The Typewriter Girl Read Free Page A

across her forehead had been the lad’s conciliatory gesture.
    “Why?” Caroline wanted to know. “All these years letting it grow again, how could you bear it?”
    Her sister regarded her with great compassion, as though Betsey had been forced to sell her child rather than her hair. It had felt like that the first time, back in Manchester when she’d been but seventeen, with nowhere to go, no idea where the next coins would come once those she’d got for her hair were spent.
    This afternoon, however, Betsey had sat on the wigmaker’s stool and wished there were some magic potion to drink, some oil or cream to apply that would make her hair grow faster so she might sell it again. She’d wished for hair the color of corn silk, to fetch more coins. “Dull as mud!” the wigmaker had spat, and when he saw the length wasn’t what it ought be, he’d turned her over in disgust to his apprentice.
    “Needed money,” she told Caroline. “Why else?”
    “But your wages, you said—”
    “Got sacked today.”
    “No! Why? How could they? What about Richard?”
    As if her husband could have, would have helped. Obviously Richard had never told Caroline, as he had Betsey, that helpingBetsey get the position was the extent of his participation in her career. She was to make nothing more of their connection, not even to do more than nod if they met each other at the front doors at the end of the workday.
    Richard would be furious when he heard of the spectacle she’d made this afternoon. Thus, she wanted to give her goodbyes to Caroline and the children before he came home. It was late already. She’d lost time at the wigmaker’s and in the walk to Caroline’s house, avoiding the need to turn over any of her few coins to the omnibus company. Richard, she knew, divided his journey from work to home, walking part of the way and then catching the omnibus. No doubt he possessed some formula to calculate the most economical division between the costs of bus fare and shoe leather.
    With some vague reassurance to Caroline, Betsey went inside, calling for her niece and two nephews and finding them at games in the back garden. She had sweets for them, not the sugar mice or toffee she’d wanted to bring, only peppermint sticks, and even the penny she’d handed over for those was more than she should spare.
    Still, lowly peppermint made the children’s eyes grow wide and solemn with wonder. Dick and Emma, the eldest two, cradled theirs in their hands for a moment, then snapped them and held out halves for their mother to store away. Four-year-old Francis watched them, red stripes melting into his fist.
    “No,” Betsey protested. “I mean for you to have it all, right now. A treat, you see. You don’t have to put it away.”
    Dick and Emma regarded their aunt as though she’d told them Jesus was a fiction. They looked at their mother: Would she confirm this heresy?
    Caroline was uneasy with the burden of such a decision, but with a nod, she told them, “I suppose, since Papa isn’t here . . . if you wish . . .”
    But the training ran deep. The halves were relinquished, and as Caroline put them in her apron pocket, Emma wrenched at Francis’sfist, warning, “You’ll be sorry if you don’t. Me and Dick’ll have some when you don’t, and you’ll be sorry then.”
    Francis butted his forehead into his sister’s chin and fell back on his bum as she let him go. They both went to tears, Emma for her stinging chin, Francis for his sweet, broken upon the brick pathway where he had fallen.
    As Betsey brushed off the peppermint and set about trying to convince Francis it would taste just the same, broken or not, Caroline suddenly straightened from Emma’s side. “I hear Richard coming in, I think,” she murmured, and rushed back inside.
    Betsey looked toward the door at the far wall of the garden. Even if she might have seriously considered it as an escape, there was not enough time. Richard’s children were weepy