Read Online Sister Noon by Karen Joy Fowler - Free Book Online Page B

are we going?” Jenny asked.
    “Where would you like to go?”
    “The ducks.”
    Lizzie had no idea where that might be, but since they weren’t going there, it hardly mattered. “The ducks are asleep.”
    “Wake them,” suggested Jenny.
    There was really only one destination that Lizzie could think of within walking distance. She took Jenny’s hand and started off. She wasn’t sure exactly how late it was. There were still lights far away in the city, but no one else seemed to be abroad.
    The streets were unpaved and full of obstacles, stones and dips and horse droppings. Lizzie was not used to walking with a child. People credited her with maternal instincts simply because she volunteered at the Brown Ark, but as treasurer, she worked solely with adults and accounts. She was actually quite awkward around the young wards. Jenny’s steps were so small. She labored on the uphill slope to Sutter Street. Lizzie recalculated how long the few blocks would take, and then leaned over and hoisted Jenny.“You’re a bigger girl than I thought,” she said, trying to keep the disapproval out of her voice. She could smell Jenny’s hair, a stale-molasses smell, not entirely pleasant. If she were mine, Lizzie thought, I would keep her as clean as a kitten.
    Jenny refused to put her arms around Lizzie, which would have helped balance her. “Where are we going?” she asked again.
    “Do you want to go back?”
    “No.”
    Lizzie turned left at the thorny rose garden of Trinity Church. The wind picked up considerably. A man walked ahead of them, going their same direction on Bush Street. She put Jenny down, glad for a reason to fall farther behind him.
    “Will we ever go back?” asked Jenny.
    “Yes, of course. Soon. We’re just taking the air.”
    The man had heard them. He turned, but only briefly. Lizzie wondered who he imagined they were, what he imagined they were doing. A woman evinced her class in a variety of ways; Lizzie was good at reading the clues herself and assumed that she was also good at sending them. An unescorted woman could always be misunderstood, but surely the presence of a child conferred respectability. In any case, the man appeared uninterested.
    It was very cold. Lizzie began to wish she’d sent Jenny straight back to bed. Why in the world hadn’t she? She wished for a different place to go. She wished for lights and more people, or absolute dark and fewer.
    “When I was just a little girl like you, you’d hear coyotes out here at night,” Lizzie said. “The city hadn’t comethis far yet. I saw a horse race near this very spot with those big golden horses the Spanish had. It was Diego Estenegas’s sixteenth birthday. We had
cascarones
. Do you know what
cascarones
are?”
    “No.”
    “Eggshells filled with perfume and tinsel and flour. You break them over people’s heads. Even my father came home streaked with flour.”
    “Why?”
    “My father did business with the Estenegas family. He brokered their beef to local hotels. They were kind enough to include me in the invitation. It was a party.”
    Jenny sat down in the dirt. “Something’s in my shoe,” she said. She removed it.
    Lizzie was forced to squat beside her. She took Jenny’s shoe, shook out a thin stream of sand, like the drift in an hourglass. Lizzie had been to few enough parties as a child. Perhaps that was why this one remained so vivid. How could it be so long ago? She could see her mother, her hair falling from its pins, brandishing an eggshell, but that couldn’t have happened, it must have been someone else’s mother.
    The Spanish women had been beautiful, with their bright dresses and diamond haircombs. Though some had married American husbands, few of the men had taken American wives. Were there really so many fewer Spanish families now, which was the way it seemed, or had the city simply filled in around them with Italians and Irish and Chinese? Diego Estenegas was like a prince and smiled once at Lizzie so she