Little Wolves - By Thomas Maltman Page 0,48

one month? I don’t believe any of us knows what others think. Only God can look inside a person’s heart. Do you know what I am thinking right now, dear?”

“Stop this,” Nora tried to interrupt. “I don’t like where this conversation is going.”

“Something wicked,” said Clara, raising her chin and meeting the woman’s gaze.

Gretel’s smile twitched the corners of her mouth; she was enjoying this exchange, Clara realized, probably not used to people talking back to her. “There’s a difference between thinking and doing,” she said.

“Not much,” said Clara.

“Yes,” insisted Gretel. “Sometimes the difference between thinking and doing is a matter of life or death.”

AFTER THIS EXCHANGE THE rest of the conversation blurred for Clara, and she was quiet, her thoughts elsewhere. The German chocolate cake proved to be dry, spackled with a hard coconut frosting. The women gathered up the plates and headed into the kitchen. Doreen and Helen had left already, but Clara lingered, still hoping to redeem herself from her earlier foolishness. She wanted to walk home with Nora. She stayed because she needed a friend, but when she had offered to help with the dishes, Rosa had gently said, “Not in your condition.”

“Condition,” muttered Clara. She hated that word, as though the baby was some type of fungus growing under her armpits. Precious Moments figurines sat on the surfaces of sideboards and buffets lining the walls, each occupying its own lace-fringed doily. The figurines had fat angelic faces and teardrop eyes. Clara found them faintly creepy.

Gretel pushed in a woman in a wheelchair from one of the back rooms and left her there, rejoining the other women in the kitchen without any explanation. The woman was so ancient most of her white hair had fallen out, except in clumps on either side of her head. She slumped in the wheelchair, lightly snoring, a yarn afghan thrown over knees despite the heat. When Clara stepped back, she jostled the Precious Moments figurines on one of the buffet tables, startling the woman awake. She raised her head, sniffing like a hound, her eyes milky blue. “Hello, Duchess,” she said, when her eyes found Clara.

“It’s Clara, actually,” she said once she got her breath. “I’m the pastor’s wife.”

“I know who you are.” The woman’s mouth was a dark pink cave; her caretaker must have neglected to put in her dentures. “It’s cold in here,” she continued, shivering. “That’s what hell is like, winter without end. Fire eats you up quick, but the cold is a slow kind of burning.”

They had just gotten done talking about eternal life as this woman must have known. Clara heard the others in the kitchen chatting in low voices as they washed and dried Rosa’s good silverware and china. “Why did you call me Duchess?”

“It’s who you are.”

“Oh,” Clara said. “How nice to be a duchess.”

“Don’t put on airs. We took you in as one of our own. Our little displaced person. But you were bad, you and the other one.”

The hair stood up on Clara’s arms. The woman’s whitish-blue eyes had fixed her with a hostile glare. “What did I do?”

“You know what you did.” She waved a speckled hand over her afghan. “Always serving tea and then turning the cup over to read the leaves. Telling us when to plant, if our husbands had been faithful. You walked with spirits; you lay down in sin.”

Clara froze. If hell was winter without end, it was all she saw in the woman’s eyes, emptiness and violence. But the woman’s voice ebbed with every word. Even her head sagged slightly, as if the story she told were draining her.

“Well, I won’t do it anymore.”

“That’s what you promised.” Her head was like a sunflower, too heavy for the stalk. It sagged toward the blanket. “You promised. But you were a liar. You had to be punished.”

“How?”

When a moment passed without the woman speaking, Clara leaned in close. The old woman smelled of talcum powder and decay, as if pieces of her were already rotting from the inside.

Nora appeared behind her. “I see you’ve met Bynthia.”

Clara stood and looked into Nora’s periwinkle eyes. “I need to get home,” she said, “will you walk with me?”

Once they were outdoors in the heat of Indian summer, the old woman’s words seemed insubstantial. Nora hobbled beside her on her bad hip, gossiping. “Sorry about Gretel. Some days, I feel like I have to wash my mouth out with cider vinegar just to hold my own in a conversation with that