make them happier than you can imagine.”
“Passing them on?” Van Cleve’s eyes bulged. “You gave away my dolls? To . . . hillbillies?”
Alice laid the napkin neatly on her lap. She glanced at Bennett, who was staring at his plate. “Only two. I didn’t think anyone would mind. They were just sitting there doing nothing and there are plenty of dolls left. I didn’t think you’d even notice, to be honest.” She tried to raise a smile. “You are grown men after all.”
“They were Dolores’s dolls! My darling Dolores! She’d had Miss Christina since she was a child!”
“Then I’m sorry. I really didn’t think it would matter.”
“What has gotten into you, Alice?”
Alice let her gaze fix on a point of the tablecloth just past her spoon. Her voice, when it emerged, was tight. “I was being charitable. Like you always tell me Mrs. Van Cleve was. What were you going to do with two dolls, Mr. Van Cleve? You’re a man. You don’t care about dolls any more than you care about half the trinkets in this place. They’re dead things! Meaningless!”
“They were heirlooms! They were for Bennett’s children!”
Her mouth opened before she could stop it. “Well, Bennett isn’t having any children, is he?”
She looked up and saw Annie in the doorway, her eyes wide with delight at this turn of events.
“What did you just say?”
“Bennett isn’t going to have any wretched children. Because . . . we are not involved in that way.”
“If you’re not involved in that way, girl, it’s because of your disgusting notions.”
“I beg your pardon?”
Annie began to put the plates down. Her ears had gone quite pink.
Van Cleve leaned forward over the table, his jaw jutting. “Bennett told me.”
“Pa—” Bennett’s voice held a warning.
“Oh, yes. He’s told me about your filthy book and the depraved things you tried to do to him.”
Annie’s plate dropped in front of Alice with a clatter. She skittered back to the kitchen.
Alice blanched. She turned to look at Bennett. “You talked to your father about what goes on in our bed?”
Bennett rubbed at his cheek. “You . . . I didn’t know what to do, Alice. You . . . kinda shocked me.”
Mr. Van Cleve threw his chair back from the table and stomped round to where Alice was sitting. She flinched involuntarily as he towered over her, spraying saliva as he spoke. “Oh, yes, I know all about that book and your so-called library. You know that book has been banned in this country? That’s how degraded it is!”
“Yes, and I know that a federal judge overturned that same ban. I know just as much as you do, Mr. Van Cleve. I read the facts.”
“You are a snake! You have been corrupted by Margery O’Hare and now you are trying to corrupt my son!”
“I was trying to be a wife to him! And there’s more to being a wife than arranging dolls and stupid china birds!”
Annie peered around the doorway with the last plate, immobile.
“Don’t you dare criticize my Dolores’s precious things, you ungrateful wretch! You aren’t fit to touch the heel of that woman’s shoes! And tomorrow morning you’re going to go up those mountains and fetch my dolls back.”
“I will not. I’m not taking those dolls away from two motherless children.”
Van Cleve raised a stubby finger and jabbed it at her face. “Then you’re banned from that damned library from now on, you hear me?”
“No.” She didn’t blink.
“What do you mean, no?”
“I told you before. I’m a grown woman. You don’t get to ban me from anything.”
Afterward she remembered thinking distantly that old man Van Cleve’s face had grown so crimson that she feared his heart might give out. But instead he lifted his arm, and before she realized what was happening a white-hot pain exploded at the side of her head, and she collapsed against the table, her knees buckling under her.
Everything went black. Her hands gripped the tablecloth, the plates collapsing toward her as her fingers closed around the white damask, pulling it down until her knees hit the floor.
“Pa!”
“I’m doing what you should have done a long time ago! Knocking some sense into this wife of yours!” Van Cleve roared, his fat fist banging down on the tablecloth so that everything in the room seemed to shudder. Then, before she could gather her thoughts, her hair was pulled back sharply, and another blow, this time her temple, so that her head bounced off the edge of the table, and as the room spun, she