The remainder of the meal was eaten in silence. One by one the children asked to be excused, and when it was just Lily and Roen, she stood and began clearing the table.
Roen observed her nervous energy. “Will you sit, Lily?”
“I’d rather not.” She carefully placed the glasses, bowls, and utensils in the sink and removed the oatmeal pot that was soaking there. “We can still talk.”
“Not when I have to speak to your back. No, stay there. I’ll come to you.” He picked up a dishtowel while she pumped cold water into the sink and added soap flakes. When she turned her head to look at him in astonishment, he said, “What? Do you think I’ve never done this before? Once my mother had children old enough to fetch and carry, she didn’t do housework. As the youngest, a lot of it eventually fell to me.”
“You didn’t have help?”
“A housekeeper twice a week and a cook when my parents remembered to pay her.”
Lily was suspicious.
“Truly,” said Roen. “My parents have ideas about money that don’t lend themselves to acting responsibly.” He took the clean glass she handed him, dried it, and put it up on the shelf. “Do you want to hear about Clay?”
“Do I? I don’t know anymore. I thought I understood him. He’s acting in ways that are foreign to me.” She set two more glasses on the towel beside the sink.
“He’s scared.”
“Of what? Of you?”
“Not exactly. It’s more like he’s scared for you.” He told her what transpired when he visited Clay’s room after leaving hers. “He shut me out when I asked him about his father, but before then he already knew he’d said too much. When he heard you scream, why did he think I might have hurt you?”
Lily took a handful of spoons and washed each one individually before she set it aside.
“What secret are you harboring, Lily?” asked Roen. “I can guess, but I’d rather hear it from you. I think Clay wants to tell me, but he won’t because he thinks he’d be betraying you. That’s a lot of weight on a young man’s shoulders.”
“You should have stayed downstairs,” she said quietly. He was a dangerous man, not in the manner her husband had been, but dangerous nonetheless. She pressed her lips together for a moment, holding in what she couldn’t say. “We agreed you would stay downstairs.”
“No, we didn’t. We agreed I would sleep there. Your screaming woke me, and we had no agreement about where I could go when I was awake.”
“Let it be, Roen. You already know the truth. Why must you hear it from me?”
“Because what I’m imagining must be worse than the reality.”
“So I am supposed to humiliate myself so your imagination isn’t troubled? Is that it?” She scrubbed out a bowl and set it down hard. “Have you struck a woman?”
“No.”
“At the zenith of your frustration with Victorine Headley, did you ever once consider banging her head off a wall or wrapping your hands around her neck?”
Roen flinched. “No. Never.”
Lily stopped scrubbing and looked sideways at him. “I believe you, and because I do, I’m telling you that it’s you who are naïve. You don’t have the capacity to imagine the worst.” She tossed her dishcloth into the sink. “Be grateful that you don’t.” With that, she left the room.
Roen stared after her until she’d disappeared into the front room to be with her children. He dropped the dishtowel and picked up the cloth, then he stood at the sink and finished the work that she could not.
Chapter Seventeen
Hitch was waiting for Roen outside the office when he caught sight of Fedora Chen coming out of Maxwell Wayne’s bakery. He rarely saw her outside the hotel. Sometimes he caught a glimpse of her returning to her boardinghouse room after work. She always had an escort if it was dark. Usually it was Mr. Butterworth, and that was Ellie’s doing. Fedora was under Ellie’s protection almost from the first. Hitch thought it was a good idea since some folks had prejudices and suspicions about Fedora and weren’t above taunting her, but all that protection sure was an impediment to striking up a conversation or just mooning after her.
Hitch looked down the boardwalk, and when he didn’t see Roen coming, he decided he would cross the street and see what came of it. Fedora had a brisk walk so he had to cross on the diagonal to meet up with her. She also walked everywhere with her head slightly bent, something she did to avoid catching anyone’s eyes. This morning there was the wind to consider so she dropped her head forward more than usual.
“Can I help you carry those?” he asked when he was beside her. “Those” were at least a dozen loaves of bread each wrapped in brown paper tied off with a string. The aroma of warm bread might have been tantalizing if it weren’t for the fragrance that Hitch identified solely with Fedora. It was a fragrance unfamiliar to him. Something exotic, he was sure, like her.
Hitch stumbled a bit when Fedora stopped in her tracks. Momentum carried him ahead a couple of steps before he caught himself. He smiled a little crookedly as he backed up and held out his arms. She was looking at him now. Hecouldn’t tell if she was smiling because the lower half of her face was hidden behind a thick woolen scarf. He saw she was undecided about taking him up on his offer, and he couldn’t blame her. She’d just witnessed him stumble and then there was the time he pitched forward on his face in the hotel kitchen. Remembering that graceless fall made his face flush. He hoped she would think his cheeks were bitten by the wind.
“Really,” he said. “I want to help.” She was difficult to understand behind that scarf, but he saw her head bob and took it as a yes. He began plucking the loaves from her arms and transferring them to his. When he had eight, she told him it was enough and began walking again. It seemed to him that she failed to reestablish the pace she had set before, and he interpreted that as her wanting to draw out the trek back to the hotel so she could spend more time in his company. It might have been a flight of fancy on his part, but it put a bounce in his step. He searched for something to say to her.
