The Solace of Leaving Early by Haven Kimmel Page B

interesting.”
    “Mmmm-hmmm,” she tried to sound pleasant, but noncommittal.
    AnnaLee held out the index finger of her right hand, positioning it so that when Walt and Langston glided forward her finger touched her husband’s knee. Langston pretended to concentrate on Chimney Street. Her mother could be so
unconscious;
it was exasperating.
    “The little girls are coming to live with Beulah next week, Walt,” AnnaLee said, and her eyes instantly filled with tears.
    Walt shook his head in sympathy but didn’t say anything.
    “It’s just . . . it’s so . . . Beulah can’t take care of those children. She was past forty when she had Alice, which would make her almost
seventy
. And she spent the past ten years caring for her own mother, it seemed like she would never die, and I think Alice was planning to do something special for Beulah this summer—send her to Ireland or something as a way of saying, ‘Okay, that’s over, now you can enjoy the rest of your life.’ ”
    Walt shook his head and clucked his tongue. He was moved.
    “The whole situation makes me feel like,” AnnaLee looked down the street at Beulah’s mobile home, where nothing moved, “like we’re never actually out of the woods. Beulah must have thought she’d seen the worst of it. She must have thought she was going to have some peace, and now this.”
    “Wait a second,” Langston said, realizing for the first time that no one ever mentioned Alice’s husband, Jack Maloney. “Why doesn’t Jack just keep the girls? They’re his children, too.”
    Her mother didn’t say anything right away, but looked at Langston as if she’d suggested the children be sent to the moon.
    “What? We’re creeping up on the twenty-first century here, Mama. Men are not actually helpless. Jack can probably be taught to turn on a washing machine and make a bed. The rest of the world is examining postfeminist constructs, and Haddington is still handing out cowbells. I don’t know which is worse.”
    AnnaLee shook her head as if to dislodge water from her inner ear. “Langston, don’t you know how Alice died? Where have you
been
? What goes on with you that you are so completely free of anyone else’s story? My
God
.”
    Langston was surprised to see that her mother was both really angry and really crying. “For heaven’s sake, Mama.”
    Walt stopped gliding and took AnnaLee’s hand.
    “I didn’t really feel, I’ve already said this to Daddy, that it was my business to pry into the nature of her illness, or the details of her death, that’s all.”
    Her mother looked at her a moment, then wiped her face with the back of her hand. “That’s not all, Langston. If you gave yourself even one hard look, you’d see that’s not it.” She squeezed Walt’s hand. “I’m going in and make some lunch. Come with me?”
    Walt stood up and Langston noticed for the first time how he favored his lower back, how he walked with a slight limp.
Dear Lord
, she thought,
he’s in his fifties
. He had been just a boy when Taos was born, only nineteen, and just twenty-two when they had Langston, and she’d always thought of them as being so young, younger than other parents, but here they were, middle-aged.
    “How did she die, then?” Langston called out to her mother as AnnaLee walked into the house.
    Just before the door slammed, Langston heard, “It doesn’t matter.”
    Langston glided a few times. “Exactly. That was exactly my point.”

Chapter 5
    THE SACRED HEART
    Madeline and Eloise, eight and six. Amos had never met them, although he’d seen pictures. Alice had begun coming alone to his church a year before she died, and after a few weeks Jack came with her, but the girls had continued to go to Sacred Heart of Mary, in Hopwood, accompanied by Jack’s devout aunt, Gail. Alice didn’t want to confuse them or disrupt their lives, she’d said, and they loved Sacred Heart. They’d both gone to preschool there; they had friends; they were attached to