Free Lark and Termite by Jayne Anne Phillips

gone before Lark gets home. We’re not hiding anything, but it’s our privacy, and it’s how I want it.
    Elise cuts me a glance. “I do believe I’m driving you straight to my place for a cold beer, Noreen. You seem to need one, and you won’t get it at home. Seems to me you could relax your policy. How long is it now since you divorced the second husband, that high-flying alcoholic? Seventeen years?”
    “Billy Onslow’s drinking was almost the least of it,” I tell her, “but I don’t fault him. We were married seven months, but he stood in for me for a lot of years, watching over Lola.” I rest the bag of food on the sidewalk. Elise will need to light herself another cigarette.
    She chuckles and shakes her head. “Poor Lola, gone so long and still the elephant in the room. She got what she wanted, in a way. Well out of it and still pulling the strings.”
    “There aren’t any strings,” I tell Elise. “There’s just what happened.”
    “There’s Lark,” Elise says, “and there’s Termite.”
    She offers me a cigarette and I take it. We stand here smoking, adjusting to the heat.
    • • •
    C harlie will say how strange it is I lit out of here so fast without him, only to move back years later, after all that happened, even closer to the tracks and the river and the skinny houses of Polish Town. Well, a house on a grass alley two streets from the rail yard was what I could afford, and lucky to have it. Gladdy thought it was where I belonged, of course. When I was nineteen and Charlie’s father died, she had a prime excuse for handing everything over to Charlie. The husband she’d driven to his grave was gone, and the son inherited all, including Gladdy. Your first responsibility is the business, she told him. Without your father, we could lose everything. You’ll regret knowing such a girl. Don’t make it a permanent mistake. Think of your religion, she kept saying. And you know, he did. He’s Catholic to his bones, while it’s all show with Gladdy. What if Noreen converted, he’d say, to watch his mother blanch. Charlie knew I wasn’t about to take up Catholicism, but he didn’t know I’d leave him.
    I worked full-time at Murphy’s Five & Ten the two years after high school, promoted to floor supervisor, learning bookkeeping. I’d saved money and I was going to marry Charlie or else. We need to wait, he said. How long? I asked. Gladdy will live forever. He called me unfeeling—his father had dropped dead a month before—but I was hell-bent. It was Gladdy or me; he had to choose. She’s my mother, he kept saying, like that was sacred. Not to me. I’d pretty much raised myself and Lola. We’d done without mothering, and I thought it was time Charlie did. I knew a girl who had a cousin in Atlanta, so I packed two suitcases and rode out of town on the bus. Lola begged me not to go, and then she begged to come with me. I grew up here, I told her, you’ll have to do the same. And don’t even think of coming to find me until you’ve graduated high school.
    I walked out on all of them. I rode buses three days and nights, washing my face in filthy restrooms, stepping over families asleep in the depots. It was 1936, hard times, but I felt free, almost grateful to Charlie. The cousin rented me a room and I got a job as a window dresser at Lowman’s Department Store in Atlanta, then as a waitress in the store restaurant, a big place always busy with shoppers and businessmen. I got to know an insurance executive who took lunch and dinner at my station nearly every day. His wife had died the year before, and his two little boys a decade earlier, the same week, of diphtheria. It’s not too late, I thought, I’ll marry him and give him children. We’ll live in his brick house with the floating staircase and have babies. But I couldn’t. Doctors told me I never would. All Charlie’s careful timing and confession and prayers had been needless: I laughed till I cried, and they were the last