Marry or Burn Read Free Page B

keep a baby with you for very long, here,” she warned Francie, who rarely had
a visitor, let alone somebody she could have had sex with during a supervised encounter.
    â€œIt’s not Frances,” Francie said.
    Sometimes the baby was even smaller than a cat. Awake, she wondered what was normal. Exactly how heavy was a baby? Better not to stir up anybody on that subject. Sometimes the dream took a turn in which, to her horror, she had left the baby somewhere and time ticked away while she slogged over footbridges or through sewage.
    This was a common dream. Among new mothers, the counselor told her, practically a universal.
    Francie didn’t argue that she was not a mother and that every day she was leaving the chance of that behind. She didn’t come out with any of her usual remarks.
    Dale had a different attitude. No commenting in a disrespectful way on what anybody saw fit to bring up, no matter how stupid, boring, or plainly untrue. Just what you’d expect , Francie thought. Dale didn’t laugh. She smiled. A smile could be the opposite of a sense of humor. No room for humor, in Dale’s job of praying over their problems—which didn’t have to solve anything, because if you received a solution you wouldn’t need to pray any more. But on the other hand neither would Dale say “practically a universal.”
    Where dreams were concerned, the ones who had a problem—Francie had noticed this—were women from an island, just about any island on the map in the lounge, from Samoa to Haiti. They were the ones who wrestled with headless animals, ghosts with knives, man-birds that sucked out your intestines. Simone, for one, had a recurring dream in which the doorknobs were human heads. “I turn it, every time, the neck crack,” Simone said in her soft accent.

    â€œWhat do you think it means?” said Dale, as Francie was thinking of what size the heads would have to be to be grasped with a hand.
    â€œMaybe some neck she’d like to break,” Francie said.
    Dale gave her a look. “Lord,” Dale said, taking Simone’s hands and folding the pink palms together inside her own, “we don’t know why we do harm, but we do. Even in our sleep. That you would keep Simone in your care. We pray to the Lord.”
    Â 
    AS SOON AS her brother said the word Safeway , Francie knew who it was. A bucktoothed woman, wrapping meat. Blond hair in a French twist, with a net over it.
    She could hear Sharla. “I’ve cut that hair and that’s naturally blond hair. And it’s long, down her back. What I’d give for that hair.” Sharla put a good amount of time into dyeing her own and teasing it to the height it was. Francie said, “What if you had to look like that to get it?”
    â€œHey,” said Sharla. She had Francie working on her temper and her tongue.
    That was the woman. She had been in the Safeway meat department for years.
    Their father had the house up for sale, her brother said, and he had moved in with her. When she went to kick him out, he turned around and married her. Quit drinking to do it. “All—those—years,” her brother said in a drunk voice. “Got my mom started drinking and here he goes and gets married and quits. ” My mom. Francie didn’t call him on it. She didn’t say, “Hey, mine too.” He still called her, this decent brother. He would put a call in to her on his own birthday. But he had forgotten hers, he had forgotten her.

    BY BUS IT was going to take Francie an hour and a half each way, but she had it figured out so she could get back in time for the party. Or maybe she would let them see how they liked it if she wasn’t there. All of them.
    â€œI don’t know that I’d do that,” Patrick said when Francie said she was going to see Sharla in the home. She was living with Patrick and Dale, in the halfway house they managed. In recent months