Mrs Delilah Sharpe

Of course I remember it.

Cruel hot day.

I called Will into the kitchen and he looked at my legs but I wouldn’t look down. I could feel it and that was enough for me. He took me out to the truck and we didn’t say a word because where else would he be taking me?

Not that we’ve a name for him.

When I was a child we called him Mr Fix.

We got to the house and I still wouldn’t look, though by then I could smell it. The mean metal smell. I don’t remember getting into the house, just the rocking chair. That damn chair tilting to and fro with him knelt beside me and peering between my legs. I remember he told me not to move and I wanted to say I’m not moving, it’s this damn chair you’ve made me sit in but I thought if I spoke it’d put more strain on the baby.

How long we were there I don’t know. Him ripping up sheet after sheet and trying to staunch the flow and singing – the whole time he kept on singing – and then he looked up and told me again not to move and then his daughter was in the room.

Little Miss Ada.

And she’d a bundle in her arms.

A red-streaked barely moving bundle of cloth. And then she said what she said and I thought My baby, that’s my baby, and Will was crying and I thought I should hold his hand.

When we came home the blood was still on the floor and even then, through the happiness, I thought What a sight this would be if our baby had died. But she didn’t die. No matter what’s wrong with her. My beautiful girl.

I’ll not have an ill word said against Miss Ada.

It was close to two when Lorraine arrived.

From my window I watched the car approach while the rain spat and settled in a mist above the grass. Whoever drove her to the bottom of the drive looked away as she made for the house, drove away without helping her with her bag, which was clearly heavy.

She didn’t seem to mind.

She walked like a woman who’d grown up slim.

The small heel of her shoes saw her wobble once or twice, one arm stretched away from her body and the other pulled taut by the weight of the bag. When she came closer I could smell it: cigarettes and cold cream, and of the foil that Cure candies come wrapped in.

The thin fabric of her dress moved over her hips and thighs with the same frenzy of a lightbulb flickering before it finally expires, and the scoop of her armpits had the velvety look of charcoal after a fire.

Hot, hot weather. It took its toll on older bodies.

I went to the door and I opened it and right away she pointed at her bag and said her lower back was tender. I took the drooping handles in my hand, felt the moist fingerly grooves.

Inside the hall she leaned back to look at me.

–Why Ada, I do believe you’ve grown.

The most I could have grown was a half-inch or so. I suppose she said it because it’s something Cure children and adolescents like hearing.

I left her bag behind the sitting room door and told her she might sit for a moment. Her freckles gathered close about her lips, a sign she was about to smile.

Upstairs Father was standing in his bedroom, his back to the door.

–Just open her in the sitting room.

–You’ll not be coming down?

–You know your way.

–And you don’t want to talk to her?

–No.

He’d left a towel hanging over the chair. I picked it up and held it in both hands.

–This feels very strange to me. Curing her without your coming down. Without talking to her at all.

–You’re getting older, now. You don’t need me watching over you all the time.

I helped Lorraine lift her stocking feet onto the couch and asked her to leave her hands at her side. If she wondered after Father she didn’t say. Her dress was lined with buttons down its front, and once I’d laid my hand across her eyes and seen her sleeping I undid them one by one.

I looked at her belly, at the belts of fat falling under their own slack weight and pooling ’round her waist.

She smelled like a rag left near the sink. I peeled away her underthings and wedged the towel up between her legs and a little ways underneath her. My thumb, when I ran it along the soft inside of her arm, saw the blood come heavy and slow. This we did with women past a certain age, relieve some of the pressure that gets into their blood. But her blood was extra thick. So thick I half-expected the opened vein would shimmy up flecks of iron, as pebble-bedded streams will sometimes in a certain light reveal shards and lumps of gold.

After a few moments I pushed the skin back together and wiped it clean with my dress. The skin of her stomach fell easily apart, its elastic long gone. The ovaries were all sinewy and very small, lined with the deep grooves of a peach stone, and her womb shone with an unseemly wet.

It made me think of staling fruit that takes on the shape of the bowl it sits in.

I held a hand over it, felt its heat. I wondered it didn’t turn the flesh of her stomach pink. I ran a finger down its middle and it opened slack and uneven as her sleeping mouth. Inside was the usual liquid, only cordial-thick.

I sang the sound of water in a drain, of rain moving through the gutters. She quivered, which was the change in her blood, and then water was coming out onto the towel, quickly followed by a heavier substance that saw it darken.

I closed up her womb and flattened down her stomach. It took me some moments to button her dress. I looked at her wedding band and tweaked it out of its groove. It had stained the root of her finger a mossy green.