“I’m glad you like it.”
After a few minutes of silence Olivia asked softly, “You never talk about your
sisters. Do you know where they are for Christmas?”
“My sisters? Better not to know what they’re up to. They did a good job of
raising me up – when they were hardly more than babies themselves – I’ll give
them that. But since then … Let’s just say that of the three of us, I’m the one who turned out well. So you can imagine.”
“Do you know where they are?”
“I suppose still in Erie. That’s where they were last time I seen ’em. Sharing
two rooms near the port. Back then they used to work a few hours in the
morning, cleaning for folks, and then spend the rest of the day smoking up their
wages.”
“They smoked that many cigarettes?”
Jettie smiled. “Opium, Honey, opium. One year I went lookin’ for ’em,
planning on staying a while, but turned out they had quite a few gentlemen
callers.”
“You don’t mean they were working as prostitutes!”
“No. They were too damned stupid to charge money. It was sailors off the
boats, bringing them more of the poppy juice they loved to smoke, in exchange
for a visit.”
“Oh.” Olivia blinked, not knowing what to say.
Jettie’s expression went blank and she spoke as if to herself. “Those sailors,
they had a name for my big sisters. I passed some of ’em, on my way out. They
had a young one with them, hardly but a boy, and they were tellin’ him what a
swell time he was going to have with the pair of lobster kettles at the top a them
stairs.”
Chapter Forty-Six
It was a hard January. Every morning Olivia high-stepped to the barn through
a fresh crust of snow and was increasingly grateful that she wasn’t in Uncle Scruggs’ awful cabin. She spent long hours in the kitchen, the table pulled close
to the stove, writing in her journal about Mourning and Jeremy and Jettie.
One morning she became lost in a frenzy of scribbling. She wrote it all down:
how she’d met her new neighbors, how nosy Iola was, the way she stared at
Olivia with her snake eyes, and everything about what happened in the barn.
Every horrible minute. After she finished she closed the journal and sat staring
into space, opening and closing her cramped hand. She’d written nothing about
her night with Mourning, but had left out no sickening detail of what Filmore had done to her. It was there, on paper. That was the last entry she made in that
journal. She had no stomach for writing after that.
One freezing noontime in February, Olivia was sweeping up the kitchen when
Jettie stomped in, bringing a gust of cold with her.
“You are not going to believe who I saw just now, riding right up the middle
of Main Street.”
