Marry or Burn Read Free Page A

the subject was, they all went with whatever you put in front of them.

    Everyone comforted Paloma. More than half of them had children. “My kids.” They said that all the time. “My kids.” For years Francie had been hearing about, even seeing, their children. If you woke up at night after a visiting day, you heard the moans and sobs, the aftermath.
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    HER MOTHER WENT into the hospital. She went by ambulance to the county hospital, the same one where they had taken Sharla’s little girl, and there she too died. Francie did not learn of this for three days, until her brother, who had joined the army, made a sobbing phone call from the base. No use in trying to get a pass because there wasn’t going to be a funeral. Their father had seen to that. She was already in the ground.
    â€œI don’t know, I don’t know, Francie,” her brother kept saying after he broke the news. He kept covering the phone with his hand because his buddies were talking to him, trying to settle him down. “He never said she was sick. He never said.”
    â€œNever told me neither,” Francie said. She had not heard her father’s voice in eight years. “But I figured she might be.”
    Around then the warden had her see the counselor. Not because she kept having the same dream; the warden didn’t know that. She sent her because of fainting, from holding her breath in the cell. The warden said that was what she was up to.
    The dream would wake her in the flicker of the tube lights that stayed on, a dream of a baby—or a kind of abbreviated baby, the weight of a cat in her arms. But it had a flat-out helplessness a cat would never give off. It had to be hidden, in a curved hollow not unlike the eggshell ornaments her mother had made for the nurses’ tree when she was a transporter at the hospital. Francie had to be in the hollow with it, where despite its lack of any muscles, gradually it would begin to thrash like a maggot until she couldn’t hold on to it. Things would go on from there.

    Francie didn’t believe in broadcasting what showed up in your dreams or visited your mind in a cell, but the counselor got the story out of her by asking for two positive memories. Her first thought was of Sharla—in the mirror, with her black bangs and her mascara, her smiling cheeks in a coat of her special foundation. Francie could almost smell the ammonia as the plump fingers snapped the roller. She had to shut her mind against those fingers, some with Band-Aids on them for a rash, dabbing to get an endpaper off the stack. She got away from that and told about Sharla’s refusal to testify for the prosecution. Then, because the counselor just sat there waiting for the second positive memory, she came up with the egg ornaments.
    First you edged half a shell with rickrack, and then—Francie was eight and did this part—you glued in green felt, and onto that a plastic lamb, or a donkey, or a baby. Between them she and her mother had ruined a lot of eggs. It was a day when nothing they did had any consequences. Her father was doing a week in the county jail. Her mother could drink a bottle of Almadén and open the next one, they could smash so many eggs they had to go out and buy more, they could laugh so hard at the kitchen table, with the cat sitting on the green felt, that her mother tipped over in the chair and didn’t hurt herself. The day had a soundtrack of her mother’s high wandering laugh and her voice saying, “OK don’t get mad at me, Francie”—because when her mother was drunk Francie could get just as mad at her as her father did—“but there went another one!”
    The counselor had a lot of questions about Francie’s mother. She explained that the enclosure where Francie saw herself holding her “baby” in the dream was not a tree ornament but a jail cell.
    â€œOf course you know, Frances, that you could not