The Patron Saint of Liars (17 page)

"A little."

"Me too," she whispered. "I went into the bathroom and locked the door and I couldn't stop crying, you know. Just couldn't stop. I thought I was going to jump out the window there for a second."

"Angie."

"What?"

"I'm married now. I got married tonight."

She raised up on her elbow. "Go on," she said.

"No, I did." I touched her face. I wished I had a sister. I wished there was blood between us. "I married Son."

"You're not joking, are you?"

"No."

"Why, Rose?" she whispered.

"I'm going to keep the baby and I just didn't see how I could do it alone. If I married Son then I can stay here. This wouldn't be such a bad place to raise a baby."

She stared at me, her eyes open wide. She was completely awake. "I'm jealous," she said. "I'm happy for you, but I wish it was me." She looked down at her stomach, pushed at it with one finger. "You're doing the wrong thing. Nobody gets married like that, it's crazy. You did it because of Beatrice, not because you love him, but I would have done it, too." She looked at me. She wanted me to tell her how it could all be the same again. "If I had been the one to walk outside. If I was the one he found. I would have married him, too."

"I know." I was quiet for a second, waiting to tell her the rest. "I'm going over there tonight," I said finally. "I have to get things started now before I think about it too much."

"You married him," she said. "I figured you'd go over there." We looked at each other for a long time. I was moving to a little house not a quarter of a mile away. I would still be at Saint Elizabeth's every day. We would have been split apart soon anyway, when the babies were born, and knowing all of that I still could not stand to leave her. She scooted over in her bed and lay down flat on her back. "Come here," she said.

I lay down beside her. We were too big to face each other, but we lay there together and looked up at the dark ceiling and held hands. "It's going to be fine," she said. "It's going to be good, even."

"You too," I said.

"But I wish you weren't leaving. I wish we were going to be together."

After a while she pretended to be asleep, but I could tell she wasn't. I got up and took a few things, a clean dress, my toothbrush, some underwear. I would get the rest later. When I finally did leave, neither one of us said anything about it.

Son was in the kitchen with Sister Evangeline, having something to eat. When I came through the door she nearly threw herself at me. "This is just the way it should be," she said. "I was going to tell you, a million times, but I didn't." She clapped her hands. "I kept it all a secret all this time. I am so happy, Rosie. I've never been so happy. What a big day. I deliver two babies in the morning and my best girl gets married at night. There's never been a day like this in all the world."

"You knew?"

"Sure I knew." She waved her hand, dismissing me. "Of course I knew. I know all sorts of things."

"More than just the babies?"

"It's in my diary. The week you started working in the kitchen, I said, Rose will marry Son, sure as I'm born. Why, I don't know that you two had even properly met then. I had to drop my rosary down next to the stove. My rosary! That's how sure I was."

"I don't want to hear this."

"That's your problem, Rosie, you never want to know. All sorts of things going on out there and you don't want to know about them until they land on your plate."

Son sat at the table, smiling. He didn't care how it happened, only that it had. I was tired.

"Well, you two get going," she said, and gave me a little push toward Son. "I'll see you in the morning, if you're feeling up to work. You've had a big day today. You might want to take tomorrow off."

"I might," I said. I kissed her good night, even though I felt strangely angry at her for knowing my business. Then Son and I went home.

The house looked different than it had five hours before. It was my house now, at least to a small part. I looked around the living room.

"Are you Catholic," I asked him.

"No," he said. "I'm not much of anything. Does that matter?"

"No," I said. "I was just wondering."

We took off our coats and stood in front of the fireplace, which was cold. "I could start a fire," he said.

"I think we ought to go to bed, probably."

"Sure," he said. "You must be tired. You can have the bedroom, I'll sleep in here. I fall asleep in here half the time, anyway."

"I know I'm no great find," I said. "But you might as well get used to sleeping with me. We're married. We've only got one bedroom."

Son looked surprised, as he had a hundred times that night. "You, Rose? Dear God, there was never such a find." He came to me and put his hand on my face. With the base of his palm against my jaw, his fingers curved all the way up the side of my head. And then he kissed me, very lightly on the side of my nose and then my lips, then on my lips again.

We went into the bedroom and I took off my clothes. I would not be embarrassed, I told myself. This was the body he had married, this is the one he would have to see. We kept the lights off, but the moon against the snow made the room seem nearly bright. "Look at you," he said. "Look how pretty you are."

"I'm not pretty," I said.

"You have no idea."

I slid in between the covers, not lightly, not sexy, and pushed my back against the wall. At least it was a double bed. Son took off his overalls and sat down beside me in his shirt and underwear. "You might as well get used to it," I said.

"It's been a long time."

"Well, nothing's going to happen, at least not for a while. Just sleep with me." I touched his back. A tree, a wall, a city.

He took off the rest of his clothes and lay down beside me. I saw something on his arm, a birthmark or a scar, and leaned over to look at it. It was a tattoo. It said Cecilia in green letters near his shoulder, a cluster of leaves beneath the name. "Who's Cecilia?" I said.

"Someone I knew a long time ago."

"You must have loved her, to put her name on your arm."

"I thought I did."

"Don't say that," I said quietly. "Don't change your past because of me. There's her name on your arm." I ran my fingers across the letters, up the
C,
over the
e
and the
l,
down to the
a.
I could feel his skin tense beneath my hand. "That means you loved her."

"Okay," he said.

We didn't say anything for a while but didn't sleep either.

"It's going to be all right," he said to me finally. "We've done the right thing."

"Yes," I said.

"And it will be good for the baby."

"Yes."

"What are you going to name her? If you know it's going to be a girl, you must have picked out a name."

"No. I never did. I was always so sure I was going to give her up. I thought it would be better to not give her a name. I thought that would only make things worse."

"But you must have thought about it, even if you didn't want to."

"No, I didn't."

"So now you should think about it."

And I did. I thought about it for a long while. "Cecilia," I said finally. "I'm going to name her Cecilia."

"No," he said.

"It would be perfect. We'll tell her you had her name put on your arm the day she was born, that you loved her so much you went out and had her name written right here." I touched the tattoo again and he flinched.

"Don't do that, Rose. I'm asking you."

"Cecilia," I said. "That's her name."

SON

1

T
HERE ARE SO MANY
pretty names for girls, Caroline and Emily and Bess. Those are the three I thought of right off. Then there are all the names you could choose 'cause you wanted to make somebody else feel good. Angie, Evangeline, June. Or Beatrice, since she was the one who brought us together in a way. She could call her Elizabeth for the saint or Louisa for the hotel. In the hospital gift shop, I bought a book called
Naming Your Baby.
You wouldn't believe all the pretty names in there, ones you'd never think of, like Madeline and Isabel. In the end, there was only one name that wouldn't be right, which is the name Rose had settled on.

Cecilia.

In the weeks before the baby was born, I begged Rose a hundred different ways to change her mind. Once I even tried putting my foot down. "You will not," I said over breakfast, and looked at her straight enough to scare her, but I must have forgot who I was dealing with. Rose don't scare. She don't even ruffle. She just whisked my plate up off the table, her belly so big in front of her you hardly know how she could move about at all, and she looks at me as if to say, who are you to tell me what to name my baby?

"Rose," I said, "listen."

"Come on now," she said. "I've got to get to work."

Before I know it she's got the dishes clean and her coat on and she's out the door to make breakfast for twenty-five other girls, none of them as far along as her. She didn't stop working in the kitchen. She stayed there till the last possible minute, was stirring up a birthday cake for someone when her own water broke out on the tile floor.

Rose was a strong girl. She's the only woman I ever knew who felt as big as me. Not that she's anywhere as tall as me, but her hands and feet are big and the bones across her shoulders are sturdy. When you find a beautiful woman who's small, small like Cecilia, there's something about her that makes you want to cradle her in your hands. You want to keep her in your pocket, and show her to people like a little secret that you own. But Rose's beauty was something that no one person could keep. It filled up every room she went into. I remember the first time I saw her, standing up on the porch with Angie. She put a shadow over every girl there. Her white neck, the length of her thighs against the worn blue cotton of her dress, the line of her jaw under her dark hair. I thought, what's she doing here? What kind of man would let her get away?

But I never asked her about that man and she never asked me anything about Cecilia, except whether or not I'd loved her. She was always staring at her name across my shoulder when we were in bed at night. She made like it was the tattoo she was really interested in. "Did it hurt?" she asked.

"I don't remember. It was a long time ago."

"But it must have hurt. Needles." She shivered.

"I guess it must have," I said. Pain is one of those things where the big ones just wipe the small ones away, so I really couldn't imagine a needle working in and out of my arm when I was seventeen could have hurt so much.

I loved lying in bed with Rose, smelling her warm skin, running my hand down against her sides once she fell asleep. Everything about her was big; her belly was a mountain, her breasts and legs were smooth and swollen and round. In bed with her I didn't feel lonely the way I did with other women who had fallen asleep beside me. Not that I'm saying there'd been so many, but there were enough to know. Sleep brings out the smallness in a woman, their little hands holding the edge of the pillow while they dream. I felt so huge beside them. I was afraid they would wake up and be scared to see me there. I never touched them while they slept. But Rose could hold her own against anybody. Even after the baby was born, when her body whittled down into its old self, she was still a match for me. There was something about Rose, not just her size but who she was. I could tell she'd seen some things. When we were married she wasn't yet twenty-four and I was forty-five. I'd seen plenty, more than God will forgive me for, but not more than Rose. Even knowing her as little as I did, I knew that much.

That first month was the only time in our marriage we were ever alone, if you can call living so close to Saint Elizabeth's being alone. Me and Rose both stayed over there pretty much all the time, same as always. We were used to it that way. Some days it seemed like nothing had changed. I was still eating dinner in the big kitchen while she cleaned up, and as she washed dishes I would find myself looking at her breasts under her wet apron and then looking away so she wouldn't see. Then I'd think, that's my wife, and hell, I've seen her coming out of the bathtub in the morning, big as life. So I tried to tell myself it was okay if I looked, that I don't have nothing to be ashamed of, but it's hard for me to believe.

When a man gets to be my age, he don't much expect things will change. Winter and you press caulk into the windows, summer and you're putting up the screens. The pipes give way one by one. By the time you've repainted the whole place inside and out it's time to start over again. You're alone and you'll always be alone. It's so true it doesn't bear mention. You just stop thinking about it, the way you stopped thinking about everything after a while.

But then here comes Rose, after eighteen years of pregnant girls come and gone. After the first day I saw her I found myself looking for her. I hoped she would be there when I came in in the morning. I went to the kitchen at night to find her. It had been so long since I'd done anything like that that for a while I didn't even know I was doing it. Then all of the sudden I'm lonely at night. I couldn't remember the last time I was lonely. I would think of her, the way she pushed her hair behind her ear with one wet hand, the way she blew on a spoon of soup she was tasting for salt. I longed for her. Not like I longed for a woman at seventeen, not like I longed for Cecilia, where I wanted to feel her hands on my back and press my face against her neck. I only wanted to be near to Rose. I guess maybe I wanted the rest of it too, but that kind of longing had pretty much been worn out of me. I'd come to believe that part of my life was over.

So when I found her that morning in the snow and she came to my house and slept and woke up and said yes, she would marry me, everything changed. It was like the sun had set in the east, and suddenly nothing was like it was, even though everything was like it was. I can't explain it. It felt like I should be coming home to another house, living in a different state, that nothing of my old life should have stayed the same because I was suddenly a married man. But instead we went on just like before, except now the longing wasn't there. Rose was there, beside me in my bed.