Free Concrete Angel by Patricia Abbott Page B

Made us responsible men. We take care of our women.”
    Eve didn’t hear his last name—this responsible man with good upbringing from fine schools, who now was a department store cop. He was still talking.
    “I’ve expunged the record, Hank. You can forget about it.”
    She felt something coming off this Bill. Some sort of stench at the thought of hitting her, hurting her, having her sexually probably. His eyes seemed unfocused in some insidious way. His hands clenched and unclenched at the sudden flood of power moving through them. If he hadn’t discovered Hank Moran was her husband, would he have come alone to that other dank office and done something foul to her?
    She’d stay away from downtown Wanamaker’s. Frequent one of their smaller, more anonymous stores.
    “To say I’d never cross their foyer again was too great of a promise,” Mother told me. “But not any time soon.”
    Not with the chance of this guy bringing her to his office without Hank’s protective arm—an arm she needed but resented. She wondered if he’d inform the other stores of her activity and decided no. He’d have to admit he let her go, that he was bought off.
     
    L ike her father, ten years earlier, her husband didn’t speak on the ride home. It was a Buick LeSabre rather than a bus, but that was the only difference. The silence was the same: scorching and horrible. There were always grim-faced men in charge of her, she thought again. Men who guided her around by the elbow, steering her like an unwieldy ship into port. Men whose faces would crack if they tried to smile. Men who were ashamed of what she’d done—at their association with her.
    When they pulled up to the Moran family home, Hank turned to her and said, “I thought your thieving would stop once we left those army bases. Once we had enough money.”
    She was shocked. So he’d known of her thefts. Probably paid people off, did things like he’d done today to keep her out of jail. And she’d believed those women—those shopkeepers—had let it go. She believed she had conned them.
    Daddy deposited her in her old room at the Morans’ house, where she could be more easily watched, and went downstairs to do battle with his family. She listened at the heating grate—like she always did.
     
    I f I had written Daddy’s version of the day, it’d be about shame, about meeting with a lummox he hadn’t known at all but been forced to bargain with. To play the beta male to an idiot’s alpha. Being humiliated again for his wife’s petty thefts, having a stranger assume he was surprised at his wife’s need to steal baubles he could easily pay for.
     
    T he Terraces was a progressive sanitarium, created to satisfy the needs of the area’s wealthy. Less fortunate people in southeastern Pennsylvania needing a “rest” went to Norristown State Hospital. The Moran family voted to send Mother to Norristown, claiming The Terraces was more a gift than a punishment. But Daddy overruled them, coughing up the dough without their help for the campus-like feel of The Terraces: for the large, well-appointed single rooms, for the naturalized swimming pool, the game room, for the horses, three-hole golf course, and tennis courts. And, of course, it was chockfull of psychiatrists with progressive ideas.
    Hank had visited an aunt at Norristown State Hospital years ago and still remembered the pleas for deliverance coming from each door he passed. It’d been like a prison. It was a prison.
    “It’s not about gifts or punishments. We want Eve to get well,” he told the gathered Moran clan. “Which place has the better doctors?”
    “Isn’t prison what your wife deserves? Isn’t prison where she’d be if you hadn’t paid the fool off? It’s not like she’s weepy or talks to herself,” his mother said. “She’s hardly likely to throw herself out a window. She’s a troublemaker and a thief.”
    Hank stuck by Mother, despite the Morans’ machinations, although he didn’t