“My mother.”
“Indeed? Well, I stand corrected. But since I’ve taken a bite out of it I don’t have to put the damn thing back, do I?”
“Swearing’s rude too.”
“I imagine it is. What did you say your name was?”
“Neave.”
“Well, Neave, I thank you for your reading efforts today. I will pay you your five cents and give you a bag with enough cookies in it so you will be able to share with your siblings. How many are there?”
I didn’t answer because I didn’t know what a sibling was, which was embarrassing.
“Your family’s vaguely Irish, isn’t it? How many are there? Twelve?”
“How many what?” I managed.
“Brothers and sisters,” she said, and her voice was friendlier.
“There’s me and Lilly, Jane, and Snyder.”
“We can manage that many cookies.”
She gave me a nickel and told me to go to the kitchen and ask Violette for a paper bag of cookies. I stood motionless.
“What is it now?” she asked. Her eyes had drooped closed but she talked to me as if she could see me still standing there shuffling from foot to foot. I studied a hair on her chin. Her fingers drifted to it as if she could feel my eyes on it, and, her own eyes still closed, she plucked it out while I stared.
“Am I coming back?” I managed.
“Do you want to come back?”
I nodded. The skin on her neck crinkled like a turtle’s and one of her eyelids wasn’t doing the same thing as the other one, which I did not like but I wanted to read The Sheik so badly that I stood my ground. When I want things, I want them badly, and Mrs. Daniels wasn’t the first scary thing I’d stared down. “Very well. Come tomorrow if it’s all right with your mother.”
We lived only four houses away, and I ran the distance as if a wild animal armed with machine guns were at my heels. I banged into the house calling for Lilly, and when she came to see what the matter was I made her sit down right there and read something hard with me, something as hard as The Sheik.
“What are you doing for Mrs. Daniels?” Mom asked me that night at dinner. “You went over there today?”
Something dinged in me, warning me off the subject of books, which could lead to a discussion of my gaining access to White Collar Girl.
“Carrying things. Sweeping.”
Snyder looked up from his meat loaf but kept his mouth shut.
“Sweeping and carrying what? I thought Mrs. Daniels had a cook in the house who could help her.”
“Well, Violette’s a Protestant. And Mrs. Daniels likes someone who knows the rosary to say it with her.”
That whipped my mother’s head around. “Mrs. Daniels is a Catholic?”
I nodded. “It’s just not easy for her to get to church, so you don’t see her there.” I could feel my mother’s assessing toe-to-hairline sweep of me. I smiled mildly and looked right back at her. I knew what she was thinking. Rosaries? None of her children took church very seriously, but I was the only openly resistant member of the family. I’d been a cranky First Communion candidate, complaining about the classes and the memorizing and the idea that now I was old enough to get in real spiritual trouble. I’d resisted the white gloves I was supposed to wear to Mass now that I was old enough and the doily that got pinned on my head every week. I was a pew kicker and a malcontent. My mother had used those particular words to describe me and they’d stuck in my mind.
“You’re over there for longer than it takes to say a rosary, missy.”
I’d overreached. “Well, sure. You know I think she really just likes company. She’s very lonely.” This didn’t seem like too much of a lie—simply a different way of looking at things.
My mother considered a little longer. “It’s a worthwhile thing to do if the poor woman’s lonely. You be nice to her. But take no money from Mrs. Daniels unless you’re making yourself useful doing something that needs doing in this world as well as the next. Nobody on Earth should pay another person to say a rosary with her. Do you understand?”
I did understand and I indicated this with a puppety nod. Maybe our mother wouldn’t have stopped me from going to Mrs. Daniels’s house if she knew I was heading hip-deep into the land of Adult Fiction, but I wasn’t taking that chance. Such a small little lie and besides, I could find something to dust the next time I was in her house and so it wouldn’t even be a lie at all.
I was a bad Catholic but I still had some uneasiness about all this lying. I took it, like I took most of my uneasy feelings, to Lilly.
“Oh, don’t be a ninny. Who cares if Mrs. Daniels likes hearing rosaries or not? Mom’s never going to walk over there and ask her.”
“She’s not?”
“Nope. She thinks Mrs. Daniels is a little scary. I heard her say it to Mrs. Seifritz.”
“Really?”
Then Lilly said exactly what I needed her to say. “You didn’t do anything wrong. If she gives you more cookies, ask for extras.”
The first afternoon I worked for Mrs. Daniels, we ended with Mrs. Roosevelt’s “My Day” column, and then she said that was enough reading for today. “I need to stretch. I’m going to tell Violette to bring us a little something,” she said. She stood up and started toward the kitchen. I stood up too, and drifted to the part of her bookshelves that held the titles like Paris Spring. Mrs. Daniels stopped in her tracks. “Move along, child. Leave that section of the library alone.”
“Will we ever read one of these, Mrs. Daniels?”
“One of the romances? No.”
“Why not?”
“You are young, and impressionable.”
“Does something happen to you if you read them?” A rhetorical question—I assumed that something happened to the people who read them, or Mrs. Daniels wouldn’t be shooing me away from them.
“The first thing that might happen to you is that people mock you for reading them. They think that women who read romances are idiots. I assure you, they are not.”
“No?”
“No. They are people who trust that love exists and that it is more powerful than bad logic or bad writing.”
“Why would anybody be against love?”
“On the surface, a reasonable question.”
“I’m not against love,” I offered.
“So you are a devotee of love?” Mrs. Daniels said drily. “One wouldn’t assume that to look at you. But the world is full of hope, isn’t it? It appears in the most unlikely of places.”