When I have been at Mrs. Clark’s for a little over a month and am fairly certain she likes and trusts me, I ask her if I might be allowed to make a phone call to the family with whom I first lived after my parents and brother were killed.
“You mean the Calverts,” Mrs. Clark says.
“Yes,” I continue. “I want to let them know where I am now. I grew up on their vineyard.” I hope I sound a little nostalgic. What I really want is to talk to Truman and assure him that I am coming for my money someday soon and that it needs to be there when I do come for it.
“I suppose that would be fine,” Mrs. Clark says.
When I ask her if I can make the call in private, she studies me. “All right,” she says a few seconds later.
It’s a Saturday afternoon, and I’m counting on Truman being in the tasting room, hopefully alone. Mrs. Clark nods toward the telephone in the living room and tells me to mind the time, as it is long distance to Santa Rosa. I assure her I won’t be long.
But when the tasting room telephone is answered, it’s not Truman who answers; it is Celine.
I hang up.
“They weren’t at home,” I say when I come back into the kitchen, where Mrs. Clark is.
“You can try again tomorrow if you want,” she says, and I do. But the next time, the phone rings and rings and no one answers. I try again on the following Friday, and again Celine answers,and again I hang up without saying anything. I’m finally successful the next day. Truman answers, and I hear in the background the chatter of other voices. He’s not alone.
“Truman,” I say. “It’s Rosie.”
I hear the intake of breath. The whisper of God’s name on his lips. He is surprised to hear from me.
“I can’t talk right now,” he says, both softly and forcefully.
“I don’t want you to talk, Truman. I want you to listen. I’m out of that terrible place Celine sent me to, and yes, it was unbelievably terrible. I’m coming for the money you promised me. It might be a while before I can come for it, but when I do, it needs to be there. If it takes a year or two years, it needs to be there. I need to hear you say you promise it will be. That’s all you need to say.”
“I haven’t touched it. It’s all there,” he whispers. “And it wasn’t me who sent you to wherever it was you went. I didn’t know. I didn’t—”
“Wherever itwas?” I interject, scarcely able to believe he has no idea what I went through after I last saw him. “Did you not even ask where I’d been taken? Did you not even wonder?”
Truman hesitates. In the background, I hear laughter and then a woman’s voice. Celine’s, perhaps.
“It wasn’t up to me to—,” he whispers, but again I cut him off. I don’t want to hear him excuse away the last two years of my life.
“I’m counting on you to keep your promise,” I say.
“The money is there,” he says.
“Good-bye, Truman.”
I lower the receiver to the telephone base. I place it carefully in its cradle, hoping that while Truman Calvert is a coward, he is also a man of his word.
•••
As my twentieth birthday approaches in the fall of 1941, I am still the oldest in the house. I feel like a much older sister to youngsiblings who don’t think I have anything worthwhile to say. I don’t care that the other girls don’t seem interested in my companionship. I have made it through the first year at the group home. I am doing well; Mrs. Grissom and Mrs. Clark have said so on several occasions. Only one more year to go. Sometimes I think of Belle, and I hope that she is all right, that she is still free. Sometimes I think of Amaryllis and I try to picture what she looks like. I still say the prayer from time to time. I have kept my part of the agreement.
I am decorating miniature cakes with tiny poinsettias made of icing when the news flies through the hotel in December that a naval harbor in faraway Hawaii has been bombed by the Japanese. The hotel staff are all saying that the United States will now likely enter the war that has already been raging across much of the world.
The mood in the kitchen is somber and fearful: So many sailors died in Hawaii; so many more American servicemen are likely to die in the days and months ahead. I don’t know what it means to be at war. As days and weeks pass, it seems like all the young male waitstaff have enlisted, and by the first of the year they are gone.
The early months of 1942 are filled with restrictions that seem opposed to my slowly approaching freedom. In the spring, Mrs. Clark is issued ration stamps to buy everything from meat, sugar, and butter to clothing and fuel oil. The hotel is suddenly under the same constraints. Everyone is.
“You’ll likely be entering a world fraught with problems,” Mrs. Clark tells me in September. Mrs. Grissom had been by earlier that day and said everything is in place for me to be released from the county’s custody on my twenty-first birthday.
“But I’m used to problems,” I say with a slight smile. The two of us are in the kitchen washing up cups and plates from a before-bed snack of saltines and milk. The other girls have all gone to their rooms.
Mrs. Clark smiles, too. “That you are.”
