“At least you’ll be with your mama. She won’t let nothing happen to you.”

“This morning I asked her about it. She wouldn’t answer really.”

She kept her eyes fixed on her hands on the table. She didn’t want to cry again in front of Arbuckle, though she could, and he would no doubt comfort her; even with a bastardly father he always knew how to soothe Lady Mae.

“Did she tell you?”

She shook her head, unable to describe how her mother had grabbed her wrists and told her to never question. The words licked like flames in her mind, but try as she might she couldn’t figure how to explain to Arbuckle the desperation in her mother’s voice—the warning call hidden beneath her mother’s trembling mouth. Lady Mae tried hard to control herself: she clenched her jaw and balled her fists. She pressed her tongue to the roof of her mouth, bit down on her cheek’s fleshy meat. And though she was sure Arbuckle knew already, she didn’t want him to see that she was scared. She did not—could not—know the dangers of her appointment; anything her mother had told her had most certainly been censored. What she had seen that day at the depot, what she had heard, was both exactly and not at all what she had expected. Her mother had tried to protect Lady Mae from the worst of it, but she noticed when her mother came home in a different dress than the one she had left the house in. She heard the metal edge of the knife on the stone wheel they kept in the kitchen late in the night when her mother was supposed to be sleeping. But most of all she had watched her mother in the early morning as she sat at the table, her head in her hands and her shoulders shaking.

“I’ll find out soon enough.”

2

When her mother came home that evening, Lady Mae was at the stove. The front door slammed shut, and she stayed where she was, stirring the ham hock and peas. There was no way that she could avoid her mother’s gaze, but she didn’t want her battered face to be the first thing she saw after a day spent at the depot. It pained her mother to see her so, and though the attack had been bad, it certainly hadn’t been the worst one. Still, she hoped the low light of the stove fire would mask her injuries. It wasn’t so much the bruises and the cut on her face, though they did sting and throb. No, what hurt the most was how no matter what her mother or Arbuckle said, she was a leper, infectious and poisonous.

“Evening,” her mother said.

“Evening, Mama.”

She heard her mother pull the chair out from under the table and set her tired body down. The fire crackled and the stew boiled.

“Supper’s almost ready.”

“Smells it,” she said. And then, “You ain’t allowed at the depot. Not yet.”