Marry or Burn Read Free

Let him go and cut the ear off the cat.”
    A silence followed while a weight came down on them like the mangle in the laundry.
    â€œHome is our first thought,” said Dale. “Lord, that you would be with Rhonda’s son. Her family.” She let them sit there a minute in the cold state to which she gave the name silent prayer. “What we imagine, really imagine for ourselves becomes real. That each one here today would have that experience. We pray to the Lord.”

    â€œLord, hear our prayer.”
    â€œSo can you think about the sun and look straight at the thought of it and go blind?” said Francie. She looked around. “Hey, I can ask a question. I mean isn’t that what she said?”
    â€œYou hush,” said Maxine. “Talking about pray to the Lord. Girl, you got a lot to learn.”
    Â 
    ONE DAY DALE had a rubber band around her wrist. “What’s that?” Francie asked her.
    â€œThat’s to remind me to pick up my son’s immunization records today. He’s starting first grade.”
    Dale had a son in first grade? Dale, whose ironed blue shirt hid a body like an ironing board? Whose perm had gray in it? Who almost never referred to a husband? What was this, now that they had fallen into the habit of opening up their lives to Dale’s examination every week like laundry bags? Where had this child been hiding?
    Thomas. Dale drew one of her deep breaths. Thomas was six years old. He was an independent child . You could tell that she meant something else by independent. Something better, not worse. At five, instead of going to kindergarten, Thomas had made the choice to go with Patrick in his truck to projects in the parish. Patrick did this work because although he had left the priesthood and married, he had been partially received back, encouraged to offer his skills to the archdiocese. Before applying to seminary he had been a builder. So while Dale was in her program and Patrick worked on the renovation of church kitchens and tore out old confessionals, Thomas sat in the sawdust building things out of Legos.
    Thomas, it had turned out, was exceptional. At four he could read the Lego instructions, by five he had discarded them. His
castle won a prize at the state fair and remained on exhibit in the center court of a mall.
    When he was little more than a baby, fifteen months to be exact, Thomas had begun to ask questions. “Where moon?” “What him?”—pointing at the crucifix Dale wore. Other than that, there was no mention of God in this life of Thomas. Dale did not call on God to approve her account of her son, which she seemed in fairness to recognize was bragging.
    That a fifteen-month-old might have an idea of the word where did not seem like a miracle to Francie. How was one word any different from another? Who, what, when, where, why . She had written them down, sitting behind her boyfriend, the one who was going to jump into the lake. It was a remedial class because they had both skipped so much school.
    The story went on. Thomas had a particular liking for buildings—already he had gone beyond Legos to wood and nails—but he didn’t like the ones he was told were schools. Why did people have to go to school if they didn’t want to? “I had to say I honestly don’t know,” Dale said. It didn’t matter; in a year Thomas had made the decision on his own that he would, after all, go to school.
    Francie looked at the other faces in disbelief. Nobody was sneering at the thought of Dale’s show-off kid. “Paloma?” said Dale. By the door where she lurked, Paloma had raised her hand. She said Child Protection had taken her baby Rafael away because of her girlfriend. She had him back now, but she had to live by herself.
    Nobody said, “What does that have to do with it?” This was one of the things that had come gradually to Francie’s notice. Nobody ever worried about what