Providence

by Cocca, Lisa Colozza

  “Thanks anyway,” I said. I got us away from that house as quick as I could.

  The further away from the center of town I walked, the bigger the houses and yards got. But they weren’t the only things getting bigger. I would be fine bunking out under the stars, but Baby Girl was a whole other story. I was running out of options, and my worries about the night expanded with every step.

  Baby Girl was waking up again, and I knew from my own brothers and sisters that it would only be a few minutes of time before she would start wailing to be fed. I reached into the carriage basket for the bottle of water and the formula mix. The water felt like it had been boiled for tea. I turned the corner and started searching for a solution to my newest problem. There was a group of children playing in their bathing suits on one of the lawns. The biggest one was holding a hose up in the air, producing a shower for the little ones to run through. I wondered how long it would take for one of them to run and tell their mama about us if I asked to fill Baby Girl’s bottle from their hose. I didn’t have a chance to weigh the odds. A woman opened the front door and yelled, “This is your last warning! I want you children in the house, changed into dry clothes, and ready to run errands in ten minutes.”

  The girl dropped the hose and chased the little ones inside. I knew it would be safer to wait until the family had gone off on their errands before touching their hose. Unfortunately, Baby Girl was starting to rumble like a volcano ready to blow and I knew we didn’t have the luxury of ten minutes to wait. I hurried up the block, pouring some of the hot water out as we went, and quickly grabbed the hose and started adding fresh water to the bottle. As soon as it was half full, I hightailed it back to the carriage and practically ran down the block.

  I turned the next corner, eager to get out of sight, in case someone had spotted me with the hose. I ended up on a street that finished with a circle. There was no way out but the way I’d come in. At the end of the road, three trees sharing one large trunk grew. I decided to hide behind it to feed the baby. This street was quiet, but I walked down the block trying to look like I belonged there. I settled behind the tree and hurried to mix the formula before Baby Girl started to cry. I sat and leaned against the trunk, positioning myself so I could peek between the trees without our being seen. Baby Girl was gulping that formula down so fast that I wondered how much of it was going to come right back up. I stopped to burp her and when I looked back out onto the street, I saw a mailman walking around the corner. I curled up tighter and checked to make sure the carriage was out of sight.

  I sat and watched as he strolled along poking letters in the boxes and slots. More precisely, I took notice of the houses where he didn’t stop. I held my breath as he came around the circle and didn’t breathe easy again until he moved on to another street. I changed Baby Girl’s diaper and rummaged through my bag for the candy bar and soda I had purchased earlier. The candy was a gooey blob and the soda was hotter than the baby bottle had been. I brushed off my backside and mustered up the courage to walk around the circle a couple of times. I wanted to get a better look at the houses that had gotten no mail. On my first time around, I looked for cars in the driveway or lights on in the house. Then I circled around again, listening for dogs and checking to see how close these houses were to their neighbors. I spotted a treehouse behind one of the houses. It might be hard to climb up there carrying the baby, but at least it would give us a roof over our heads.

  When Baby Girl started fussing again, I knew it was time to head back toward town. My belly was rumbling as loud as Baby Girl was crying, so we stopped in the Tick Tock Diner. A woman sitting at the counter elbowed the man sitting next to her. He turned, looked at us, and shook his head. The group in the front booth stopped talking and just stared at us.

  The cold reception caused me to worry about leaving all of our worldly possessions in the carriage basket. I grabbed our bags and took a seat in a booth in the back. When the waitress sauntered over, I asked for some water. She slapped the glass down on the table so hard the water splashed out of the top. “Is that all you’re going to order?” she asked, her words sounding more like a challenge than a question.

  I took out the new bottle I had gotten at the second hand shop and mixed some formula for Baby Girl. I looked at the menu and ordered the cheapest thing on it for me. “You want me to heat that up?” the waitress asked, pointing at the bottle.

  “No, I don’t want to trouble you,” I answered.

  “Well, you can’t be feeding it to her like that,” she said, as she grabbed the bottle from my hand.

  A head popped through the window behind the counter. “Hey, Dottie,” the voice yelled. “This food isn’t going to serve itself.”

  The waitress walked off with Baby Girl’s bottle, mumbling the whole way. When she returned she put my plate in front of me and held the bottle out. “You know to test the temperature of this before you give it to her, right?” she said.

  I nodded, took the bottle out of her hand, and put it on the end of the table opposite of the waitress. When I finished my meal, I made sure the waitress was watching before I placed a few drops of the formula on the inside of my wrist. Dottie came over with the bill as I fed Baby Girl. I asked her where the library was in town and if she knew how late they were open. I knew that if I was going back to that treehouse, it would have to be after dark. She answered my questions and asked a few of her own. “Are you new in town? Is this your baby? Is it just the two of you? That baby doesn’t look at all like you. Does she look like her daddy?”

  I answered ‘yes’ to all of them. That last one might have been another lie, but maybe not. I have no idea what her daddy looks like.

  We stopped in the ladies’ room on our way out. I got a little shock when I saw myself in the full-size mirror. If people praised my looks back home, I rarely had reason to doubt them. With the number of boys who were sweet on me, I guessed that they were being truthful. The girl looking back at me from that glass didn’t look like a girl a boy would take to the church dance on Saturday night, though. My long brown hair was wet and sticking to the sides of my head. My nose was as red as Rudolph’s. My legs and shorts were coated with train dust. “Girl,” I said to the person in the glass, “no wonder people are looking at you funny.”

  CHAPTER 4

  After we left the diner, we went straight to the library. I settled into a chair and scanned the recent newspapers. I started with the ads in the back of the paper. I was hoping to find a place where Baby Girl and I could settle in for a few days until I figured things out. The few ads I saw were all looking for someone to rent monthly and to pay a whole month’s rent up front. I didn’t have that kind of money, but I took out my notebook and jotted down some of the addresses anyway. I thought that once I got cleaned up and started my new job, I would look like a better prospect. I hoped then that they would be willing to take a smaller amount up front since they would be getting someone with a steady income.

  A group of girls came into the library. Baby Girl was sleeping off her last bottle, so I was worried their giggling might wake her. One of the girls bent over the carriage. “Is it a boy or a girl?” she asked.

  “A girl,” I answered. “Her name is Georgia.”

  “Aww, that’s so pretty,” the girl said. “It suits her.” She waved over her friends. “Come look at this baby,” she said. “Isn’t she the most adorable little thing?”

  I watched the girls huddle around the carriage. They all looked to be about my age. One of the girls had moved with the herd without ever taking her eyes off her phone. Her thumbs moved up and down the keys with speed and ease. The librarian took notice of this too, and taking the cell phone warning sign off her desk, she started in my direction. The last thing I wanted was to draw more attention to Baby Girl and me and our problems, so I started wishing real hard these girls would disappear. When the librarian blocked the girl’s view of her phone with the sign, the girl shoved her phone in her pocket. As the librarian walked back toward her stati
on, the girl rolled her eyes and muttered something under her breath.

  One of the other girls looked at her watch. “Never mind her; we need to get out of here anyway. I don’t want to miss the bus. If we get there too late, the movie will be sold out.”

  “Okay,” said the first girl. “Where did Sarah go? Sarah!” she said in a strange combination of a whisper and a shout.

  Another girl walked out from between two bookcases with several books in her arms. “What are you doing?” the girl with the pink stripe in her hair asked.

  Sarah shrugged her shoulders. “I thought as long as I’m here, I might as well find something new to read.”

  Pink Stripe shook her head. “First of all, you spend too much time with your face buried in a book. Secondly, we don’t have time for this. If we miss the bus, we miss the movie. Drop the books and let’s go.”

  For a second, Sarah looked like she was going to follow this order. Then she said, “Can’t we hang around town tonight—maybe go to the diner? My mother said the next time I get caught sneaking out of town I’m grounded for the summer.”

  The other girls in the group groaned as if on cue. “Your mother is not going to find out and there is nothing to do in this town. We’re going to the movies.”

  “My mother will find out,” Sarah answered. “I don’t know how she does it. Maybe she has a network of spies or a sixth sense or something, but she always finds out. You all can go ahead, but I’m not going. It’s not worth getting in trouble. I don’t even really want to see that movie all that much.”

  The first girl planted her fists on her hips. “Why do you have to be so difficult? If you go home now, our parents will find out and wonder where we are. Then we will get in trouble. A real friend wouldn’t get me into trouble.”

  Sarah sighed. “I’m not going to rat anybody out. I’ll just hang around here for a while and then go home.” She sat down on the chair across from me and ended the conversation.

  The other girls cooed one last time over Baby Girl, I think more because it gave them a chance to turn their backs on Sarah. I thought about asking them if they knew of a place to stay. It seemed they were already inclined to keep secrets from adults, so maybe they wouldn’t run off and tell someone what I was asking about. I was just about to ask when one of the girls said, “I love babies. They are the sweetest things on earth.”

  Her friend answered, “Sweet when they belong to someone else.”

  “I hear the bus!” one girl shouted.

  I watched the girls run out of the library and glanced back at Sarah. She was shuffling the books on her lap and looking like she was going to cry. I didn’t need to be dealing with the attention that might bring either, so I decided to try and pull her thoughts from those other girls. I pointed at the book on the top of her pile and said, “I loved that book. I could hardly put it down.”

  Sarah lifted the book and smiled. “This one?” she asked. “I’ve read two others by this author and I loved them, too. They were both set in Paris and the descriptions were so good I felt like I was really there. They made me decide to go there someday.”

  “That one is set half in Paris and half in Rome. When you’re done reading it, I bet you’ll want to go to Rome, too.”

  Sarah smiled and nodded. “My name is Sarah, by the way. You probably caught it when my friend practically yelled it across the building.”

  “I’m Becky,” I answered.

  Sarah leaned in toward me. “I don’t know what my friends said to you while I was in the stacks, but please don’t take anything they say personally. Donna’s sister had a baby when she was eighteen, and now her life is practically over. She lives in a tiny apartment in town with her baby and her boyfriend. She was supposed to go away to college and have an exciting life. Now a big day is when she goes out for groceries. We all can’t wait until we graduate from high school and get out of this dead town. If they said anything to you about having a baby, it’s because they think having one young means the same thing for everyone, not just Donna’s sister.”

  I almost told her she was the only one who had shared her opinion of me, but when I looked in her eyes I saw no meanness there. I forced a small smile onto my face. “Oh my gosh,” she said. “I just realized I’m the one being awful. I just assumed the baby is yours, and for all I know you could be babysitting. So whether you’re her mother or her sitter, please don’t be offended by anything I said. I’m suffering from diarrhea of the mouth, because I’m ticked that my friends ditched me for a movie.”

  She tapped the cover of the book a few times. “Anyhow, thanks for the suggestion,” she said. “I’ll put the others back on the shelf and if you don’t mind, I’ll come back here and sit with you and read.”

  When she walked away, I turned my attention back to the newspaper. There was a picture of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis at the top of the page. I read the caption and thought about what I had learned in history class. I kind of fancied myself as a pioneer. My adventures would take me places no one in my family had ever seen before. If St. Louis was the perfect starting off place for the people heading west more than a hundred years ago, then it seemed the perfect place for me to start my trip across the country. I pulled my backpack out of the carriage and dug out my notebook. I turned to my adventure list and added the Gateway Arch. Those girls didn’t know anything about me, I thought. I was going to see places they had never even thought about. I was going to go to college too—and I was going to graduate. I patted Baby Girl on the back. “Don’t you worry none,” I whispered. “I’m not going anywhere until I find your mama.”

  I flipped through every page of the paper, searching for any word of someone missing a baby. As my mind went back to our housing situation for the night, I thought again about going to the police. If I did, would they bring me back home to Mama and Daddy? Then what would happen to Baby Girl? I know Daddy wouldn’t welcome another mouth to feed into the house. He hardly was happy about the ones he made with Mama.

  Rosie knowing my real name was weighing on me, too. She was more than kind to us, but I figured if my name showed up in the newspaper she might call the police first and ask questions later.

  “Becky,” Sarah said.

  I jumped in my seat a little. I had been so deep in my thoughts I hadn’t taken notice of her sitting back down. I looked at her and saw her smiling and pointing up at the ceiling. I looked up and saw the lights blinking. “That’s the librarian’s way of letting us know she is closing up,” Sarah explained. “I’m going to check this out. Are you getting anything?”

  “Not tonight,” I said.

  “Well, it was nice to meet you,” Sarah said. “I’m sure we’ll run into each other again. I think that is something you’ll find out about this town quickly. It’s hard to turn around without running into someone you know, or someone that someone you know knows.”

  “Enjoy the book,” I said. I pushed the stroller back to the ladies’ room. I changed Baby Girl’s diaper and took care of myself. The prospect of having to spend the night outdoors caused me to consider hiding out in there until everyone had gone home for the night. If it were just me, I probably could have gotten away with it. But babies draw attention, especially when there is only one baby in the library, and the librarian had peeked into the carriage a few times while I was sitting there. Even if I could find a place to hide the carriage, I was sure the librarian would notice that we hadn’t left the building.

  I took a deep breath and swung the bathroom door open. I held it there with my backside while I steered the carriage through the opening. The librarian was standing by the front door looking at her watch when I got there. As I walked out the door, I heard the lock click behind me. I shivered despite the heat. Night would be upon us soon, and I still had no sure plan for where we were going to go.

  CHAPTER 5

  I pushed the carriage up the same streets we had walked down earlier. It was that dozy time of evening that happens in summer, when day is gone but night hasn’t
quite arrived. Porch lights dotted the dusky air, and neighbors were swatting the mosquitoes and calling out their goodbyes.

  I turned the corner and practically tiptoed down Cobbler Court, the street where I had watched the mailman earlier in the day. The two houses on the right of the circle looked empty. I walked around three times to see if anyone would come outside. The big brick house had a tall white fence around its backyard. I held my breath and plowed across the gravel to the gate.

  The tree house was the reason I chose this place. Now I gave it a really hard look. I went around the pool and looked at the rope ladder hanging from the tree. The knots in my stomach were bigger than the knots on that rope. There was no way I could climb up there holding Baby Girl.

  The screened porch on the back of the house looked more promising. I swear that I never before entered someone’s house without the benefit of an invitation. But I couldn’t spend all night shooing away the mosquitoes that hovered around us. I reached up and removed a bell that hung from the top of the porch door. I felt sure the family that lived in this house was away, but I didn’t want that bell jingling and announcing our arrival to the neighbors. Then I opened that door the way I pull off a Band-Aid—slowly and carefully.

  The porch was large, and had everything a couple of girls on the run could ask for. The furnishings were covered with sheets. I lifted one and peeked inside. They had cushions as thick as a loaf of bread, and one of the pieces lay back just like a bed. Against the wall, there was a long cabinet with a sink built into it. Underneath there was a refrigerator no taller than my two-year-old sister, Mary Jo.

  The porch had a slate floor, so the first thing I did was take off my shoes to quiet my walking. The cool slate soothed my tired feet. I cleaned Baby Girl up and mixed three bottles of formula. One would be her good night bottle, and the other two would go in the refrigerator for the middle of the night feedings.