•••
We ride in silence back to the inn. I want to ask Kat what she’s thinking, but I know she will not answer me. She does not seem upset to leave her mother after having been with her for only a little while, nor does she seem anxious about our plans to return to the sanatorium the next day. We eat a supper of roasted chicken, pinto beans, and warm tortillas at a restaurant across the street from the hotel, and then we head up to our room and spend an hour before bed looking at Da’s word book.
In the morning when we go downstairs for breakfast, the hotel owner informs us that a Mrs. Candace Hocking has paid for our stay and has secured the room for as long as she will require me to have it. She has also paid for our meals and the daily travel to and from the sanatorium. I am both relieved and a little miffed that Candace is meeting my expenses. I don’t want to be paid to care for Kat—as though I am an employee—and that is what this seems like. But the cash from the strongbox won’t last forever and I don’t know how long I will be here. It seems this is a time when I will have to take each day as it comes.
Before we head out to the sanatorium, I take Kat to a little stationer’s store a few blocks from the inn, where I purchase a tablet of paper and some wax crayons so that she can draw pictures. I have learned that this is one of the ways Kat can communicate. On the carriage drive to the sanatorium she draws a picture of a baby wearing a pink ruffled dress. It is as good a likeness of an infant as one could expect from a nearly seven-year-old, perhaps better. I know without asking that Kat has drawn a picture of Sarah. She misses the little one. I find that I do, too, strange as it may sound. I miss the baby and I miss having Belinda to talk to. When we return to town today I will need to send Belinda a telegram letting her know that I might not be leaving Tucson for a while.
Truth be told, I am hoping I am here indefinitely. Though I long for the calm beauty of the Loralei and the fragrance of the country air and the new home waiting for me away from the echoes of what happened in San Francisco, it won’t be near as sweet without Kat. I don’t want to return to that idyllic place if it means leaving Kat.
When we arrive at the sanatorium, the residents have just had their lunch. Several, including Candace, are on the patio awaiting their afternoon visitors. She seems less pale today, almost rosy-cheeked. Being reunited with her daughter seems to have invigorated her.
Today, there is a little boy with his mother visiting an older man who appears to be the boy’s grandfather or uncle. The two children eye each other for a while before the lad finally comes over to Kat and asks if she wants to come play with him and his toy soldiers. By this time we have been visiting with Candace for close to an hour. Kat has already shown her the picture of Sarah, and now she is interested in the boy’s miniature armies. The little boy, whose name is Randolph, looks to be about Kat’s age, and he doesn’t ask why she doesn’t speak. Indeed, as Kat sits down in silence several yards away to look at the tiny brigade, I wonder if he is the youngest in his family and happy to dominate the conversation for a change.
With Kat out of earshot, Candace and I have the first chanceto speak openly again about our situation. I first thank her for taking care of the hotel, the meals, and the transportation. She seems surprised at my gratitude.
“Of course I would pay the expenses of you minding Kat for me,” she says. “I will pay you an hourly wage, as well.”
I swallow back the sting of those words. “I don’t need a wage.”
“Nonsense. You are providing a service to me. Of course you need a wage.”
I let the observation fall away. I won’t take a penny for loving Kat, but I don’t say this.
“Did she... talk about me last night? Did she say anything?” Candace asks.
I shake my head.
“Does she ever say anything about what happened to Martin? Does she ever ask about him? Does she wonder why you’ve not heard from him?”
My mind takes me to the first night in the park, when Kat and I slept under moonlight and she asked where her father was and I told her I’d sent him on his way. It was the last time she spoke of him.
“She hasn’t said much of anything since the day Belinda came,” I answer.
“Maybe she doesn’t remember what happened.”
“Maybe.”
“What will I tell her if she starts talking again and she asks why her father hasn’t come back?”
I bristle at the thought of Kat asking Candace this a year or two or three from now, and not me. “I think you can wait to decide what to tell her when and if she asks. Don’t borrow tomorrow’s burdens, my gram used to say.”
“Yes, I suppose you’re right.”
Candace is quiet for a moment. “What was Kat like when you were with her in San Francisco? Was she happy? Did she have favorite toys? Little friends to play with?”
I tell Candace about the lovely house Martin had secured and our neighbor Libby and her little boy. I tell her about teaching Kat her letters and how brilliant she is at jigsaw puzzles and reading. I tell her about the back garden and our flowers, and the time Martin and I took her to the circus and to the seashore to collect shells.
Talking exhausts Candace, I know this from yesterday, so when she asks me next to tell her about Ireland, I fill the next hour with the happiest memories I have before everything changed for me, both to fill the silence and so that I won’t seem like such a stranger. I tell her about the fishing boats and the pewter gray Irish Sea, and my gram’s cottage with the curtains made from her wedding dress. I tell her about helping my mother watch the wee ones in the lane while their mams helped their fathers at the docks, and about my father, who wanted to go to university and was told he was not smart enough nor was there the money for it, so he took it upon himself to become a learned man. I tell her about the word book he made and how every time he read a book he collected all the words inside he did not know, found out what they meant, and wrote them down, and that he shared those words with me so that I, too, could know what he knew.
“Your father loved you,” Candace says, and it must pain her to say this.
“Yes, he did. He was a kind and gentle man. Everyone in the village liked him. He was good to my brothers and my mam, and he wasn’t bitter or resentful that he’d wanted to be a teacherand was instead a roofer. And he might have liked me best, being the youngest and the only girl.” I laugh lightly and Candace smiles.
“It must have been difficult, then, to leave your parents when you came to America,” she says.
I hesitate for a moment. I will be heading into dangerous waters if this conversation continues in this direction. “My father died when I was sixteen,” I answer a second later. “He fell from a roof and struck his head. He never woke up afterward and died a few days later.”
“That’s so sad.”
