Free The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett Page B

parents' house and see your old boyfriend and everything's just the way it was. Just exactly the way it was."

4
    "G IRLS AT SAINT ELIZABETH'S are the recipients of charity," Mother Corinne informed me. "But that does not mean they are not expected to work so long as they are able."
    Clearly I was able. I kept my discomforts to myself. When I was sick, I was sick quietly and privately, so that even Angie commented that I wasn't like the other girls. I was sent to work in the kitchen with Sister Evangeline. It was a job that few people were able to keep for long, as the smell of food sent them reeling sooner or later, but I found it comforting somehow. The kitchen was huge, with long steel tables for preparation, twenty-six gas burners and half a dozen ovens. Giant copper pans hung from the ceiling, and the bone handles of good knives jutted up from wooden blocks. The kitchen was the one part of the hotel which had maintained its glamour.
    I didn't like to think about the baby that way. I didn't like to think about it all. The more that it was just something taking up space in my body, the easier it would be. If I thought of it as being something, a girl, a boy, mine, Thomas', it all became too confusing;
    "Never you mind, dear." She rubbed my stomach like a lucky charm. "You've got a good girl. You'll do right by her."
    "I'm giving her up," I said quietly. "I'm not keeping her." I didn't like it. Her. It made me shiver.
    Sister Evangeline laughed and headed off toward a pot of something boiling. "Not you, Rosie. Everybody else, but not you."
     
     
    That night in bed I tried not to think about it. I had never thought about it, what it might be like to keep this baby. I whispered to Angie in the darkness what Sister Evangeline had said.
    "Lord," she said back quietly. We had to keep our voices down, as the halls were checked for sounds, stray words seeping out underneath the doors.
    "Do you think she knows anything?"
    "They say she does. They say she knows about babies. I didn't know about her being mother superior though. That's something."
    I was always happy to be able to give Angie a piece of news she didn't have before. "I wish I didn't know about the baby."
    "I'd love to know. A boy or a girl. You could picture what it was going to look like once it grew up. You could know for sure what you'd name it. What would you name it?"
    "I don't think about it."
    "You can't keep yourself from thinking of things. It used to be if I had a girl I was going to name her Sharon, just because it's a beautiful name." She stopped for a minute. "But now I'd name her Rose of Sharon. Maybe I'd just call her Sharon, but her name would be Rose of Sharon."
    It was all talk. Angie and I would never name our children, but her saying that put such a tightness in my throat I couldn't reply.
    "And if it was a boy I'd name it for my boyfriend at home."
    "Who's that?" I whispered.
    She was quiet for a long time and I could hear her steady breathing. She wasn't crying, because no matter how softly she did that, I could always tell. "Duane," she said.
    "That's the father?" There were girls who told stories about the fathers. They were the ones who said he was away and would come back and marry them the day the baby was born, but no one ever really told the truth. The truth, I imagined, was almost uniformly the same, someone who said he loved you but didn't, someone who loved you but got scared. Within that truth were an endless number of stories, each so personal that no one could believe theirs was like anyone else's, as I believed mine was like no one else's. Maybe I shouldn't have asked, we were so careful not to ask things, but in that dark room I felt like a girl telling secrets.
    "No," she said, "that was Mr. Price. He owned the drugstore where I worked. I mostly worked the fountain, making sundaes and milkshakes and stuff like that. Sometimes I worked up front." She rolled over onto her side to face me and pulled the blanket way up over her