Free Bury Me Deep by Megan Abbott

for special training to learn and it cost me forty dollars. So I’m gone not three days and Dr. Milroy decides to show this other nurse, this claptrap Fern, how to use the machine to make X-ray pictures. He told everyone, ‘She’s from a farming town and is familiar with equipment.’ What, tractors? So I come back and they don’t want to pay me the extra four bits a week anymore.”
    “That doesn’t seem fair. Nor safe,” Marion said. “Those machines can be dangerous.”
    “You don’t have to tell me, buttercup. But I showed them,” Louise said, grinning. She leaned forward. “First chance, I went into the X-ray Department right before her shift and turned the voltage up real high. The next day, darling Fern uses it and near burns a hole right through some poor clod.”
    Marion looked up at Louise, wondered if she could be serious.
    Louise grinned, red-lipped like a baby caught with hands in the jam jar. “Well, shouldn’t she pay for being such a louse, such a nasty little s.o.b.? Myra best keep her talons short. She causes trouble, wait and see. Wait and see what I got cooking.”
    Marion thought, Why, she’s just playing, she always plays. Besides, there was Joe Lanigan to think of. Joe Lanigan.
    She wanted to share it all with Louise, but she really couldn’t, could she. What might Louise think? For Louise, bad behavior was coming by for supper with empty hands, or not paying mind to Ginny, so clearly itching to play Tiddly Chase or Chinese checkers. Sins were looking down long noses at unmarried girls while carrying on with parlormaids on the sly.
    “So do tell where you and Joe Lanigan stole off to on Saturday, my little nightingale,” Louise said, over hoecakes she’d brought for them.
    “We went for a drive,” said Marion, fingers to her mouth. She felt like everyone could see it on her, Louise most of all. Like the one time, the only time, seven years old and being fresh, she sassed her father and he made her stand under the cherry tree at the foot of their lawn with a writing slate hung round her neck that said, I DO NOT FEAR OUR MAKER .
    “I thought you went the way of the Parker baby, but Ginny has a slyer eye,” Louise said, smiling the whole time. “She says to me, ‘Marion plays the prairie flower but she’s got a hot mitt on Gent Joe.’”
    Marion could feel her chin shake. “He needed someone to talk to. You know, his wife is so ill.” This was true. Joe had talked about his wife, at length and in ways that made Marion feel he had sorrows deeper than her own.
    “They do hot-air treatments,” Marion went on. “When it’s bad, her lips, they…” Here, telling her, he had touched his fingers to his mouth, embarrassed. “They taste of urine.”
    He told her too that when his wife came to realize this herself, kisses stopped forever. Her humiliation was so great. She was dirty, she said. Dirty and foul.
    Before she fell sick, he’d admitted, he’d never seen her lily-white bride flesh, even in low lamplight, curtains heavy across every window. He’d not seen an inch of it, only felt it, tense and wincing, under his hand, under two coverlets, under the grave dead dark of long winter nights.
    Now he saw that flesh and it was pushed full with air, with sick, with awful inner squalls of illness. It was like touching the thin, skeiny membrane of a newborn birdling.
    “Is that how it is,” Louise said to Marion now, nodding, eyes fastened hard. But she seemed to be, could she be, finding a giggle in all this.
    “She has the Bright’s,” Marion said. “She’s infirm.” Marion, you must understand, he had told her, fingers on the ties that held her dress together, I cannot help myself. You are all I have that is not dead. Dying or dead. Dying and dead.
    “Is that what they’re calling it now? You don’t have to tell me about Mrs. Lanigan, Marion,” Louise said. “The three months I worked for her were the closest I’ve come to San Q.”
    “You worked for her? You were