I nod toward the bookcase. “Is it okay if I take those books out and read them?”
Her smile widens. “Absolutely. You like to read?”
“I do.”
“So do I. I have others downstairs when you’re finished with the ones in here. Come. Let’s hang up your new clothes.”
It does not take long to put away my few things.
“Let me show you the rest of the house, and then we’ll go into the common room and you can meet everyone,” Mrs. Clark says.“I’m surprised the girls have been so quiet. It’s been a while since we’ve had someone new join us.”
As we pass the other two bedrooms on the third floor, I see now that one is clearly being used—a pair of loafers is askew at the closet door, a sweater hangs on a bedpost—and one looks as if no one is occupying it.
We return to the first floor, go through the living room and dining room, with its large table for ten, and Mrs. Clark points out her bedroom, a former breakfast room, and then we head down a short flight of stairs to an addition to the back of the house where there is a sitting room with sofas and bookcases and a game table. A console radio is softly playing a Billie Holiday tune. Spirals of goldenrod flit about my peripheral vision as I take in the sight of the four girls in the room who are my new housemates.
One sits on a couch, legs tucked under, reading a magazine. Another is at the game table playing checkers with a third. A fourth, the youngest it seems, pigtailed and freckled, is standing just inside the room with a poorly decorated, lopsided cake on a plate.
“Happy birthday!” the youngest girl says. “I made you a cake.”
“This is Vera,” Mrs. Clark says to me. “She’s thirteen and likes to bake.”
Vera bursts into a smile that crinkles her eyes to slits. “It’s chocolate.”
“Um. Thanks,” I say.
“And over on the couch is Lillian; she’s sixteen. She’s in the room next to yours. Cora and Maxine at the table there are fifteen. They share the second floor with Vera. Girls, this is Rosie Maras.”
The other girls seem cautious at my entrance into the room— and their lives—but they settle around the game table as Mrs. Clarkcuts the cake and then eat slices of it willingly enough. As we eat, I learn Vera was abandoned by her unmarried mother at the age of ten—she’d simply awakened one morning to an empty bungalow. She happily sits by me as we eat. I get the impression the girl is hungry for affection. Starved for it.
The others—Lillian, Cora, Maxine—seem hardened, though, like the outside of an orange that has sat too long in the heat of a harsh sun. Lillian tried to stab her stepfather—in self-defense, she says—and her mother doesn’t want her in the house anymore. Cora, who was orphaned at twelve, ran away from her aunt and uncle for the last time, and they were done with her. And Maxine helped her brother rob a jewelry store. He is twenty-three and in prison. She is here.
None of them have been with Mrs. Clark longer than a year. All of them lived in some other county home before this one.
They ask about me. And I tell them only that my parents are dead and that I took something from my last county placement that didn’t belong to me. Maxine especially wants to know more, but I say nothing else.
I have nothing in common with these girls except our shared predicament; we are under the county’s thumb and have been sent to live with a woman who is not family. Nothing good brought these girls to Mrs. Clark’s doorstep.
That is probably something we have in common, too.
I resolve to mind my own business, hide the colors from everyone, obey Mrs. Clark’s rules, and quietly count off the twenty-four months. I don’t know yet what I want to do with myself and Truman’s four thousand dollars, but I know I want to create a life that will allow me to say, as Helen Calvert said, that I am right where I want to be.
A life that will allow me to buy amaryllis bulbs to my heart’s content—the only “children” I will ever have. And I will have them. Windowsills full of them.
A life where the colors are my well-kept secret.
A life that is good.
•••
My job at the Hotel Pacifica, an elegant multistory building with ballrooms and fancy paintings on the walls and thick carpets on the floors, is located six blocks away from the group home. Mrs. Clark walks with me that first Monday morning and reminds me that I am expected back home immediately after my shift ends at four. I can tell by the way Mrs. Clark smiles at me as she drops me off that this is my first test, and that if I’m smart, I’ll pass it easily.
I’m greeted at the back door to the kitchen by an older woman in a gray dress and white apron. Mrs. Delaney is the supervisor of the kitchen and laundry staff.
The Pacifica’s gleaming kitchen is outfitted with long metal prep tables and rows of hanging pots and pans, three large ovens, and a walk-in refrigerator. If the other workers in the kitchen know from where I’ve come, they do not let on. Perhaps it is only Mrs. Delaney and the manager of the Pacifica, a Mr. Brohm, who know that my employment here was arranged and is subsidized by the state.
The head chef, Tony, is from New York and insists everyone do everything exactly as he instructs, down to the smallest detail. He reminds me of Alphonse and I quickly sweep away that memory when it surfaces. I don’t want to think about Celine’s chef or her kitchen or anything pertaining to her at all.
I settle in quickly to my new role as a kitchen assistant and someone who does little more than wash dishes and pans all day long and put them away. In time, though, I am given more responsibility, especially as my willingness to be useful is appreciated more and more. I find I can lose myself to the sights andsounds and colors of the kitchen in much the same way I did when I was a child among the vines. The kitchen is a place where ideas are hatched and beautiful things come together. I like being able—finally—to finish Tony’s beautiful dishes with bits of fresh flowers or greenery. I am reminded that there was a time when I thought I might take cooking classes and then find a nice job in a fancy restaurant. That dream again appeals to me.
