Free The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett

thought their husbands were upstairs changing in the room, and would soon come onto the porch and kiss them and look proudly over the beginnings of their family. Every now and then a girl broke away from the group and walked down the front steps and into the field, where she could imagine herself to be the only woman in the world about to have a child.
    At six o'clock the one that Angie said was Sister Loyola stepped onto the porch and rang a small bell. The girls hoisted one another up from their chairs with exaggerated effort and laughed. "That damn bell of hers," Angie whispered to me. "You think she could just say that supper was ready."
    As I turned to go in I saw a man walking up toward the hotel. He was the only man I had seen since my arrival, and I wondered for an instant if he was coming to get someone. "Who's that?" I asked.
    "Oh, that's Son," Angie said, and waved to him. He waved back to her and smiled. He was a giant man, maybe six foot six. He wasn't fat, but as big and broad as an oak. His arm swept through the air like the branch of a tree. "He fixes things. Everybody's in love with Son."
    I didn't know how she meant that, really in love, or as a kind of joke, but she had gone into dinner before I could ask her.
    We said our prayers standing beneath chandeliers, Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts.
    At dinner we sat with girls who were closest to our class. Your class was the month you were due in, so I was the class of February. Charlotte, Lolly, and Nora, the class of August, sat at the head table with a couple of girls who were due any day. It made an odd kind of sense, their not wanting to get too close to the ones who were just coming in. By the ninth month, they were saturated with the things they were going to have to give up: their friends, their home, their child. They had no cause to take on new alliances. We sat with a girl named Regina, who was due in January, and Beatrice, who was due in December. Beatrice was a big-boned, strong-looking girl who claimed to work in the mines alongside the men in eastern Kentucky.
    "I bet you worked 'long side the men," Angie said, laughing at her own joke. I was surprised at how bold she was, having been here only eight days herself. Beatrice was clearly a girl who could give you trouble if she was so inclined. But she laughed a little herself and poured another glass of milk. She was showing nearly as much as the girls in the class of October.
    "Twins run in my family," she said, and smiled to show her big white teeth, which were miraculously straight and even. "My grandmother was a twin."
    "What a nightmare," Angie said.
    "If I have two," Beatrice said, "I might just take a mind to keep one for myself." But no one laughed at that, and Regina, who was quiet anyway, turned her head. Even at the end of my first day I knew enough to know that keeping a baby wasn't something to be joked about. None of us would. That's why we were here.
    We ate the rest of our meal quietly. The food was not good, vegetables were overcooked, the meat sat in thin pools of grease, but there was a limitless amount of everything. "Sister Evangeline does the cooking," Beatrice said to me in a low voice, as if that would explain everything.
    I pushed back my plate, suddenly unable to go on. "Eat, eat, eat," Angie said cheerfully. "That's the war cry around here. I've gained four pounds in a week. 'The success of a girl can be measured in the pounds gained,' that's what Sister Loyola says."
    She looked so thin to me, all knees and elbows. I couldn't imagine where she put those four pounds.
    "Can't you just see what this place must have been like?" Beatrice said. "I mean, with white tablecloths and white napkins and fancy china that all matched. There must have been a guy in a white coat coming around with little bowls of water, asking you if you wanted to rinse off your hands. My sister ate dinner in a real fancy restaurant once, down in Lexington. She said that's what you do."
    "That's