Agnes points to a high stoop where three ladies are watching the street through long lashes. One of them is smoking a thin-rolled cigarette. “There!”
Juniper slants toward them, flinging elbows, crushing toes beneath her staff. She climbs the short steps, panting.
A woman in red silk watches her with no particular expression on her face. She removes the cigarette from between her lips. “You ladies in trouble?”
Juniper checks to see that the red-silk woman has a shadow beneath her, and that it seems to possess the correct number of arms and hands. She hitches a sideways, desperate smile at her. “Might be.”
The woman gives her a motherly nod. “Then you’re in the right place, love.” She reaches casually behind her to unlatch the door, knocking it open with one hip. The stale sweetness of perfume and liquor drifts out, and a few jangling notes of ragtime.
Juniper dives into the dimness with her sister’s hand in hers.
Jane and Jill went up the hill
To fetch a pail of water.
Spill it thrice, say it twice,
Or soon it will get hotter.
A spell against burns, requiring clear water & a strong will
The smell reminds James Juniper of a chestnut in bloom, sharp and sour in the back of her mouth. It hangs heavy in the shadowed hallway and grows stronger as they follow the red-silk lady up two flights of stairs and into a small bedroom. The wallpaper is rich and flowery and the bed is a frosted cupcake of pillows and feather-down.
“This place is awful nice, isn’t it, Ag?” Juniper offers. She’s thinking of her sister’s mildewed room in the boarding house. “Bet it costs a pretty penny, though.”
The red-silk lady—who introduced herself with a casual flick of her fingers as Miss Florence Pearl, proprietress of Salem’s Sin, No. 116 St. Mary-of-Egypt Avenue—cracks a cackle. Cigarette smoke coils from her nose. “Sure does.”
Juniper sees her shoot a knowing wink at Agnes, who snorts, then flinches.
Miss Pearl’s eyes narrow. “I’ll send Frankie up. Her auntie taught her rootspeak back in Mississippi, she’s ten times better than those butchers over at St. Charity’s. And dinner—you picky about food? I was almost the whole nine months.” She ticks her chin at Agnes’s belly, and Juniper notices for the first time the way it’s pushed tight against her dress, the way her sister cradles it in her arms.
Oh.
Juniper sees her sister standing above her again, strong and steady, risking herself to save some stupid, vicious boy—and risking a second someone, too.
Agnes shakes her head, lowering herself onto the bed with white lips. Miss Pearl sweeps out.
Then they’re alone together with the cupcake bed and the smell of blooming chestnuts and the careful sound of Agnes’s breathing. A gluey silence falls between them.
“So,” Juniper says, “who’s the daddy?” It comes out meaner than she meant it to. She can almost feel Mama Mags’s knuckles on the back of her skull.Mind that tongue, child.
Agnes shakes her head at the floor, still breathing thin through her nose. “Doesn’t matter.” She looks up, meets Juniper’s eyes. “She’s mine.”
“Oh.” Juniper feels a hot flare in the line between them, fierce and defiant. Is that what mother’s love is like? A thing with teeth?
Juniper’s mother was never anything to her but a secondhand story from her sisters, a curl of hair in a locket. Juniper never missed her much; she always figured if her mother was worth a damn she would’ve left their daddy or slipped hemlock into his whiskey, and she didn’t do either. Juniper had her sisters, and it was enough. Until it wasn’t.
A second silence falls, thicker than the first. Agnes starts to speak just as Juniper asks, “Why did you leave?”
Agnes frowns at the floor. “You’re the one who left, as I recall.”
“I mean before.”
Juniper already knows why she left. Their daddy was a mean drunk with hard knuckles who never loved anything or anyone as much as he loved corn liquor, and there was nothing for miles but coal seams and sycamores and men just like him. Any girl with a single, solitary lick of sense would want to get as far from Crow County as her feet could carry her, unless they loved the wild green mountains more than they loved themselves.
She’s just too chickenshit to ask her real question:Why didn’t you take me with you?
Agnes looks up at her, then away. “Had to, didn’t I?”
