my mother's driving, but I wanted her to keep talking. "Where was the best place you ever went?"

"I drove all the way to Carmel from San Diego once. That was pretty great. I rented a hotel room by myself and sat on the bed for about five minutes, and then I checked out and drove all night to get home again. It was a stupid thing to do. I was so tired by the time I came in. But I think about that hotel room all the time. It was so nice. There was a bed near the window and you could open the shutters and look at the ocean. Carmel-by-the-Sea, that's the full name of the town. Do you ever wonder why you remember some things so well and not others?"

"Sure," I said, but I never had.

"You asking about my father makes me think of that. I don't remember him, but I could tell you everything about this hotel room I stayed in for five minutes eighteen years ago. There was a wood floor with a blue braided rug. Brass bed, white chenille spread. It was room number twelve. Why in the world would I know that?"

I felt like she was really asking me, and I didn't know what to tell her. "Maybe it was a lot of fun," I said.

"It was," she said, looking out her window. "It was fun." We were quiet for a while, and I knew that pretty soon it was going to be over for the day, and maybe tomorrow she wouldn't be talking. I wanted her to tell me everything. "I've about had it with this field," my mother said. "I think it's time we branched out a little."

I stopped the car and turned to face her. "Where do you want to go?"

"I don't know," she said. "It doesn't really matter. Let's just get on the road."

"Road driving?"

"Sure." She reached over to me and for some reason I jumped back. It caught me off guard. "God, you're nervous," she said, and looped a piece of my hair behind my ear.

I pulled the car onto the dirt road that ran from my mother's house down to Saint Elizabeth's and out onto the Green River Parkway. We passed my father and I waved to him from my open window.

"I'm driving, Dad!" I called out, and he waved back.

I pulled up behind Saint Elizabeth's and stopped again. "Let's get Sister Evangeline," I said. "She never goes anyplace. Let's take her with us."

"Wait here," my mother said, and got out of the car. She ran up the front steps and I waited for her, the car idling. I was as happy at that moment as I could ever remember being in my life. I slapped the steering wheel with my palm and turned on the radio, but I couldn't get anything to come in.

Then my mother was there, holding Sister Evangeline in her arms like a bundle of laundry. Her arms were around my mother's neck. "Open the door," my mother said.

I got out and ran around to the other side of the car. Sister got in herself, and my mother leaned over and got her settled. Then my mother and I got back in. We were laughing, the way girls laugh when they're doing something bad. It wasn't bad, but it felt that way.

"Look at this," Sister Evangeline said as I pulled out onto the road. "Cecilia driving."

"You bet," I said.

"Where are we going?" she asked, leaning forward for an answer.

"Nowhere," my mother called back loudly so that the sound of her voice wouldn't all fly out the window and onto the road.

3

M
Y FATHER
walked in the front door just as
I
was getting ready to go out. His face was covered in blood. His hands stayed at his eyes. He kept wiping them over and over again just to see for a second. His white shirt was dyed red, starting at the neck. It was soaking down, making the bib of his overalls a dark blue-brown. There was blood in his hair and on his shoes. He took one step inside the house, realized that he was getting blood on the floor, and stepped back out onto the porch. I didn't know whose blood it was at first. It didn't occur to me for a full minute that it could have been his.

"Dad?" I said, and held out my arms to him. He wiped his eyes again and again, trying to see me there. He cocked his head to one side. He looked like he almost remembered me. Like he couldn't quite place my face.

"Cecilia?" he said.

Then he fainted there on the porch. He didn't go over straight, he just sort of folded, sank to his knees and then to his hands and then fell over to one side. He turned over a chair on his way down, one that he'd been working on refinishing in the evenings. He'd been holding onto the back of it to help him stand up. It wasn't until my father said my name that I could really register what was going on, how bad it was. My father had never called me Cecilia in his life.

I started doing a million things at once. I squatted down beside him and then stood up again. I pulled his legs out from under him so he was lying flat on his back. I touched the top of his head. I ran inside and took three pillows off the sofa and put them under his head. I ran into the kitchen and then just stood there for a minute, looking around, trying to find something that would help. I looked at the teakettle and the potholders hanging over the stove. I looked at the tablecloth. I saw the blood on my fingers and wiped it off on my shorts. I got a glass of water. I took the dishtowel off the refrigerator door and wet it, then I started to go outside again. I came back and pulled the tablecloth off the table, sending the blue china sugar bowl flying halfway across the room. When it broke the sugar swept over the floor like a layer of frost.

I ran back to my father and put the glass of water beside him. The red was working its way across the pillows now, turning all the flowers and leaves a darker color. I wiped his face with the dishtowel. The blood had caked at the corners of his mouth and around his eyes. His forehead was cut clean across in a straight line and the blood was still pulsing from the edges of the cut. I couldn't imagine where he had cut himself like this, if he had fallen and hit his head on the front steps, if there had been an accident. I lifted up his head in my hand. It was so much heavier than I thought it would have been and that's when I first realized I couldn't move him inside. My father was the one who picked people up. Always when a girl's time came and she felt she couldn't walk, my father carried her to the car. He carried me everywhere when I was little. I saw him picking up Sister Evangeline in her chair and moving her across the room like it was nothing. But who in the world could carry him? I slid the tablecloth under his head and wrapped it around like a towel, making it as tight as I could. Maybe it hurt him, because he raised up his head and opened his eyes a little.

"Lie still," I said, even though he wasn't trying to go anywhere.

"You all right?" he said.

I nodded. He was asking me because I was crying.

He took hold of my hand. "Get your mother," he said. But I just sat there, stupid. "Go," he said.

At the word go I was up like a shot, running down the front steps. I slipped on something wet and came down hard on the path, on my knees and one hand. The gravel dug into my skin and I tried to get up again. I was clawing at the steps to get up and then a second later was running on the goat trail that connects our house to Saint Elizabeth's. I was running as fast as I had ever run anywhere in my life. I wasn't wearing my shoes.

I came up the steps of the back porch and through the door like a shot. I came into the kitchen wild, out of breath, yelling for my mother.

"Cecilia!" Sister Evangeline said.

"Where's Mom!" My voice was so loud. It had to be loud enough to be heard over my breath.

"What's happened to you?"

"Dad fell," I said, though I didn't know if he had fallen. "Dad's hurt."

"Your mother isn't here." She stood up, shaky, and came to me. "She's gone with Mother Corinne and Sister Bernadette to take some girls to the doctor." She took my hand and turned it over, palm up. When she touched it I sucked my breath in. A pain went all the way up my arm. "Call an ambulance," she said.

I went to the phone by the door and dialed the hospital in Owensboro. We all knew the number. Girls had babies around here every day. We all knew the number by heart.