Garden of Stones - By Sophie Littlefield Page 0,79

the lights and got to work, listening for sounds through the thin wall, but there was nothing. While she sprinkled the tub with Old Dutch and got on her knees to scrub it, acrid steam stinging her eyes, she replayed what had happened with Reg. What she had done. What she wished she had done.

No one would protect Lucy here. Any guest could do anything he wanted, anytime. He could accuse her of stealing, as Rickenbocker had accused her mother. But if Lucy were accused, she would refuse to confess to anything, ever. If she were locked up for a crime she didn’t commit, she wouldn’t care. After all, she’d already traded one prison for another. What difference would a third make?

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After finishing the last of the rooms, Lucy pushed her cart back along the walk toward the main house, the aroma of fried chicken making her stomach growl. She passed room nine and forced herself not to speed up or look back. She would not mention to Mrs. Sloat that she hadn’t cleaned that room. With any luck Reg wouldn’t either, and Lucy could take care of it tomorrow before it was rented again.

Resolve changed things. Lucy had no solutions, no alternatives, but she had a next step and a next. Do her work. Do not back down. There was one thing that belonged to her in this world. It wasn’t the job, which could be taken away from her, or the suitcase full of clothes, which had belonged to other people first. It wasn’t pride, which Lucy had only borrowed from her mother and which had been extinguished when her mother was gone.

No. What Lucy had was a tiny seed inside her, a hard thing like a popcorn kernel. The first time she ever watched the boy behind the concession counter make popcorn at the Orpheum, she had been astonished that such a big, fluffy thing could explode out of such a little case. But Lucy’s kernel—she didn’t know where it was located exactly, in her heart perhaps, or more likely in her spirit, wherever that might be found—would explode large as well. She didn’t want much—a place of her own someday, a job of her choosing. But she meant to have it. And when she finally exploded, no one would ever be able to take her future from her again.

In her pocket was the fifty-eight cents she’d found that week as she cleaned. She didn’t trust Mrs. Sloat not to search her room while she was working, so she’d carried the money with her. It wasn’t a lot. But it was a start. She would have to figure out how much she would need to set out on her own. How much did a room cost, a coat, a streetcar ride? A bus ticket to a city, the bigger the better? Only in a city could Lucy live without being seen, without being singled out, ogled, isolated.

In Los Angeles every year on her birthday, Lucy’s parents took her to the Beverly Wilshire or Perino’s. She and her mother wore new dresses, her father a dark suit, and people in the street paused to watch them arrive. But as the valet helped her mother out of the car, Lucy also saw the others, the ones in the back of the crowd, dressed in rags, begging for change. People ignored them, rushed around them, like a stream flowing around a stone lodged in the current.

Lucy would be that stone, and the city would flow around her, indifferent and preoccupied. But unlike the beggars with their hollow eyes and gaunt expressions, Lucy would not ask for help. She would work hard and learn a trade. She would depend on no one. Her mother had already closed one avenue for her: no man would ever choose her. So be it. Lucy would make her own way.

Inside the house, Sharon and Ruby worked in silence, washing and drying and stacking the dishes. Lucy scanned the bare sideboard hungrily.

“Excuse me,” she said. “Is there... May I make myself a plate?”

Sharon turned and regarded her coldly. “Mary didn’t say anything about that.”

“Is she here? Did they already eat?”

“She went to see Mr. Dang.”

“That’s the fish man. He’s a Chinaman,” Ruby added shyly. She lacked her mother’s hard edges; there was a sweetness to her, an innocence that made it all right that she was staring openly at Lucy’s face. “But he’s nice. He comes around here a lot. Mrs. Sloat always drives down there