live-in counsellors. We have three.”
“Don’t you have to ask someone?” Rosie whispered. “Put my name up before a committee, or something?”
“I’m the committee,” Anna replied, and Rosie later thought that it had probably been years since the woman had heard the faint arrogance in her own voice. “Daughters and Sisters was set up by my parents, who were well-to-do. There’s a very helpful endowed trust. I choose who’s invited to stay, and who isn’t invited to stay ... although the reactions of the other women to potential D and S candidates are important. Crucial, maybe. Their reaction to you was favorable.”
“That’s good, isn’t it?” Rosie asked faintly.
“Yes indeed.” Anna rummaged on her desk, moved documents, and finally found what she wanted behind the PowerBook computer sitting to her left. She flapped a sheet of paper with a blue Daughters and Sisters letterhead at Rosie. “Here. Read this and sign it. Basically it says that you agree to pay sixteen dollars a night, room and board, payment to be deferred if necessary. It’s not even really legal; just a promise. We like it if you can pay half as you go, at least for awhile.”
“I can,” Rosie said. “I still have some money. I don’t know how to thank you for this, Mrs. Stevenson.”
“It’s Ms. to my business associates and Anna to you,” she said, watching Rosie scribble her name on the bottom of the sheet. “And you don’t need to thank me, or Peter Slowik, either. It was Providence that brought you here—Providence with a capital P, just like in a Charles Dickens novel. I really believe that. I’ve seen too many women crawl in here broken and walk out whole not to believe it. Peter is one of two dozen people in the city who refer women to me, but the force that brought you to him, Rose ... that was Providence.”
“With a capital P.”
“Correct.” Anna glanced at Rosie’s signature, then placed the paper on a shelf to her right, where, Rosie felt sure, it would disappear into the general clutter before another twenty-four hours had passed.
“Now,” Anna said, speaking with the air of someone who has finished with the boring formalities and may now get down to what she really likes. “What can you do?”
“Do?” Rosie echoed. She suddenly felt faint again. She knew what was coming.
“Yes, do, what can you do? Any shorthand skills, for instance?”
“I ...” She swallowed. She had taken Shorthand I and II back at Aubreyville High, and she had gotten A’s in both, but these days she wouldn’t know a pothook from a boat-hook. She shook her head. “No. No shorthand. Once, but no more.”
“Any other secretarial skills?”
She shook her head. Warm prickles stung at her eyes. She blinked them back savagely. The knuckles of her interlocked hands were gleaming white again.
“Clerical skills? Typing, maybe?”
“No.”
“Math? Accounting? Banking?”
“No!”
Anna Stevenson happened on a pencil amid the heaps of paper, extracted it, and tapped the eraser end against her clean white teeth. “Can you waitress?”
Rosie desperately wanted to say yes, but she thought about the large trays waitresses had to balance all day long ... and then she thought about her back and her kidneys.
“No,” she whispered. She was losing her battle with the tears; the little room and the woman on the other side of the desk began to blur and soften. “Not yet, anyway. Maybe in a month or two. My back ... right now it’s not strong.” And oh, it sounded like a lie. It was the kind of thing that, when he heard someone say it on TV, made Norman laugh cynically and talk about welfare Cadillacs and foodstamp millionaires.
Anna Stevenson did not seem particularly perturbed, however. “What skills do you have, Rose? Any at all?”
“Yes!” she said, appalled by the harsh, angry edge she heard in her voice but unable to make it go away or even mute it. “Yes indeed! I can dust, I can wash dishes, I can make beds, I can vacuum the floor, I can cook meals for two, I can sleep with my husband once a week. And I can take a punch. That’s another skill I have. Do you suppose any of the local gyms have openings for sparring partners?”
Then she did burst into tears. She wept into her cupped hands as she had so often during the years since she had married him, wept and waited for Anna to tell her to get out, that they could fill that empty cot upstairs with someone