with the dust and odor assaulting her nose and lungs. She experimented with leaving the door open a crack, but it didn’t seem to help the ventilation. She lay awake, exhausted to the bone, staring out the tiny window at the stars sprinkled across the patch of night sky. Searching for sleep, she replayed moments she had spent with Jessie—the first time he held her hand, the way he would push her hair gently away from her face before he kissed her—but even these memories were not enough to take her away. Her heartbeat throbbed in the condensed and matted tissue of her scars. She imagined her blood moving, slow and thick, through her veins, the blood of her doomed family.
Lucy’s room next to the kitchen had never been a maid’s room, as Mrs. Sloat claimed; the moldering debris in the corners was proof that it had served as a larder. A single small, unglazed window was covered only with a rusting screen. The walls were marred with rows of holes where shelves had once hung, entire chunks of plaster missing. A meat hook in the ceiling was surrounded by a spreading stain. The only furniture was a stained mattress on a cot that looked even older than the one Lucy slept on at Manzanar.
Just once—the third morning or the fourth—she failed to get up right away when Mrs. Sloat rapped on her door. Moments later, it was flung open, banging into the wall and sending up a shower of plaster dust. Mrs. Sloat stood over Lucy, bristling with rage.
“Don’t you forget—” she spat the words with cold fury as Lucy scrambled to cover herself with the thin sheet “—that you are here as an act of our mercy. The world does not want you, Lucy, no one wants you. And you have to earn your place here just like the rest of us.”
Lucy cowered, and for a moment she thought the woman was going to strike her. She rolled as close to the wall as she could, sharp lath cutting into her back through her thin nightgown.
“Earn your place,” Mrs. Sloat muttered and turned away to leave.
Seconds after her footsteps faded, Lucy finally breathed.
* * *
A small reprieve arrived unexpectedly on Saturday. Lucy was starting the day’s laundry when an old Chevy High Boy pickup rattled to a stop in front of the house. Three people got out—a middle-aged woman and a boy and girl in their teens—and started unloading tin pails from the back. Lucy watched them through the laundry window, and didn’t hear Mrs. Sloat come in.
“Got your eye on Hal McEvoy, I see,” she said. “You and every other girl in town.”
Lucy hastily got back to the laundry. “I was just wondering who was here,” she said. She had noticed the boy—sun browned, hair cut to bleached-blond stubble, broad back of a hard worker—but not the way Mrs. Sloat was implying. She seemed to delight in even the smallest opportunities for meanness, and Lucy had learned that ignoring her slights was the best way to defuse her.
“That’s the weekend girl, Sharon McEvoy, and her kids. Twins, they must be seventeen, eighteen by now. Ruby helps serve, and Hal helps Leo around the house.”
Lucy picked up a pile of rags and started folding them, feigning indifference.
“You stay out of their way, hear? We’ll have a couple dozen guests for lunch and who knows for dinner. I don’t need you getting underfoot.”
There were few restaurants in Lone Pine, and the Sloats picked up extra business serving family-style meals on Saturday and Sunday. Lucy had seen the menus: a dollar seventy-five bought coffee or tea, an entrée, vegetable and starch, and cake or pudding. Ten could be seated at the big walnut table, and Leo had dragged in two extra cloth-covered card tables that morning.
“Go make sure the kitchen’s picked up,” Mrs. Sloat said. “You can finish this later.”
Sharon McEvoy was already at the sink, a ruddy, stocky ranch wife with brown teeth and a shapeless bosom. Ruby looked like a younger version of her mother. They clattered around the kitchen, making themselves at home at the cupboards and counters and glaring at Lucy, who raced to get the breakfast dishes dried and put away. She wasn’t about to argue with her first opportunity for free time. She could have the six occupied rooms cleaned by one o’clock and the rest of the day to herself. And if her luck held, the same tomorrow. She had been collecting stones