“I’m not.”
“You are,” said Fay. “And you don’t have to tell us why you took off if you don’t want to.”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I did,” Ruth said. “Trust me.”
Fay continued, “You need to come home now, Ruthie. See Mom and Dad. If you’re sick, we’ll take care of you. You have nothing to be afraid of.”
“I have everything to be afraid of. I can’t ever go back there...”
Claire finally lost it. “For god’s sake, Ruthie! What the hell is going on? Is this all about Roman and his bullshit? Is it about his new wife? What’s her name? Faith? Is she so faithful and virtuous that she got involved with a married man, and a minister at that? When he wasn’t even divorced? How is any of that your fault, Ruth?”
“He called her a harlot,” Ruth said.
“I don’t know if she’s a harlot but she’s not exactly a great role model of—”
“Not the new wife.”
“What?”
“He called Felicity a harlot.”
We all subsided into stillness. Strictly speaking, that was not an inaccurate description of Felicity, especially for someone of Roman’s character—or, at least, his counterfeit character. That sense of a storm crept up my arms and my neck like electricity. Something else was coming. This was only the beforemath.
Ruth was saying, “At first, when she was a kid, she loved him. She thought that he would be a dad to her. She’d never had a dad. Her birth father, if you can call him that, was from Italy and I never saw him after I found out that I was pregnant. Roman said Felicity would turn out like me. He became obsessed with her, and he was the one...”
“He raped her?” Claire said.
“No! Not like that. He wanted her to be good. When she wasn’t, he forced her to leave. She was seventeen, just graduating. She went to Madison. I helped her pack. I drove her...”
“What did you say to him, Ruth?” Fay asked.
“Say to him?”
“What did you say to stand up for Felicity?”
“What could I do? He was my husband. He was my pastor. I loved him. Jay and Guy were little. I had to submit...”
“You’re a piece of shit, Ruthie,” said Claire. “You should have defended your girl. You should have called us or Mom and Dad.”
“Mom and Dad knew,” said Ruth. “They already hated him before I found out about the other wife. I didn’t want you to know the way he was toward her. It was all so bad...” Although she needed her parents and their support, Ruth had a hard time with their opinion of Roman, until she was forced to share that opinion. Even after she found out about Faith, she would have taken him back. She was ready to start over. For a long time, she adored him, no matter what he had done. Sometimes, she said softly, she still adored him.
“You’re weak,” Claire said.
“Stop it,” Fay ordered Claire. “That doesn’t matter. It’s all in the past now.”
I watched Ruth watching her sisters, not meeting their eyes but studying them whenever they looked away with widened eyes, black, nearly all pupils. Drugs? Adrenaline? When she spoke, her voice was flat, matter-of-fact.
Claire was wrong about Ruth. Ruth would indeed defend Felicity, and she would stop at nothing. Her sister had called Ruth a “firecracker,” an unstoppable girl whose intuitive charm and intellectual might destined her for a future as more than a high school science teacher (here, Fay would have put in hastily, “Being a science teacher isn’t nothing, but you know what I mean”). After that future was knocked out of her hands, Ruth must have made a decision. She would not be “poor Ruth.” Her child would not be the woebegone proof of a book-smart girl’s real-life naivete. Felicity would fulfill her own promise—and Ruth’s. Ruth would cherish her nestling of bright plumage.
Or maybe I was being melodramatic.
Probably I was being melodramatic.
Still, that premonitory chill crept over me, that animal sense of something very wrong, the same thing I’d felt the day Felicity was convicted.
“Go outside now. Just for a moment,” I said to Claire and Fay. “I want to talk to Ruth alone.”
Claire muttered, “Nothing doing.”
