Liberty or Death Read Free Page A

her, or this place, or what I was getting myself into. I didn't like being called a girl. I wanted to jump in the car and drive back home, but I wasn't here for myself and home was just another empty place without Andre. "Rosie said you might know someplace I could stay?"
    She pointed toward the ceiling. "There's a room upstairs you can use. Got your own bath, if you don't mind just a shower. And you can get your meals down here, of course. It ain't nothin' fancy. Mindy took a gander and turned up her snooty little nose, but then, there wasn't much about that girl to like, now I look back at it. Give me a minute and I'll find you the keys." When she came back, the pot was empty. She made a fresh one, then opened a drawer and fished around until she found a ring with two keys. "This'll open the back door, in case the place is closed, and the shiny one's for the door upstairs. You can park out in the back there, by the Dumpster."
    Parking next to a Dumpster and waiting tables in a place called "Mother Theresa's." It put me in mind of a line from Tess of the D'Urbervilles, "See how the mighty are fallen." My life was just one humbling experience after another, as if being left standing at the altar wasn't humbling enough. I felt perennially light-headed now. It seemed like I hadn't been able to get enough oxygen since Dom had told me about the kidnapping, even after I took off the Spanish inquisition dress. They might say that the idea of the heart as the seat of love is only a fiction, but my own heart had felt constricted ever since Saturday morning. The thought of Andre in danger had squeezed it like it lay in a giant's hand, and with every word of Jack Leonard's explanation, the giant had gripped tighter. I was getting a very good idea of what it was like to live with a chronic disability. Mine was fear.
    I took the keys and put them in my pocket. "Thanks, Mrs. McGrath."
    "Theresa," she corrected. "I hear Mrs. McGrath, I think you're talkin' to some old lady. You go along and get yourself settled. You look done in, you don't mind my saying so. I suppose, from what Rosie said, you haven't had an easy time of it. How'd you meet her, anyway?"
    "Dom," I said. "He was kind of looking after me, when he could."
    "Rosie's a lucky gal, got a good, handsome man like that to take care of her, stickin' with her after the accident and all. Lotta men, find themselves married to a cripple, they just walk out," she said. "She doesn't know how lucky."
    She was wrong about that. Rosie Florio thought she was the luckiest woman in the world to have married Dom, and he thought he was the luckiest man. If anything, Rosie's accident had made them closer. If I hadn't liked them both so much, their happiness would have made me surly with jealousy. As it was, I hoped my own life would be a lot like theirs. At least, I had hoped that. I guess I still did.
    From the other room, someone called, "Hey, Theresa, everyone die out there? Where the heck's that coffee?"
    "See you in the morning," she said. "Six. And not any later or you can forget about the job. Got that?"
    "I'll be here."
    I trudged out to the car, got my stuff, and shuffled wearily up the stairs.
    I put my bag on the narrow bed—the first single bed since college—sat down beside it, and looked around the room. The adjectives bleak and dreary came to mind, but they both did the room a kindness. Spare was good, though I had always associated spare with austere and austere with a kind of cold cleanliness. This room showed a marked absence of cleanliness. I could write my name in the dust on the dresser top and bedside stand, and the windowsills and the floor beneath them were thick with flakes of paint and the corpses of flies, spiders, and other insects who had died there, trying to escape. The wallpaper was beige on beige—toning, I believe is the current decorating term. The tufted bedspread had evidently once been white; now it was the yellow of old eyes, with occasional darker