Orphan Train(24)

When I’m finished, I open the door, pulling down my dress.

“You’re pitiful thin,” Fanny says. “I’ll bet you’re hungry.” Hongry.

She’s right. My stomach feels like a cavern. “A little,” I admit.

Fanny’s face is creased and puckered, but her eyes are bright. I can’t tell if she’s seventy or a hundred. She’s wearing a pretty purple flowered dress with a gathered bodice, and I wonder if she made it herself.

“Mrs. Byrne don’t give us much for lunch, but it’s prolly more’n you had.” She reaches into the side pocket of her dress and pulls out a small shiny apple. “I always save something for later, case I need it. She locks up the refrigerator between meals.”

“No,” I say.

“Oh yes she does. Says she don’t want us rooting around in there without her permission. But I usually manage to save something.” She hands me the apple.

“I can’t—”

“Go ahead. You got to learn to take what people are willing to give.”

The apple smells so fresh and sweet it makes my mouth water.

“You best eat it here, before we go back in.” Fanny looks at the door to the house, then glances up at the second-floor windows. “Whyn’t you take it back in the privy.”

As unappetizing as this sounds, I am so hungry I don’t care. I step back inside the little shed and devour the apple down to the core. Juice runs down my chin, and I wipe it with the back of my hand. My da used to eat the apple core and all—“where all the nutrients are. It’s plain ignorant to throw it out,” he’d say. But to me the hard cartilage is like eating the bones of a fish.

When I open the door, Fanny strokes her chin. I look at her, puzzled. “Evidence,” she says, and I wipe my sticky jaw.

Mary scowls when I step back into the sewing room. She shoves a pile of cloth at me and says, “Pin these.” I spend the next hour pinning edge to edge as carefully as I can, but each time I put a completed one down she grabs it, inspects it hastily, and flings it back at me. “It’s a sloppy mess. Do it again.”

“But—”

“Don’t argue. You should be ashamed of this work.”

The other women look up and silently return to their sewing.

I pull out the pins with shaking hands. Then I slowly repin the cloth, measuring an inch apart with a metal sewing gauge. On the mantelpiece an ornate gold clock with a domed glass front ticks loudly. I hold my breath as Mary inspects my work. “This has some irregularity,” she says finally, holding it up.

“What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s uneven.” She won’t look me in the eye. “Maybe you’re just . . .” Her voice trails off.

“What?”

“Maybe you aren’t cut out for this kind of work.”

My bottom lip trembles, and I press my lips together hard. I keep thinking someone—maybe Fanny?—will step in, but no one does. “I learned how to sew from my mother.”

“You’re not mending a rip in your father’s trousers. People are paying good money—”

“I know how to sew,” I blurt. “Maybe better than you.”

Mary gapes at me. “You . . . you are nothing,” she sputters. “Don’t even have a—a family!”

My ears are buzzing. The only thing I can think to say is, “And you don’t have any manners.” I stand up and leave the room, pulling the door shut behind me. In the dark hall, I contemplate my options. I could run away, but where would I go?

After a moment the door opens, and Fanny slips out. “Goodness, child,” she whispers. “Why you have to be so mouthy?”

“That girl is mean. What’d I do to her?”

Fanny puts a hand on my arm. Her fingers are rough, calloused. “It don’t do you any good to squabble.”

“But my pins were straight.”

She sighs. “Mary’s only hurting herself by making you do the work over. She’s paid by the piece, so I don’t know what she thinks she’s doing. But you—well, let me ask you this. Are they paying you?”

“Paying me?”

“Fanny!” a voice rings out above us. We look up to see Mrs. Byrne at the top of the stairs. Her face is flushed. “What on earth is going on?” I can’t tell if she heard what we were saying.

“Nothing to concern you, ma’am,” Fanny says quickly. “A little spat between the girls is all.”

“Over what?”

“Honest, ma’am, I don’t think you want to know.”

“Oh, but I do.”

Fanny gazes at me and shakes her head. “Well . . . You seen that boy who delivers the afternoon paper? They got to arguing over whether he has a sweetheart. You know how girls can be.”

I exhale slowly.

“The foolishness, Fanny,” Mrs. Byrne says.

“I didn’t want to tell you.”

“You two get back in there. Dorothy, I don’t want to hear another word of this nonsense, you understand?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“There is work to be done.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Fanny opens the door and walks ahead of me into the sewing room. Mary and I don’t speak for the rest of the afternoon.