Читать книгу The Used World - Haven Kimmel, Haven Kimmel - Страница 10

“I can’t be late getting home.” Hazel looked at her watch for the fifth time, thrust her hands back into her coat pockets.

“You can’t be late.” Finney’s breath smelled like tea. Sometimes she smelled like sleep or cinnamon, but today it was bergamot and lemon.

“That’s what I said. If we don’t leave here in twenty-seven minutes, it’s all over for Miss Hazel.”

“Well, we don’t want that.” Finney leaned farther over the scrollwork railing of the mezzanine, let her body tip just slightly past the fulcrum of her own weight.

“Hey, how’s about you follow the rule about keeping your feet on the floor.” Hazel tried to sound casual as she grabbed Finney’s coat belt, which was untied and slipped free.

“What I want”—Finney turned and reclaimed her belt—“is to go up, up to the sixth, Women’s Lingerie. Then I want to come down, down, stopping on every floor. Last is the jewelry counter. If I have twenty-seven minutes I’m going to use them.”

Below the girls, the black-and-white-tiled ground floor of Sterling’s Department Store spiraled around the square jewelry counter, so that from Women’s Lingerie, looking over the railing, Hazel knew she would feel an urge to jump. “Women’s Lingerie it is,” she said, taking Finney’s arm and heading for the elevator.

The folding metal door of the elevator closed, cagelike, behind them. In the red velvet interior the air was warm and close. The elevator operator hummed along with Bing Crosby’s Hawaiian Christmas song, which both Hazel and Finney hated. Jerry Hamm, that was the name of the man sitting on a stool in front of the elevator’s controls, but Hazel didn’t acknowledge him, nor did he look at her. He was a patient of her father’s, and there were countless rules of conduct that applied to meeting a patient in public, or at his job. Finney knew him, too, of course, but she ignored him, leaning against the back wall to watch the numbers light up above the doors.

In Women’s Ready-to-Wear, in Household Goods, in Infants and Children, Finney had asked, “Do you want this? Is this on your list?” No, Hazel had answered, and no. Finally, walking toward the jewelry counter with only four minutes to spare, Finney asked, “What do you want for Christmas?”

“A book. I don’t know, something I can keep. Nothing frivolous.”

Finney took a deep breath, rolled her eyes. “I worry about you, Hazey.”

“Really.”

“Yes, I do. I worry that any day now you will tell me you want to write short stories or romances, and then you’ll turn to strong drink.”

“Will I abandon my Christian principles?”

Finney considered the possibility. “You will.”

“Will I die young and tragically?”

“That’s not funny.” Finney ran her fingers over a dozen strands of freshwater pearls, took one off the metal rack and held it to her throat.

Hazel fastened the necklace, gently lifting Finney’s hair. “This looks beautiful on you.”

Finney looked in the square mirror on the counter, turned her jaw to the right and the left in a way that would have never occurred to Hazel. Finney’s camel hair coat was down around her shoulders and her long neck looked more vulnerable than ever, with the pearls lying pale and imperfect against her skin. “I’m not a pearl person.”

“Hmmm. What kind of person are you?”

Finney took three steps away, didn’t answer.

“Anyway, what do you most want for Christmas?” Hazel asked, just as Finney stopped before a display of gold chains.

“Oh, look at this.”

In a blue velvet box were two chains, each chain holding half a heart. On the inside lid of the box were the words MAY GOD WATCH OVER US WHILE WE ARE APART, and carved on the heart itself, ME FROM THEE. Hazel lifted the left half and warmed it in her hand as Finney did the same with the right.

“Do you think,” Finney whispered, leaning close to Hazel, “that he will ever buy me one of these?” She whispered, it seemed to Hazel, because she had lost her voice, like a girl in a fairy tale. It was only a matter of time before a hunter came after Finney’s real, beating heart, or until her legs became the tail of a mermaid, and she vanished. No, the man in question would never, never buy Finney such a necklace; the possibility did not exist on planet Earth or within the bounds of time and space. “Maybe he will,” Hazel said, turning away from the display. “Your four minutes in jewelry are up, Miss Finnamore Cooper.” She used the old nickname as a distraction, but it failed.

“I will be blue until I die,” Finney said, sighing.

Hazel’s stomach knotted into a fist, and she could taste at the back of her throat the coffee they’d had at lunch. She reached into Finney’s bag and pulled out her muffler, wrapped it around Finney’s neck as they walked past the great Christmas tree beside Sterling’s revolving doors. “Bundle up,” she said, tucking the end of the scarf into Finney’s coat.

Finney smiled, said, “You do the same.”

They’d grown too mature for hats, so they walked close together, heads bent against the bitter December wind, across the street to the parking lot and Albert Hunnicutt’s late-model, sleek black Cadillac. Tomorrow Hazel would return for the necklace, she knew, and she would give it to Finney signed with her own name. Hazel would never pretend it had come from someone else. Finney would accept the gesture as she always had, for years and years now, as long as Hazel could remember. Finney would wear her half of the heart as if it mattered to her as it did to Hazel, and only someone who really knew her, only a best friend, would see the unease and disappointment on her face. It was just metal, after all, and probably hollow at that.

“Admit that you’re a brat.”

“Captain Brat.”

“General Brat.”

Hazel and Finney tormented little Edna until she was nearly in tears—this happened every time they baby-sat—then gave her what she’d asked for.

“I’ll tell Mama,” Edna said, sitting at the kitchen table, a TV dinner cooling in front of her.

“Tell her what?” Hazel asked. “Here’s your Bosco. Drink it fast or you can’t have it at all. It’s almost bathtime.”

“I’m not taking a bath.”

“Tell her what, Edie?” Finney stood behind Edna, combing the girl’s blond hair with her fingers.

“Tell her that a boy calls.”

“It’s not a crime for a boy to call and anyway he doesn’t call for me. So you’d be getting Finney in trouble and you love her. Think about that.”

Edna took a drink of her chocolate milk, pushed away the foil tray with her uneaten dinner. “I’m not taking a bath.”

“But you are. And what about that chicken leg?”

“I’ll tell Mama you smoke a cigarette once. When her and Daddy was gone.”

“Yeah? Is that right, Edie?” Hazel picked up the washcloth from the edge of the sink and threw it on the table. “How about if I tell Mother about the letter your teacher sent home last week, the one I signed so you wouldn’t get in trouble? How about if I tell Mother that you got caught stealing a cap gun from the Ben Franklin and I got you out of that one, too?”

Edna sat very still, one hand in her lap and the other around her Mickey Mouse Club cup. She was small for eight—almost nine—with the facial features of a much younger child. Staring at her, Hazel couldn’t see at all who her sister might turn out to be. Edie’s chin shook and her gray eyes filled with tears, but it was not to Hazel she apologized. “I’m sorry, Finney!” she said, jumping up and spilling her Bosco all over the table.

“Great. I’ll just clean this up for you,” Hazel said, using the washcloth she’d thrown at the child.

“Come here, Edie,” Finney said, holding out her arms. “Don’t cry, I’m not mad. You just don’t want to take a bath, right? It’s cold in the upstairs bathroom.” Finney held her on her lap, using her sweater to wipe Edie’s face. “Come on, we’ll go upstairs, I’ll wash behind your ears and brush your teeth and we’ll call it a night. Maybe mean old Hazel will bring you some more milk.”They stood and walked toward the back staircase.

“Nice,” Hazel said to the empty kitchen. She dropped Edna’s frozen dinner in the trash can, poured more milk in her cup. “Thanks a lot, Finney.”

The arm of the record player lifted the 45 and dropped it back in place, and the needle settled into the wide opening groove. “Theme from A Summer Place” began for the third or fourth time, the waltzing melody washing over Hazel as if it really were another season. She and Finney lay on their backs in Hazel’s bed, looking out the window at the bare winter branches, the clouds passing the moon.

“Don’t you love this song?” Finney’s arms were crossed behind her head and she wiggled her toes inside her white socks.

“I do.” Around the room the elephants marched and the circus train faded against the gray walls. Edna’s nursery had been painted pink, with dancing circus ponies in ribbons and flowers, as if Hazel had been invited to one kind of carnival and Edna to another.

“You don’t mean it.” Finney would be blue until she died.

“How do you know?”

Finney shrugged. Hazel turned her head on her pillow and watched Finney’s eyes trace the border of the casement window. “What do you love?” Finney asked, still looking ahead.

I love—Hazel thought—your parents’ farm and the tone of voice you use with animals. I love that you have stolen your father’s cardigan and made it look like the most feminine sweater in the world. I love the way your curls hang against your neck, and how you are the one true thing I’ve ever known, and how if I were captured by pirates and didn’t see you for a hundred years I’d still recognize any part of you, even an elbow. “I love Johnny Cash. I love the music from the war and from before the war. I love The Steve Allen Show and the smell of kid leather in my mother’s car. Oh, and toasted marshmallows.”

“That’s a lot.”

“The world is full of riches.” Hazel settled back into her pillow. “Have you seen him lately? I mean, actually seen him?”

Finney gave Hazel a nervous glance, an unhappy smile. “My parents had gone to get some grain for the horses, and he found me skating on the pond. I was by myself, I looked ridiculous. I was wearing Dad’s overcoat with the raccoon collar, the one he had his only year at Purdue, and a white hat I knitted last winter, and a yellow and blue woolly scarf wrapped around and around my neck, all the way over my chin. My skates are even dingy. I’m sure my nose was bright red from the cold.”

“When was this?” Hazel couldn’t keep the blade off each word, the edge that told everything about how lost she was, how scared she was to think of Finney with no need of her, carving figure eights into her frozen cow pond, which in the summer was thick with algae and mosquito larvae. And also what was under the ice, and what would happen if Finney should go there.

“Three days ago? Maybe.”

Hazel said to herself, Don’t ask, don’t ask, then asked, “Where was I?” Not plaintive, not demanding. She tried to make the inquiry casual, to suggest a passing puzzlement over her own agenda, three days ago. But how could the question not contain the other times she’d asked it, when Finney had seen a movie without her, when Finney showed up at school with pale pink lips instead of coral, and where did the coral go? Where did she find the pale pink, who shopped with her? When Finney, for instance, suddenly loved “Theme from A Summer Place” and last week had loved “Only the Lonely”? Where was poor Roy Orbison now, with his ugly glasses and slow-dance opera?

“I don’t know.” Finney bit her thumbnail, seemed not to give Hazel’s whereabouts on ice-skating day a second thought. “He didn’t approve of me skating.”

“No, I wouldn’t think so.”

“He asked what would happen if I fell and got really hurt while my parents were gone.”

The arm of the record player lifted in hopeless repetition, and Hazel tried to keep her breathing steady. Time was he didn’t talk to Finney that way, didn’t suggest any tenderness. This was new, his fear, and it was akin to Hazel’s own.

“What did you say?”

“I told him I’m indestructible. Then I skated backward around the pond twice and he stood completely still watching, right up until I skated into him and we both fell and he hurt his hip and I hurt my wrist.” She raised her eyebrows at Hazel, warm with irony and in full possession of the memory. She was resurrected, the now gone Finney of three days ago, and Hazel could see the coat and hat, the bright scarf, Finney’s long limbs and neck, how graceful she was for such a tall girl. There he was, too, standing on the ice, worried and angry and miserable (so much a part of his charm), watching Finney glide like a carved figure over the mirror of a music box. It would have been a moment outside of time for both of them, and then the sudden physical awakening of her body against his, the swift transport back into the rudeness of winter on an Indiana farm, the love he couldn’t have. Finney’s smell of sleep and tea.

“And then what happened?”

“We helped each other up. I brushed him off, he brushed me off, he kissed me once, so hard my teeth nearly went through my lips, then he walked fast away. I tried to follow him and he told me to go home.” Finney blinked, her eyelashes damp with tears, and Hazel could see Finney was happy to be so sad, because he had made her sad, he had sent her away. In turning his back to her, he had told her something intimate and they shared it now, and the most Hazel could wish for was to witness it. “Do you hear a car?” Finney asked, raising her head.

Hazel sat up, glanced at the clock. Her parents weren’t due home for three more hours. “We’ve got to clean up the kitchen and fold the laundry.” She hopped around, pulling her shoes on. Finney stood up, stretched, languid as a cat. Her parents were kind, permissive, sloppy. They let her bake cookies when she and Hazel were barely old enough to turn on the stove. Nobody cared about the mess. On Sundays in the winter, after the livestock were fed, Finney’s dad, Malcolm, came home and put his pajamas back on, drank hot chocolate, and listened to the radio, letting the sections of the newspaper pile up around him. Their house wasn’t a museum or a testament to anything. Just a house.

“Hazey, that isn’t your dad’s car.”

Headlights were more than halfway down the lane, and Finney was right—it wasn’t the Cadillac. Hazel bent over, tied her shoes. She ran her fingers through her hair, pulled it into a ponytail, and wrapped it with a rubber band from her wrist. Finney, too, sped up, tying her shoes and straightening her sweater. “You expecting someone?” she asked.

“No. Are you?” It would be unbearable if she’d invited him here.

“Hardly. He wouldn’t come if I invited him to a church social.”

The car pulled up in front of the house, and in the sodium light Hazel almost recognized it. It was someone who had been there before, and recently. Yesterday?

The brass doorknob of her bedroom door was cold; the pattern of the hallway rug was a thousand eyes. Hazel turned left and Finney was behind her, humming. They went down the front staircase, passing the silvery ancestors, through the front parlor, past the wide front door with the leaded glass panes, to the side entrance with the heavy lock and the screen. Neither thought to take a coat. They walked out into a bitterly cold, windless December night just as the car pulled into one of the clinic parking spaces and stopped. A man jumped from the driver’s side, shouting, “Miss Hunnicutt, where’s your mama?”

Hazel and Finney stopped on the porch, squinted into the dark to take him in. “Jerome? Is that you?”

“I need your mama, Miss Hazel. Lorraine isn’t doing good, she’s bleeding, where’s Mrs. Hunnicutt?” The young man covered the distance between his car and the porch in two long strides: Jerome Wilson, who played center for the Southside Wildcats, a local star, and Negro.

“She’s at a…” Jerome had been here yesterday with Lorraine, that much was true, and while her father was at his Jaycees meeting. Her mother had asked Hazel to take over at reception for an hour or so, and Hazel had taken three phone messages. Lorraine was pretty, a cheerleader at the all-Negro high school.

“She’s at a Christmas party at the Cannadays’,” Finney said, stepping around Hazel. “She won’t be home for quite a while.”

“Miss?” Jerome wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You’ve got to help me.”

Hazel and Finney ran the length of the porch, took the stairs two at a time. The passenger door of the old Chrysler opened with a groan, and the overhead light didn’t work. Jerome reached for a flashlight on the floorboard and shined it on Lorraine. Her head was tipped back against the seat, her lips pale. Her coat was unbuttoned and her hands hung limp at her sides. She was wearing a black flannel skirt, pulled up around her thighs, and in between her legs was a stack of blood-soaked towels.

Hazel pulled her head back so hard and swiftly she smacked her scalp on the doorframe. “Finney, there are five hooks on a board next to the door leading to the clinic. On the second are the clinic keys. Unlock the inner door, then go through and unlock this door we’re facing. Jerome, can you lift her?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He handed Lorraine the flashlight and reached into the car, his arms so long they slid under Lorraine’s knees and behind her back and came out the other side. Lorraine let out a tight breath, not quite a moan, and Jerome did the same. He straightened up to his full height, kissed her forehead, whispered something against her hair.

Lights came on in the clinic, and then the light outside the door was burning and Finney was holding the door open. Jerome walked quickly, trying not to jostle Lorraine, and Hazel ran ahead. She wasn’t thinking or praying or making note; only hoping in a vague way that Edna stayed asleep and that there would be room to get out of this, somehow.

“Take her in where you were yesterday, Jerome, and put her on the examining table. Finney, I need you to call Mother.”

“Do you know the number?” Finney’s face was pale, her eyes bright.

“Jesus Christ. Try the phone book.” A line of sweat ran down Hazel’s neck and into her sweater. Finney turned and headed for the outer office.

Lorraine was on the examination table, nearly panting, her eyes glassy and her lips chapped. Jerome leaned over her, running his thumb over her forehead and whispering the same thing he’d been saying walking in.

“Help me get her feet in these stirrups. Lorraine, cooperate with us, we’re going to elevate your legs.”

“I found a Cannaday on Riley Road, is that it?”

“Umm.” Hazel thought she might faint. She grasped the table and swallowed, waiting for her vision to clear. Lorraine was wearing polished saddle oxfords and rolled white socks flecked with blood. Her legs were as smooth and chilled as glass. “Yes, I think so. Tell Mother that I need her. You can say Edie’s got a fever or that I have a feminine problem, whichever will get her here without my father. Make sure she understands she needs to come alone.”

Finney left without another word, closing the examining room door quietly. Hazel turned the black handle that raised the stirrups and a trickle of blood dropped onto the floor. In the silence she could hear Jerome whispering, We’ll get married, we’ll get married, we’ll get married.

In bed that night Hazel knew she could buy the heart necklaces or not, it no longer mattered. There were gestures stronger than vows, secrets that contained more momentum than a tall girl skating backward, and she and Finney had such a secret. In part they all—Hazel and Finney and Caroline—had become bound by the shared labor, and by Caroline’s cool response (which both girls had tried to imitate), how she had unpacked the towels so calmly and given Lorraine injections of antibiotics and pain medication, then finished what she’d started the day before. No one suggested Finney leave, as if Caroline had taken Finney as a daughter in a dark hour. But they were also united by the honesty of the lawless—Finney might love any boy and never speak the words again: I understand, I will never tell, I will never.

Hazel slept, finally, and dreamed of a foreign place where many objects were stored. She wandered through alone, picking up things she didn’t recognize, and then there was an old man standing next to her, his hair gone white, his back bent like a crone’s. She remembered he had once been beautiful, and was sad for him. He handed her something—a candlestick, a broken bell, a hairbrush—and Hazel knew that it was hers to keep. She hated it, whatever it was, it felt like death itself in her hand, but she couldn’t give it back and she couldn’t put it down, and in the morning she was still holding it, in all the ways that matter.

By five o’clock the sky was fully dark and a light snow was falling; Claudia sat in her sister Millie’s kitchen and watched the wind swirl the flakes into white tunnels. The snow fell on the barn, the new garage, the empty chicken house—all were lit up and vivid in the yellow glow of the security light.

“You’re probably sitting there thinking about Mom,” Millie said, taking one container out of the microwave and putting another in.

“No, I’m not,” Claudia said, but she was.

“I bet you’re thinking how Mom would have been snapping beans or grinding corn or whatever for dinner.”

“You don’t snap beans in December.”

“You know what I mean.”

There, then, was Ludie, standing in the warm kitchen, listening to gospel music on the AM radio, and outside there was a snow falling like this one, and Millie was probably upstairs in her bedroom, on her way to becoming the person she was now but not yet there, and Claudia was in the kitchen, with her mother.

“It’s no crime to enjoy the time-saving devices of the modern world, Claude.”

“I never said.”

“I happen to like microwaved food, and I happen to like not having to do dishes.”

Millie happened also to like not eating, although she never said as much. She was tall (but not too tall) and thin, what Hazel called Warning Label Thin, or Sack of Hangers Thin. Hazel sometimes referred to Millie simply as Death’s-head, and it was true that in certain lights you could see Millie’s skull as surely as if she were being used in an anatomy class. At thirty-eight she was pinched and severe; the lack of body fat, combined with years of tanning, had left her with a web of fine lines on her face and neck. She wore her hair so short it stood up straight at the crown, and she did something to it she called ‘frosting’—which she would do to her head, but not a cake—so that the roots were black and the ends were a creamy orange.

Millie’s two children, Brandon and Tracy, came and went from the kitchen, speaking to neither their mother nor their aunt. Brandon, a junior in high school, took a soda from the refrigerator, then went back into the living room, where he slumped down on the couch to watch TV. A few minutes later he came back and got a bag of chips.

“We’re going to eat in about fifteen minutes, Bran,” his mother said.

Tracy, a year younger than her brother, ran into the kitchen, a cordless phone against her ear, and copied a phone number off the chalkboard, where she’d written TRACY + TIM 4EVER! Claudia had never heard of Tim, and doubted she’d ever make his acquaintance.

“We’re going to eat in fifteen minutes, Tracy,” her mother said.

“You are, maybe,” Tracy said, and slid across the linoleum in her socks, out of the room.

How could it be that everything had changed so much so quickly? There was no such world as had Ludie in it. She was the last mother to put up vegetables every year; the last fat mother who didn’t dye her hair or wear pants to church; the last to sing the old hymns and maintain a flourishing garden. Claudia couldn’t think of one other soul in the world who had a pawpaw tree in the yard, one that bore fruit, and that was because of Ludie. But Millie was the New Mother, no doubt about it, driving her SUV and buying everything in her life (her clothes, her furniture, her food, her pictures in frames) at the Wal-Mart. Sitting in Millie’s country kitchen with her seven thousand unnecessary pieces of plastic, Claudia sometimes expected to hear a voice call out for a manager in aisle nine. Ludie had worked all day, from the time she got up until she went to bed. She cooked and cleaned and visited the sick. In the summer she gardened and hung the washing on the line; in the autumn she raked leaves and baked; in the winter she shoveled snow and made candy. All spring she drummed her fingers on the windowsills, waiting for the time to put in annuals. She was never too sick or too tired for church or to take care of her own elderly parents. But it was Millie, who did none of those things and had no other job besides, who treasured time-saving devices like nacho cheese you could heat up right in the jar.

She put the jar of cheese down on the table, and a bag of corn chips. Beside the chips were refried beans, taken from a can and microwaved, and a jar of salsa. Millie had emptied a bag of shredded lettuce into a plastic bowl; another bowl held ground beef. The back door opened as Millie was putting paper napkins on the table and Larry came in, stamping his feet and blowing on his bare fingers.

“We caught three horses, but there’s two more still out there somewhere.” He pulled off his wool cap, shook the snow off his jacket. His muddy-blond hair was pushed up on his forehead.

“Sit down and eat something before you take the kids to the school,” Millie said, without looking at him.

“Temperature’s dropping. There’ll be a livestock alert by morning, I’ll bet, and tomorrow it’ll be too cold to snow.” Larry reminded Claudia of an actor in a western film. No particular actor—just a character with a squint, and an air of indifference to his clothes, his bunk, his companions.

“Sit down and eat something, Larry, before you take the kids to the school.”

“Take the kids to school? What for?”

“There’s a varsity game tonight.”

“So? If Brandon can’t drive them, they don’t need to go.”

Millie continued moving around the kitchen, opening the dishwasher, putting a dish in. She had a way of moving, Claudia had often noticed, that closed a door on a conversation. “Brandon isn’t driving with the roads the way they are, especially if two of Woodman’s horses are out.”

Larry looked at Claudia, sighed, pulled his cap back on.

“Sit down and eat something, I said. We’re having Mexican Hat Dance.”

“Well, I can’t, can I. I have to start the station wagon. I’ll eat something at the game.” The door closed behind Larry, and he left in his place a pocket of air so cold it surprised Claudia, even though she’d been sitting and studying the weather all evening.

Tracy came in now wearing makeup, and boots that wouldn’t keep the damp out. “Tell Dad it’s time to go,” she said to her mother.

“He’s starting the car, Trace.”

Brandon came in with his letter jacket on—a single varsity letter in golf, which Claudia would never see as a sport—and jingling the change in his pocket as if he were a man much pressed for time.

“That jacket’s not warm enough for this weather,” Millie said.

And right there it happened—a kind of disorientation that left her dizzy—it was December. High school basketball season in Indiana. The snow was falling, and Claudia was sitting at a kitchen table as teenagers got ready to head back to the school they couldn’t wait to leave earlier in the day. She was warm and safe, but there was a kind of voltage in the air, an excitement generated by having something, anything to do on a Saturday night, and it seemed to Claudia that nothing had changed. If she could just get home she’d find Ludie in the living room knitting in front of the television, and Bertram in his study. This was just what it felt like all her growing-up years: December, January, February, March.

“Kids, sit down and eat something before you go,” Millie said again, but Tracy was already putting on lip gloss and reaching for the door.

“We’ll eat at the game.” And then they were gone.

Millie watched the door for a moment, reached into the freezer where she had hidden a pack of cigarettes. She lit one and sat down across the table from her sister.

“You’re smoking again?” Claudia asked. She had grown accustomed to the idea that she might spend the rest of her short life inhaling other people’s fumes.

“Just this one,” Millie said, inhaling hard and blowing a thick cloud out over the table. “And don’t give me any crap about it.”

“I won’t.”

“I know Daddy would be horrified.” Millie dropped the cigarette into the jar of cheese and burst into tears. “Do you see? I do and do for them, look at this food on the table, and they don’t even notice, nobody cares.”

But what difference did it make, Claudia wondered, whether they ate nachos at home or nachos sold by the Band Boosters?

Millie wiped her face with a paper napkin. “You don’t know, Claudia, you can’t imagine what it’s like to watch your perfect babies who loved you so much grow into strangers who won’t even eat the food you offer them.”