The Calamity Club by Kathryn Stockett - 38

B y ten to six, Mr. Binny and his brothers were settled on the back porch. The yard was still squishy with last night’s rain, and the girls walked on tiptoes to the cocktail tables to keep from getting their shoes wet. For fifteen furious minutes, everyone slapped themselves like lunatics, clapping Mrs. Tartt’s geraniums between our palms and rubbing the oil on our skin. Without rain, the mosquitoes hadn’t been that bad, but now they’d shown up in swarms, blood feasting, eating us alive. Slapping at her neck, grimacing, Charlie marched along the bushes, reciting the rules. I’d remember the litany if I lived to be a hundred.

“One dance minimum, ten dances max. If he hasn’t turned yet—”

“He’s a dead john,” we all called.

“Everybody know the password to get inside?”

“Frances!”

“If you hear ‘Night and Day,’ it means trouble. Nobody comes in—”

“Jeezus, I’m dying out here, Charlie,” Flossy said, digging her heels into her ankles. Red blotches and streaks ran up her white legs. “Can’t we wait in the house?”

“Fine, but stay by the door in case somebody drives up,” Charlie said. Every one of them jumped up to follow Flossy inside. In Charlie’s opinion, we should at least give the illusion we had plenty of girls if a customer walked up—

They didn’t even make it up the first porch step.

I heard it too. A noisy chain-drive engine, coming not from town but from the left, headed south down muddy Lamar. I leaned forward to see a wide green truck rattle up, brakes whining, and jerk to a stop in front of the house. I watched, terrified—who would be coming from that direction? The truck bed had tall wooden slats, and inside I could see bodies standing. I squinted harder—had the sheriff come the back way for a surprise attack?

“Well I’ll be damned. Those look like college boys to me,” Ruby announced, though her eyes were worse than mine. Sure enough, a blue letterman jacket jumped off the truck bed, then a white shirt and several navy blazers, and a car horn blew, and the boys all turned in its direction. A rickety Model A rounded the curve with shirtsleeves hanging out the open windows—again not coming from the direction of the square or the school. They must’ve skirted the town so the police or the school wouldn’t spot them , I thought. Charlie said something to Mr. Binny and he planted his hands on the keys, playing the heavy opening chords straight out of First Christ Methodist’s eleven o’clock church service.

“I’ve had it! I ain’t dancing to that funeral march shit no more!” Ruby hollered. She stamped her red shoes up on the porch like a brat. Mr. Binny stood up from the piano stool and took a step back, his black coat buttoned all the way up to his grumpy frown. Ruby tore into him, shaking her finger, and Mr. Binny did not look like he was appreciating being talked to thataway.

“Miss Charlie!” he called, but Charlie hollered at him, “ Just play something! I don’t care what! ” Ruby put her face back in his, and he finally threw his hands up and barked out to his brothers and the drummer started drumming like feet running. Then Mr. Binny’s fingers hit the keys LOUD and the horn came blaring behind it, playing a heart-racing version of “It Don’t Mean a Thing,” and the music filled the entire yard and when it was time, Mr. Binny’s three brothers sang with all their lunch, “ IF IT AIN’T GOT THAT SWING! ” I guess Mr. Binny figured these were desperate times and that dirty-mouthed white girl had her a point, so for the sake of his own job safety, it was time to pick up the beat.

Boys were almost to my table, nine boys to be exact, most of them large and laughing and throwing punches at one another. Behind them were another five or six smaller ones in stiff blue jackets. As the big ones ducked through the arch in the hedge, they did not stop to gaze in wonder this time. Behind me, a high, almost deafening wolf whistle made me look back. Ruby Slipper was on the dance floor, staring down the first college boy, a thick, letterman-jacketed, long-armed ape I didn’t trust an inch. In her short red dress, Ruby lifted one foot and spun around, making her skirt rise up around her legs. Ruby had good legs, strong and shapely, and then she spun in the other direction and stopped on a dime, and she and the ape-boy stared each other down like animals. Something hypnotic was coming off Ruby, dangerous, filthy. Even Charlie was staring, looking a little starstruck herself.

“’At one’s mine ,” ape-boy said and blew past me like he might throw Ruby over his shoulder.

“Hold on there, Tarzan,” I said and caught hold of his letterman-jacketed elbow. “You each owe me a dime.” He slapped a huge handful of silver on the table and the rest filed after him. I reckon I won’t be bothering with tokens tonight. The ape grabbed Ruby by the arm and started swinging to Mr. Binny’s jitterbug. There was hollering and whooping as his large friends, necks out, hunted down the rest of the girls—that was how they looked from here, like hunters on the kill. Charlie was trying to yell over the music, “ This is Trixie and her pretty twin Dixie— ” The hulking boy, they must’ve been on the football team, ignored Charlie. I did not like how he drug Dixie by her limp arm to the line of younger boys by my table. I was about to jump up and help her when she reared back and smacked the beast in the ear so hard his head flipped sideways.

In a girlish Texas drawl, she said, “Pull me again and I’ll carve your eyeballs out with a fruit spoon and feed ’em to you.” Something about her eerie calm made him drop her arm and back away a step. Dixie crossed her arms and looked the young boys over like she’d be the one deciding.

The music roared, and soon all the girls were dancing with probably a dozen boys standing around watching. “Cold drinks twenty-five cents, cigarettes a nickel,” I said over and over and sold a dozen of each in minutes and my God, it felt good to be busy. The music was hoppy, exhilarating, really, and even Mr. Binny looked almost happy to be pounding away at the keys, his brothers wagging the horns side to side. Flossy and her date were already disappearing around the other side of the house, with Ruby and hers practically chasing after them. Charlie wanted two girls on the dance floor at all times to keep up the front, so it really was a race to go first.

Through the hedge, the road was still, the truck driver apparently asleep inside his cab, while the noisy action went on behind me. Well, I guess that was the rush , I thought, but moments later another taxicab pulled around the curve headed south, with a second and a third one behind it. When the back door to the first taxi opened, a boy fell out and then another landed on top of him. They looked ossified, laughing and stumbling toward me, and it started all over again, dimes and drinks and drunks.

When I looked back, around seven thirty, there were more than two dozen boys on or around the dance floor, and I knew more were inside. Something cowering inside me hoped they did not all have designs on going upstairs—five girls, divided by what, thirty or more boys was … too many. “Get the pledges laid! Get the pledges laid!” I heard it over and over, like an Ole Miss tribal chant. Sweaty boys cheering with sweaty fists, and the dimes were hard to collect as boys pushed past me, but then one would come along, like the first, and slap a handful of change on my table. Through the kitchen window, I could see Charlie making liquor drinks as fast as she could pour them, then disappearing to open the side door and collect money where Mr. Tartt’s head was hanging on the wall. Mr. Binny started ending the songs quicker, playing a double-time “Puttin’ On the Ritz.” He’d heard the rules plenty himself, one dance minimum, so he was moving at twice the speed.

At some point, it must have been around nine, Charlie came out, though surely she was needed inside. She stood for a moment and watched, not smiling—I knew what she was thinking: I’m going to beat you, Garnett Pittman. How bizarre that the same way Charlie’d lost Meg was how she planned to get her back. And then Flossy stuck her head out the back door and shrieked something and Charlie rushed back inside. It was probably chaos in the house with girls ripping sheets off and getting new ones on and dressing to come back to dance all over again.

Ruby, who’d turned I did not want to know how many johns, was back on the dance floor, doing a cross between the Charleston and the Lindy hop—I’d seen this on the newsreel at the picture show with Jack. It was one-handed dancing, nothing like a waltz or a foxtrot, and Ruby’s blond partner had on blousy, high-waisted trousers that flapped when he danced. Ruby kicked her leg up and raised her skirt; head back, she licked at the sky—my God, she knew how to perform . Boys cheered as her calf muscles throbbed, and if the wrong person showed up here right now, indeed they would think it was nothing more than a dance club in full swing. I watched Ruby dance so long with the same fellow that finally Charlie rapped her on the shoulder, thumbing for her to either turn him or move on . When she realized what had happened, Ruby stopped and suddenly laughed so wide I could see her back molars. I reckoned Ruby had forgotten why she was even here.

Not to say it was all orthodontia and amnesia. Every woman in this place was here to make a buck, including me. I noticed that some of the same boys who’d come in winking and flirting with the girls, once the deed was done, sneered coldly at them afterward. This idea that a man would pay a girl for it but then be disgusted by her for it seemed more degenerate than what we were even running.

Near my table, a meaty-faced fellow with curls piled high to one side started screaming into a younger boy’s face. I couldn’t make out what he was saying, but everything about the smaller one said quiet , from his round wire glasses to his delicate, slope-shouldered frame. I wondered if he was a bird-watcher and if he’d been beaten up a lot in school. I bet he’d cried when he found out that many birds die within a year.

“I don’t want to,” the younger boy was trying to tell the bigger one.

The older boy shook his head and screamed at him again; meanwhile, a small horror played in my head: What if me and Frances had been made to do this when we were seventeen or eighteen? What if I’d had to egg Frances on to go upstairs and—. I squeezed my eyes shut. I hated this business, I hated this night, and it wasn’t even eleven o’clock. Minutes later I watched Flossy lead the delicate boy in the glasses into the darkness, and when they came back out twenty minutes later, his face was splotchy like he’d cried. He vomited quietly into Mrs. Tartt’s azaleas. Flossy came and stood at my table and barely over the music I heard her say, “Careful what you wish for, doll.”

By one in the morning, there were only a handful of boys left. Parts of the yard had been turned to mud, and on the road, headlamps were moving north, taking the back way to campus. I leaned over to see if any more were coming and saw the outline of a lone figure across the road, standing next to a parked car, very still, watching the house. He looked like he had an overcoat on, or— could that be a dress? Suddenly, a boy stuck his freckled face in front of mine.

“—said I ain’t here to dance, lady, I come for a whore.”

“I’m not for sale,” I said, jerking back from him.

The red-faced idiot punched me in the forearm. “Then get over there and bring me one that is. ”

I slapped him hard across the face, and he stood there, shocked, his cheek bright as a tomato, and then one of the football boys grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the road, looking back at me like he was somewhat sorry for his friend’s bad manners.

Jesus. It took me a few seconds to recover from that. Then I leaned over again and in the quarter moon, I could still see the lone figure standing across the road. The car next to the person looked boxy, an older model of some kind. I started to get a sick feeling in my chest.

“Charlie, come here,” I called. She was standing on the porch steps, but as she came closer, the person got in the car.

“They’ve been out there watching us for a while,” I said.

The car rolled forward, headlamps off, and then turned so it was facing town—not the way the boys had come. It stopped. I made a move to get up, go see, but Charlie held me back. “Don’t,” she said. “Do nothing.”

The car snapped its headlights on and drove away. We had opened a brothel a few miles from the sheriff’s office and the new president of this state’s Anti-Vice League. I wasn’t sure if I trusted Charlie’s “do nothing” policy.

“The sheriff’s gonna come out here eventually, Charlie,” I said. “We know that as a fact. So maybe, like the girls said, we should do something to … prepare this place.”

“That’s why we have this ridiculous front in the first place,” she said. Her face was turning plum. “It’s why I keep telling the girls the rules over and over, because the wrong person is bound to show up here. We don’t know who or when, but for the next three weeks, this front has got to be rock solid.”

After the last customer finally left around two that morning and we were all inside, I went around and double checked that every door was locked and the one without a key had a chair up against it. In the quiet dining room, my ears still rang from the loud music, the beat still in my heart. Thank God this night is over. Charlie set a roll of paper money on the green felt card table, and we both exhaled as it bloomed open. It was a green budding miracle of presidents’ faces. I was exhausted and starving. I dumped the Luzianne can out beside the bills. It made a small mountain of change and a few dimes rolled off the table onto the floor.

“No picnic on your knees, is it?” Flossy said, watching me pick them up. I felt a little ashamed. Flossy just laughed, though, and tipped over the Hurley Burley can, where they’d deposited the money from what they’d sold in liquor drinks, and kept on pouring in a clinking stream. There was the sweet smell of Henry Tartt’s tobacco mixed with cash and change.

“How many drinks do you think we sold?” Charlie asked.

“It’s gotta be sixty or seventy,” Flossy said. “But we girls can’t be makin’ whoopee upstairs and drinks in the kitchen. This keeps up, you gotta get us some help, Charlie.”

Charlie nodded, though she had not smiled yet.

Ruby thumped in barefooted with her red heels hooked on her fingers. It seemed like bad judgment to have all the money sitting out, but maybe Charlie wanted them to see proof that the business was working. As if they didn’t know it.

Ruby raised a smeared eyebrow at what was on the table and asked Flossy, “How many, dick breath?”

“Seven,” Flossy said. The number made me shudder. “And I mighta dislocated a tonsil. You?”

“Nine,” Ruby said, “but three was just fist jobs.”

While the girls ate leftover potpie in the kitchen, Charlie sorted the bills while I counted nickels, dimes, quarters, half dollars, cartwheels, and a shoebox full of pennies some kid had brought in. I recorded it in the ledger: sixty-three bourbons, ninety-eight dances, twenty-four cold drinks, fifty-three cigarettes, and the girls had turned twenty-nine tricks that tomorrow they’d probably act like were nothing, though surely they’d left behind an imprint of some kind, be it fingernails or a few moments of tenderness or, God help us, disease.

Charlie tucked each girl’s share of money into one of the envelopes pasted in the back of the Tartts’ books. Dixie and Trixie’s book was called The Glorious Adventure , which I’d enjoyed reading and would never quite think of the same, and Ruby’s was titled, of all things, A Preface to Morals .

After Charlie set aside an extra five for Mr. Binny, the partners’ shares came to fifty-seven dollars and ten cents each. That paid all the Calhouns’ back taxes, plus some, and put a good dent in what Charlie and Mrs. Tartt needed.

Across the table, Charlie said, “It was just one night, not time to celebrate yet,” and she pressed her lips together.

“Well it was a pretty good one,” I said and sighed. “And we’ve got a whole weekend left.”

She nodded and looked very close to smiling, but I could tell she wasn’t willing to do it yet. She likely wouldn’t until she had what she wanted in her arms and she was headed west.

There was a penalty for having a good night.

“Toss your dirty sheets down before you go to bed,” Charlie called up the stairs. Flocks of white linens flew over the rail, sticky and smelling like bourbon and Brylcreem, stained with various shades of red lipstick. Some had black cigarette burns and bloodstains and many had mud, presumably from boots the boys hadn’t bothered to take off. One sheet came in halves, ripped clean in two. While I’d sat watching the dancing, it’d been a war zone up there. Charlie and I piled sheets in the washroom off the kitchen until the heap nearly reached my chin. If we expected to fight another battle tomorrow, they’d all need to be washed and dried in the next fourteen hours.

Charlie tied an apron around her waist and knelt by the tub, blasting open the spigot.

“We’re gonna need some help, Charlie,” I said. “Especially if the whole weekend is like this.”

She nodded, staring at the water pouring into the tub. “Well, we can’t send the sheets out. Those laundry ladies gossip too much. What if—” Even before she said it, I was wishing she wouldn’t, though I’d had the same terrible idea. “What if we asked Mrs. Tartt’s maids to come in? They know how things work around here. You think they’re trustworthy? Or they’ll tell Mrs. Tartt?”

“Of course they’re trustworthy. And I don’t know how they’d tell her, she’s in Jackson, but …” I was trying to think of a better reason not to get them involved in this.

“Think they’re available?” Charlie asked.

Lie. Just lie and say they’re not. But everything on me was wilting, as I thought of Polly saying she couldn’t find more than a day’s work now and then and how nobody’d hire Picador because she was too old.

I sighed. “I think they’re probably … available,” I said. “But I don’t want them to know what we’re doing here. If they come, the girls have to stay upstairs, alright? And—and they have to be gone way before we open.” I nodded, thinking it through. “We’ll tell them we brought in boarders to earn money; therefore …” I swept my hand across the mountain. “Sheets.”

Charlie pushed herself up, using the tub. “Birdie, they’re going to know, so we might as well tell them the truth.”

The thought of Picador, who’d changed Rory’s diapers and was so gentle with Mrs. Tartt’s medicine … I imagined her looking at me and asking, Why you did this to sweet Miss Viktoria? They using her room ? “Forget it,” I said. “We’ll just do the sheets ourselves.” If those were the consequences, I didn’t need to sleep. Ever.

Charlie threw some chunks of Fels-Naptha soap into the steaming water. “Fine, we won’t tell them. If we don’t get some sleep, we won’t be able to stand up tomorrow night, much less think.”

“Alright, I’ll walk down there when it’s light out—but you promise we won’t tell them? We’ll get them out the door before they find out?”

Charlie looked at me square on, like Meg had those first days: like I was a little stupid and a lot naive, but she’d have to put up with it. “If you say so.”

“’Scuse me, could you tell me where Miss Picador lives?”

It was only a few minutes past dawn when I got to Freedmen Town and the grocery store, where I was fairly known now, wasn’t open yet.

The woman I’d asked stood up very straight on her front porch and looked me over.

“We just need some help out at the Tartts’,” I said which I should’ve led with.

She nodded, though not looking entirely trusting. “That the young Mrs. Tartt askin’?”

“ Lord no , I’m Birdie, her sister.” She might never tell me where Picador lived if she thought I was Frances. She said to go up yonder, past Bird’s Blacksmith and take a left at Threkeld’s, and it was about another mile or so. She told me what Picador’s house looked like.

Soon, the gravel road turned to dirt, or mud rather, but at least it was still cool out. I’d slept maybe two hours, but my head was clear enough, and I got to thinking again of the many reasons I didn’t want Picador to know what we were doing. She was Meemaw’s age, for God’s sake. It’d be an insult, and a terrible position to put her in with Mrs. Tartt. Mostly, I didn’t want to implicate them in our crime. If the place got busted, especially with Witch Garnett right down the road, what would happen to the nice ladies simply doing the wash? I didn’t know. But we needed them and they needed the work.

After a while, the houses grew a lot farther apart. Single-story farmhouses, with better paint jobs and several with automobiles parked out front. Folks were already up this Friday morning, drinking coffee on their porches, rocking babies. A wagon full of yellow squash rattled past me, headed in the direction of the square. After about ten minutes, I knew I’d reached Picador’s house, by the description the woman had given me. It was small, white, typical, and covered in fall flowers, yellow black-eyed Susans, orange chrysanthemums, purple verbena, and aster, a flourish of reds and yellows and pinks, and along the right side was a wall of four-foot sunflowers as tall as Picador, and on past those looked like a garden of lettuces and squashes. Confederate jasmine covered a split-rail fence that separated her yard from the road. I thought about Picador frowning at the derelict state of Mrs. Tartt’s yard, but Mrs. Tartt had insisted that Rory’d take care of it. It seemed like years ago.

I spotted Picador walking through the side yard with a basket. She had on a pale calico dress and a blue scarf over her hair and she looked like, well, herself. And by that I meant more like her and less like a stiff white uniform waiting on somebody else. Her eyes narrowed on a weed she snatched up and dropped in her basket. I remembered what Polly’d said, how she’d never had this kind of time for herself. I hated the thought of bringing her into our world.

She looked up, basket on her hip, and frowned at me. “Miss Birdie. What you doing out here?” She waved me closer. “Is Miss Viktoria alright? She sick?”

“She’s fine, nothing’s wrong.” I opened the wooden gate. “I just came by to see if you could come help out at the house.”

“Lawd a mercy, you ’bout scare me to death.”

I followed her up a gravel path. The porch was covered in tin cans full of bouquets of the fall flowers from her yard. We sat on the steps.

“’Scuse me if I don’t invite you in, my grandbaby in there asleep. She move too fast fo Picador this time a the mawning.” She laughed, though I doubted she’d ever be completely relaxed around me. I didn’t make those rules. “How’s Miss Viktoria doing?”

“She and Frances went down to Jackson to look for Rory. They’re staying with Mrs. Tartt’s sister.”

“She must be sick to death worrying. But Mr. Rory gone do the right thing. He ain’t gone do his mama thataway long,” she said. Picador was probably the last person in town who still thought highly of Rory.

“We took some boarders in at the house to make her a little money. We sure could use your and Polly’s help.”

Picador’s eyebrows went up. Like with Polly, I’d been worried that word had gotten out via Mr. Binny and his brothers. “They strangers living up in Miss Viktoria’s house?” she asked.

“Just ladies,” I said. “Six of them.” I swallowed. I needed to tell her this next part. “They run a little dance business, a dance club, in Mrs. Tartt’s backyard. So if you come out and see the dance floor set up, that’s what that is.”

Her nostrils widened. Picador might be only four foot tall but she called it like she saw it, which was more or less right straight into your soul. Maybe Charlie was right, she would know instantly.

“They running a who ?”

“A … dime-a-dance club. Where you pay a dime. To dance.” I had to clear my throat; it felt like it was squeezing closed.

“And Miss Viktoria done approve that?” she asked, blinking wide at me. “In Mr. Henry’s backyart?”

“It helps that she’s outta town. So she doesn’t have to see it.”

“I would think so.” She scanned the row of sunflowers, thinking it over. Then she turned to me. “You got that fool Mr. Binny playing out there with his three fool brothers?”

“Yes ma’am.” How had she heard about that?

She tapped her foot on the wooden step. “I heard that ole stiff been playing somewhere around town but I sho didn’t know it was out Miss Viktoria’s house.” She made a gravelly sound. “What y’all need done, just the regular?”

“Sheets.” That was all I could get out. “We could use you this morning if you and Polly can make it, and we’d appreciate it if you didn’t mention the boarders or the dance club to anybody. I think it would embarrass Mrs. Tartt.”

“We always real careful with the Tartts’ goin’-ons,” Picador said. “All these years, we don’t talk to nobody ’bout they business.”

I stopped by the PO before I went home, and Mrs. Nutt handed me a few envelopes, all notices from the stubbornest of bill collectors. I waited, hoping, and sure enough, “Here’s your outta-town mail,” she said and handed me a letter from Jack . It was the first letter I’d had from him since he’d left Monday. I splurged on a taxi home and tore it open on the ride.

Dear Birdie, I miss you terribly and I’ve only been gone one day. Last night, I took Sam to supper at the Emporium. I’d swear he’s grown another two inches since I saw him a few weeks ago and at this rate, he’ll be my size soon. He told me he has a girlfriend and that she’s “swell” and it was all I could do not to say, “Me too, son.” I know it will take some time to get him to trust me again but he said if his mother’s agreeable maybe he and I could get together a few nights a week. It was his idea and that meant the world to me.

Now, back to you: please write and tell me everything that’s happened to you since I left yesterday. And if there’s nothing to tell, I don’t care, I still want to hear it. I dream of that day in my apartment when you undid my buttons. All yours, J

My cheeks and neck flushed as I read that word girlfriend , and I thought about his warm hand on my back. I read the letter a second time and had started on a third when the taxi driver turned around and said, “Want me to carry you to the doe, ma’am?” He smiled, and I laughed and got out and paid him the quarter through his window, tipping him a nickel. Exhausted, I plodded up the brick walk but I did wonder, did he know what this place was? Had he driven some boys here last night? If he didn’t know yet, I bet he would soon.

Two hours. That was all it took. Actually one hour, fifty-two minutes, for what I’d said could not under any circumstances happen to happen, and what did Charlie say about it?

“Told you so.”

She said it just like that, with a little know-it-all shrug, and then went on about her business, mending a dang bedsheet.

When I’d gotten home it hit me just how tired I really was, but I went in the kitchen and started slicing up fatback for a big batch of fresh butter beans. Around nine, the screen door popped shut and Picador and Polly walked in. I listened for any moving around upstairs. Nothing. Everyone was still asleep.

“Thank you for coming on such short notice,” I said. They were both in their white uniforms, pressed and clean. Polly’s hair was pulled back in a bun, tight around her smooth oval face. They set their bags down in the pantry like usual, and then Polly stopped cold in her tracks. She was staring through the swinging door to the dining room, which was propped open.

“Law, they done took everthing but the paint off the walls,” Picador said. Picador had seen the house after Rory had ransacked it, but neither had seen it since Mr. Fauster had taken the furniture and Mrs. Tartt’s heart with it.

Polly shook her head and pulled the swinging door shut the way Mrs. Tartt liked it.

“Looks like somebody been cleaning this here kitchen,” Picador said. She eyed the closed door to the little bedsit where Charlie’d finally gone to bed. Polly gently elbowed her.

I knew Mrs. Tartt did not want them to think they’d been replaced. “Charlie’s staying in there, you’ll meet her. She helps out around the house in exchange for rent, but she’s not a housekeeper.” Which didn’t look like it suited Picador altogether.

But Polly said, “We just glad for the work, Miss Birdie.”

They followed me to the washroom, where the tub was full of sheets soaking and beside it was the mountain, almost as high as Picador was tall.

“How many boarders y’all got staying up in here?” Picador said. “Where they all sleeping, the roof?”

“We got a little behind,” I said.

“You sho did.”

“We don’t mind,” Polly said. “We’n stay late as you need tonight.”

“Actually … we’re gonna need them done by five o’clock today. Because of the dance club, it opens at six and it wouldn’t look good to have bedsheets hanging in the yard. Just do what you can, I’m sure it’ll be fine.”

Polly took a deep doubtful breath. “We do our best.”

“Thank you, and no need to go upstairs. I want to let the boarders sleep in.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Polly said.

They set to work scrubbing off all the terrible things that’d happened on the sheets. At ten o’clock, there was still not a sound from upstairs. Just in case, I carried a tray of coffee and fixings and plenty of biscuits and set it at the top of the stairs in the hall. I made another pot of coffee and offered some to Picador. She frowned at me, and for a second it was like no time had passed.

When I came down from checking on the girls a second time, Charlie’d gotten up. She’d already introduced herself to Picador and Polly and she was rummaging up under the sink, saying she was sure there was more bluing under there. Everything seemed fine. The house was full of the familiar smell of Fels-Naptha laundry soap and the sound of Picador cranking the noisy mangle to wring out the sheets. It was a hungry, water-squeezing contraption with spring-loaded rollers so powerful you had to be careful they didn’t suck in your fingers and pinch them off. Polly then hauled the sheets out to the clothesline, the screen door popping closed so many times I quit hearing it as I tried to keep my eyes open. At the table, Charlie sewed up cigarette burns and rips in the cheap sheets.

“Them sheets gone take a while to dry even with us ironing ’em,” Polly said. “You sure you don’t want us to come in tomorrow?”

I hated to say no, but: “I’m sorry, it’s just for today.” I couldn’t keep the girls upstairs two days in a row. “Do what you can and we’ll finish the rest.”

“Yes ma’am. We appreciate you bringing us in.”

I wanted so badly to go to bed, just for an hour, but I wouldn’t let myself. My head ached. Staring deep into a pot of boiling eggs, I’d started to wonder, Would it be so bad if they knew? But I couldn’t bring myself to put them in such a treacherous position. They’d sweated for the Tartts for twenty-five years.

“You sho you don’t want us in the mawning?” It was Picador asking this time. “Ain’t no twenty-nine sheets gone be wash, dry, and iron in one day.”

“I’m sorry, it’s—just do what you can.”

Picador gave me a steady look, arms crossed. She said, “Yes, ma’am,” and went back outside. I took the pot of eggs off the fire, rinsed and peeled the eggs, and then allowed myself to sit at the kitchen table and rest my head on my arms for just a moment.

When I opened my eyes—how long had it been? Five minutes? Twenty?—Virginia was coming up out of the cellar in her white coat—I hadn’t even known she was here—and then Esmeralda walked through the kitchen. Thank the Lord it was just her—she looked more like an ordinary than I did. Esmeralda looked at Picador and Polly and Picador and Polly looked at Esmeralda and they all nodded a silent hello, and Esmeralda went down to the cellar with Virginia following after her.

And still, it all seemed fine.

I actually felt somewhat smart for bringing them in—helped them, helped us—but to be safe I went upstairs to tell the rest again do not come downstairs. And I had just about made it, too, when I heard Picador say real clear to Polly at the sink, “They done turn Miss Viktoria’s into a cathouse and think we don’t know.”

Dang it. My blood dropped a good thirty degrees. Picador’d sounded a little stung that we hadn’t told her. I went back down and in the doorway, I gazed past the back of them at Charlie, who’d looked up from her sewing.

“Ast me, they gone need help tomorrow. Them sheets just gone get dirty again.”

“Sho nuff,” Polly said.

No one spoke for a few very long seconds.

“How about … Birdie and I discuss it. And we’ll let you know very soon?” Charlie said.

“’Atta be fine,” Picador said and turned around and went out the back door. Polly nearbout ran out after her.

“Did you tell them , Charlie?” I asked. “Did you?”

“No, I did not,” Charlie said. And then she added the thing: “Told you so.”

“Thanks, Charlie.” I was embarrassed. I felt like my mother’d found out. “What do you think they’re gonna do?”

“If we can afford them, keep coming back, I hope.” She handed me two corners of the sheet she’d mended.

I took the corners, mad, at myself mostly. “What do you think gave us away? Virginia? All the sheets? You think they found a widow stuck in the sheets?” We’d checked for those.

“I honestly don’t know,” Charlie said as we stretched the clean sheet out between us and she walked her corners to me. I saw her glance over at the cellar door.

“You think they knew before they even got here?” I asked.

She shrugged again. “They might’ve. Or maybe you’re not as good a liar as you think you are.”

“I never said I was .” And I went upstairs because there was no reason now not to get some dang sleep.

At two thirty that morning, the eight of us pulled back our chairs and sat down for the supper we’d skipped tonight or last night or whenever that time was. Virginia’d stayed, fixing drinks and changing sheets between johns to make extra money. After two late nights in a row, I was dry mouthed, dizzy with exhaustion, and starving. Everybody’d skinned their work clothes and scrubbed off the film of drunk boys and greedy hands sticky with bourbon and vomit and worse and changed into what Flossy and Ruby called their “own-ers.” They were the precious clothes the men had never touched. At my telephone table tonight, I’d been called “darlin’,” “sweetlips,” “she’ll do,” and “useless” when an ossified boy accepted that I wasn’t a prostitute and he’d have to wait his turn. After a Goliath-sized, corn-fed animal had sat on my lap like a chair and another boy had had to drag him off me, I considered getting the rolling pin from the kitchen. But what did I think I was gonna do, whack a boy in the head? Roll him flat like a crust? Then I remembered—the cattle prod pole Meemaw’d stuck in my suitcase. I came back with it, went strolling past the sitter and zapped him in the side. He yelped like a girl, and I told him, “That was the low setting, buddy.” If he sat on me again, I’d turn it on high.

Napkins tucked in the necks of our nightgowns, I said grace while the rest erupted in laughter over something. And then the table went quiet as we ate our plates of macaroni noodles I’d boiled in milk and baked with cheese and butter and crispy chopped bacon. Flossy said she’d never tried “Eye-talian food” but she thought “they might be onto something.” I doubted this dish was ever Italian. Dixie asked where Italy even was and Ruby told her, “In New York, stupid.” Afterward, wilting and full, we all smoked cigarettes right at the table, even me.

The consensus was we’d gotten real lucky, what with the warning in the newspaper and on the weekend of the big fraternity bacchanal no less—and we still had Saturday night to go. There was so much money in the house now, it felt dangerous, so Charlie and I had locked ourselves in Rory’s study and counted it out on the floor. When it was all doled out, in the last two nights, each partner’d made just over a hundred dollars each. I’d come here looking for only two hundred fifty bucks to pay the taxes and get by on till spring. At this rate, I could walk out of here in days with what I needed. I wasn’t sure what was more attractive: what I’d avoid by leaving or what I stood to make by staying. Neither felt right.

When the girls straggled upstairs to bed, Charlie followed me out on the back porch. The air was crisp and cool—when had that happened? The strings of gold lanterns were still lit, and a single blue necktie lay flattened on the dance floor. We sat on the steps and shared one more cigarette from the for-sale can.

I passed it back to her, and, as if to no one, Charlie said, “I’m running a whorehouse so I can be Meg’s mother again.”

“That’s just now occurring to you?”

“It’s just—it doesn’t sound good, does it? A mother who’d do something like that?” Brows up, she looked stunned by her own question, staring ahead at her favorite crape myrtle tree. She had to be exhausted. But then she whispered, “What if Meg loves this woman more than she loves me?”

“You’re not replaceable, Charlie. You’re her mother.”

“What if—I make all this money and the family won’t let me have her back?”

“That’s … a possibility,” I said. I’d sword I’d be honest from now on.

“I want to make a plan to get her—it’s time to make a plan,” she said, and I could hear the begging in her voice.

“Concentrate on making money, Charlie, that’s the plan. So if you can get Meg back … you can take her far away from here.” All the way to Cal-i-for-nia, here we come! , the state with blue swimming pools and “the Specific Ocean,” Meg had accidentally called it, and we’d both laughed.

Charlie hugged her stomach and nodded. She looked miserable. “Somewhere where I never have to be in this damn business again.”