I felt my face go hot with anger again. “I am not surprised by the cruelty, Mama,” I said. “I am surprised we are expected to ignore it, to never mention it, to swim in it as if it’s the oily, smelly harbor water the boys dive into by the wharves.”

Mama finally took off her bonnet and set it down. She turned to me, her eyes exacting. “You want to write poetry?” she said. “Or do you want to get things done?”

“I want a clean pool to swim in.”

She snorted. “Always with the flowery talk. You’re spoiled.”

“Call me spoiled,” I said. “I won’t rot if I swim in clean water, though.”

She picked up her bonnet and folded it tighter in her hands, her only sign of distress.

She said with a sigh, “You are becoming too old for these scenes, Libertie. You can keep asking me your questions, your accusations full of God knows what. But the answer is never going to change. And I am tired.” She set the bonnet down again, crossed the room as if to leave.

“But I am tired,” I called after her, wanting to make her feel something, wanting to make her react, feel the same slippery sense of unease I’d felt when I saw that our pews were empty and that our friends had left us. “I am very, very tired, Mama. I am tired of bending over women’s stomachs, and I am tired of feeling for babies’ limbs under skin, and I am tired of smelling the sickroom breath of women who won’t even look me in the eye.”

Mama stopped at the door and turned. “If you are tired at sixteen years old, you understand how tired I am of having this argument with you. You can do as you please. But I won’t have this discussion anymore.”

And she left, calling over her shoulder, “Put the kettle on will you? A cup of tea would be nice.”

I sat down in the parlor, in the seat in the corner where I’d watched my mother plan and plot and scheme and heal. Where I’d loved her and wanted only her understanding. I sat there for a long time, as the room darkened around me, as I heard her move about upstairs in her regular ambulations. I had my little book in my lap, full of notes to my woman in the water, but I could not write now. I saw my own handwriting, childish and looping large, and I thought of what she would think if she saw it, and I imagined she would feel only disgust with me, what I imagined was the same disgust my mother felt now, walking about her office, setting things right for the workday tomorrow. Mama had fled into her mind, away from me—and I should be used to the cold by now, I should, but I still could not bear it.