Free Garden of Lies by Eileen Goudge Page A

stiff at her sides, her jaw cocked at an angle and her blue eyes blazing with sullen
    defiance. She was out of breath, her chest heaving, as if she’d run up all four flights without
    stopping once. Wearing her tight black skirt with the rolled up waistband, pink Flame-Glo
    lipstick, and black patent leather flats, she stirred the stale kitchen air, somehow made it vibrate,
    hum with danger.
    Then she dropped her A-bomb.
    “Pete and I are getting married,” she announced in the same the-hell-with-you tone in which
    she might have said, Pete and I robbed a bank.
    For an instant, no one had moved. It was like a tableau, Rose later thought, a weird parody of
    the Last Supper tableau that Brother Paul, over at Precious Blood, where Brian had gone to
    school, staged every year on Holy Thursday. The three of them frozen around the chrome-legged
    Formica table, under the ceiling’s fluorescent halo. Nonnie in her black rayon dress (the one she
    wore to church every Sunday and First Friday), she and Clare in their school uniforms. Their
    forks poised over their plates, their eyes on the Judas before them.
    Rose watched Nonnie’s pale blue eyes narrow as they came to rest on the bulky sweater
    drooped over Marie’s waist. Suddenly, Rose understood. It all fell into place—the miserable
    retching she’d heard from behind the locked bathroom door every morning for the past week,
    Marie’s jumpiness lately, snapping at everything Rose said. And, of course, her running off to be
    with Pete all hours of the day and night.
    [47] Holy Mother of God, Marie was pregnant.
    Nonnie stopped chewing and rose slowly, palms flat against the Formica on either side of her
    plate, pushing herself up with her bony arms until she stood facing Marie across the table. The
    light winked across the lenses of Nonnie’s rimless spectacles, and for a fleeting instant Rose had
    seen her own face reflected, no larger than a flyspeck. She sucked in air to steady herself against
    the sudden, dizzying plunge her stomach had taken.
    Nonnie pushed her chair back, and even more slowly walked around the table to where Marie
    stood. She raised her hand, her bones in sharp relief against the loose mottled flesh, like a
    Halloween skeleton’s. She slapped Marie full across the face. A cracking sound like stamping on
    a frozen puddle.
    “Shame,” Nonnie hissed. “For shame. You. No better than a filthy whore!”
    Marie just stood there, white and frozen. Hectic stripes of color now blazed against the cottage-
    cheese color of her face. Her eyes glittered with angry unshed tears. But she didn’t move or cry
    out.
    It was Clare who let loose an anguished sob. With a harsh, skittering scrape of her chair, she
    fled the room, face buried in her hands, weeping. Watching her, her numbness gone, Rose
    thought evilly, That’s right, run. Run to your prayer book, like you always do. Miss Goody-
    Goody-Gumdrops. Or are you scared it might be catching, like a disease, and you might get
    pregnant too?
    Then she swung back to Marie, staring at her sister, trying to make sense of all this. Marie,
    almost twenty now, had worked behind the budget cosmetics counter at A & S—where she met
    Pete—since she’d graduated from Sacred Heart. So even though the toes of her black flats usually
    were scuffed, and most of the time she had a run in one of her stockings, her face was always
    perfect, eyebrows plucked and redrawn like Audrey Hepburn’s, and lipstick the palest shade of
    pink. Her light brown hair ratted into a bubble, wispy bangs sprayed into a line of stiff commas
    across her forehead.
    Marie had it all. Nothing really bad ever seemed to happen to Marie. She was the tough one.
    Nonnie’s anger slid off her like water down a drainpipe.
    Despite her anguish, Rose felt her chest swell with pride and love for her older sister. Marie
    was tough, sure, but she could be generous and kind, too. Rose thought of the time she had
    begged [48] and begged Marie to let her wear