Miller's Valley - Anna Quindlen Page 0,78

red winter coat and a pair of leather gloves so thin that they were a joke for doing anything around a farm or really keeping your hands warm. It was like she was buying things for someone I would become as opposed to who I really was. It was ninety degrees out and I had an angora hat and scarf.

Eddie came and picked me up even though Debbie was annoyed that they’d had to take the baby stuff out of the wagon to make room for my things. My mother had asked him to do it, and lying in bed I tried to figure out whether it was because she didn’t want Steven to take me, or whether she didn’t want to do it herself because she thought the new Mimi shouldn’t have a mother like her. But then I figured it was mainly because she hated to drive on the highway. She said entrance ramps made her nervous.

The waitresses at the diner had given me a set of striped sheets with a matching quilt and pillows. “Don’t forget us when you’re a big shot doctor,” said Dee.

“If you start practicing now,” I said to Ruth when we had lunch together, BLTs for a special treat, “you could be ready to come to my graduation in two years.”

I don’t know whether she was chewing or thinking, but after a while she said, “I wouldn’t count on it.”

When Eddie moved me in you could tell that he was worried. He gave me a fold-up map of the city and pointed out neighborhoods I should avoid. One of them was the neighborhood where the university was.

“This will be an adjustment, Mimi,” he said, like he was sixty and I was ten. “I’m a country girl,” I’d told Mrs. Farrell about why I’d be better off at State. Like a lot of other things I’d always taken for granted, it turned out it wasn’t exactly true. I liked living in the city much more than I’d expected. After a couple of months I figured out that it wasn’t so much trees and birds I’d always liked in the valley as it was the feeling of being alone. I guess most people think that since the city is so crowded you don’t feel that way, but I did from the very beginning, maybe even more so than I had at home. Crossing the street with as many people as had been in my high school class made me feel even more alone because I didn’t know any of them and none of them knew me. I hadn’t crossed a street in Miller’s Valley in my whole life next to someone who didn’t know me, who didn’t know something about my parents, something about my brothers.

“You come out here any time, Mimi,” my sister-in-law liked to say. “You must be lonesome.” I was, I guess, but that wasn’t why Debbie was asking. She was asking because she’d popped out two babies pretty fast, one after the other, and she knew that when I walked in she could hand me one. It seemed like a lot of the girls I knew did that, had a baby and then a second baby, as though they were trying to get the whole thing over with. Or maybe not. “That second one must have been a mistake,” my mother said on the phone Sunday nights, after the rates went down.

“I bet your mother thinks Kimmy was a mistake,” Debbie said, trying to put frozen lasagna in the oven with one hand while she held the baby with the other. Sometimes I spent the night with little Eddie and Kimmy so Debbie could go out with her friends. Unlike Callie, she didn’t offer to pay. Ed brought it up once, and Debbie said, “It’s not really babysitting when it’s your family, right, Mimi?” Ed didn’t push it. I think he was still annoyed that I was getting a free ride at an Ivy and would have an MD after my name at the end of it. The pullout sofa in the living room of their house was uncomfortable, but no more uncomfortable than the twin bed in my dorm room.

I was lonesome, but I figured that made sense. I got to college two years after everyone in my class. They already had friends and routines. I had to study pretty much nonstop just to keep up. Being a straight A student at Miller’s Valley High School and Mountain County Community

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