As the months passed, her indifference toward the passenger in her belly faded away. She found herself loving her unborn child with an intensity that often scared her. She stood at the window and cradled the growing belly in her arms as if it were a newborn. She thought about her mom all the time, and the things they had done when Helene was a little girl, making dandelion crowns in the yard and drawing pictures at the kitchen table, long before her dad had disappeared and everything changed. She wondered what kind of mother she would be. She wondered if she would ever get out of there.

Near the end of March, there was a thaw and the snow began to melt in earnest. She could stand on the porch and hear it trickling downhill to the river. She put on her disintegrating sneakers and wrapped herself in the quilt and walked through the wet meadow with frozen feet, just to be outside, realizing for the first time how the cold winter had hardened her.

She found the sagging fence around the old garden, now a riot of wild plants still dormant, waiting for spring. As she high-stepped through a tangle of weeds, her shoe landed on something that rocked underfoot.

Roy was in the basement with the door closed. When he was home, she always knew where he was. She squatted down, not easy with her huge belly and sore back, and worked her hand through the thick mat of vines until she found it. An upturned shovel.

Not a whole one, because the handle was rotted away, but the metal part. The curved blade of the spade and the short tube at the top where the wood handle had been inserted. Rusty, yes, but solid enough.

She left it there, invisible, under the plants.

It was the first thing she knew that Roy didn’t.

The first crack in his control.

35

Two weeks later, Roy came home from the grocery store and said, “Frank and the others are coming for dinner tomorrow. Why don’t you make something special?”

They all arrived at once. Frank parked his blue Jeep in the barn. Hollywood pulled his white car in beside it. Pony Boy came in the gray truck with the big trailer and left it in the driveway. They came up the porch steps together and walked through the door without knocking.

They threw their coats in the corner and poured themselves drinks and sat around the kitchen table as if they lived there. Frank wouldn’t look at her. Hollywood couldn’t stop staring at her, as if picturing what she’d done to get herself in that condition. Only Pony Boy, who’d barely said a word to her in the few days she’d known him, asked her when the baby was due.

“I’m not sure. Roy still hasn’t taken me to the doctor.” But she’d done the math to get the answer that would keep her safe. “Early July?”