What Has Become of You Read Free

and certainly as much of a handicap as having three heads.
    “Well, let me know when you can,” her mother said. “You could stay here in the guest room, and we could watch TV and get pizza. Big doings. By the way, are you remembering to eat?”
    “Of course. I eat a lot. Mom, you don’t have to keep asking if I
eat
. That stuff was
years
ago.”
    “Now that I don’t believe. But me, I am getting a
gut
. It’s the most obscene thing you ever . . . Oh! I knew I had some gossip for you, but I couldn’t remember what it was. Your brother Ben ran into Peter at Home Depot the other day. He was with a woman. Great big, tall blond gal with a pretty face. Peter introduced her as his fiancée, but Ben can’t think of her name.”
    “Good for Peter,” Vera said sourly. “Really, I don’t care what he’s up to. I hope he
does
have a girlfriend or fiancée or whatever now. I hope he has a fiancée and is
happy
.”
    Peter was Vera’s ex-fiancé. Their separation, which had been Vera’s idea, had precipitated her move to Dorset. For all the whining he had done about the split, all the difficulties he had created and the fear he’d attempted to instill in her—all the
you’re the only one for me
s, the
I can’t live without you
s, even the
you won’t survive without me
s—it certainly hadn’t taken him all that long to recover, she thought.
    “Mom,” Vera said, “I’m glad you called. But I really do only have a few minutes left on my phone card. I’m sorry we can’t talk longer. I promise, if this school gig turns out to extend till fall and become something steadier, I’ll get a real phone again and can talk to you as much as you’d like.”
    “I’d love that. You know, when I was visiting the other day with Edna and Marvita . . .”
    For another ten minutes Vera listened to her mother go on about her friends from the neighborhood and how they got to see their daughters and sons at least once a week. It was hard to get her mother off the phone once she got started; Vera knew she was lonely, living in Bond Brook by herself since Vera’s father had died four years ago. She knew her two older brothers checked in from time to time, but as the only daughter, Vera knew that a certain responsibility fell to her. She also knew that she was shirking it.
A son is a son till he takes a wife, but a daughter’s a daughter all of her life,
her mother had always been fond of saying. The responsibility implied in that statement had never been lost on Vera.
    When she was finally able to hang up the phone, she sank back down at her table. She looked at the cashmere sweater and the skirt she’d hung from the hook outside her closet door. A pair of black tights hung there, too—the shoes she planned to wear would conceal the holes in the toes—and a bra and underpants so that she could wake up first thing in the morning and hop into all her clothes with no forethought. The large wheeled suitcase that she used for transporting schoolbooks and papers was also there, handle pulled out as though just waiting to be noisily dragged around the streets of Dorset. Vera unzipped the bag and took out the three folders that were used for each of her three new classes. Each had one sheet of paper in it—an attendance roster meticulously printed out by Vera the day before. She looked again at the names of the students for her first class, which would meet at eight o’clock in the morning:
    Ahmed, Sufia
    Arsenault, Katherine
    Cutler, Chelsea
    Friedman, Jamie
    Fullerton, Autumn
    Garippa, Louisa
    Hamada, Agatsuki
    Phelps, Harmony
    Smith, Kelsey
    St. Aubrey, Cecily-Anne
    True, Martha
    Willard, Jensen
    Names. Just names. Vera knew from experience that a name tells one little about a person apart from the aesthetic preferences of the parents who named her. Still, she tried to imagine a face to go with each girl on her list. Knowing their names gave her much-needed power, standing before a roomful of strangers on her first day. She