Free Against the Season by Jane Rule

not. She sat, widely dark-eyed, and waited.
    “I may marry Carl Hollinger.”
    “Carl Hollinger?”
    “He’s lonely. He’s a good man. He suggested the idea as sensible. I don’t think it is. In fact, I can’t imagine it, but I find, as the days pass, that I’m trying to.”
    “Do you want to, Ida? Do you love him?”
    “I’m upset by the absurdity of it.”
    “What’s absurd about it?” Rosemary asked.
    “Beatrice could have told you.”
    “Beatrice is dead,” Rosemary said. “And I never really did like her sense of humor.”
    “I depended on it,” Ida said. “If you’ve had to be, all your life, a quaint little bag of bones in a graveyard, the best sort of friend is one who thinks it’s funny.”
    “Oh, Ida…”
    “She also knew her kind of beauty—and yours—were bad jokes.”
    “Beatrice Larson was a bitter old woman,” Rosemary said.
    “Yes,” Ida agreed. “But she knew how to laugh,”
    “Marry him,” Rosemary said.
    “I don’t know,” Ida said. “I don’t know.”

V
    A MELIA WAS AT HER desk late Friday afternoon, waiting for Rosemary and Agate to arrive. Below her in the side garden Cole, in a pair of modest trunks, lay stricken in the sun for vanity rather than pleasure. If she had thought he would stay there long, she might have suggested that he move, though she doubted that the pale-bodied boy would excite any interest in the drug-peddling, angry young mother-to-be she was about to interview. Amelia was not apprehensive. She was distracted and heavy with the diaries she had been reading. Her first method, reading through sixty-three Mays, had been arbitrary and frivolous, giving her little of Sister but her hatred of roses and chronic spring envies. So Amelia had started again at the beginning. Those first years, like the first years of any life, passed quickly, but now she was in distended adolescence, and she began to realize what a long life Sister had had of roses and relatives. It depressed her, but she felt, by now, committed to the task, as she had been committed to living with Beatrice through all those years the first time. Why? She couldn’t explain it to herself except as moral perversity: love.
    “Miss A?” she heard Kathy call, though she hadn’t heard the bell. “Miss A?”
    “Are they here?” Amelia answered.
    “Miss A?” The calling was urgent.
    Amelia hoisted herself up from her desk and turned on her good leg. “What is it, Kathy?”
    “Miss A?”
    Amelia could not hurry. She had to move at the same pace to dinner or disaster. As she crossed the hall, she knew Kathy had stopped calling because she could hear Amelia coming toward the kitchen. There Kathy stood, leaning on the kitchen table, water streaming down her legs.
    “It’s all right, child,” Amelia said. “The sac’s broken, that’s all.”
    “What will I do?”
    “Sit down.”
    “I can’t. I…”
    “Yes you can,”
    “I have to clean it up. I have to clean myself up.”
    “You have to sit down,” Amelia said, reaching her and steering her to a wooden chair. “There’s nothing wrong, except it’s time.”
    “It’s not supposed to do that,” Kathy said.
    “It’s just one of the ways, one of nature’s ways,” Amelia said. “Now you stay there, and I’ll call Cole.”
    “No, no, don’t call Cole!”
    “He’ll get the car,” Amelia said. “By that time you’ll be fine. We’ll just get some towels. You’ll be fine.”
    “It’s not supposed to do that,” Kathy repeated, tears of fear and embarrassment beginning to brighten her eyes.
    “Yes it is,” Amelia said. “The sac has to break some time. This is one of the times. Now just sit there.”
    Amelia crossed the hall again and went to the study window. “Cole? Pull on some trousers and a shirt and get the car. It’s time to take Kathy to the hospital.”
    The abruptness of his response belied the relaxation of his pose. He was out of the lawn chair like something released and nearly collided with