Read You Remind Me of Me for Free Online Page B

you? I don’t care about me, they can put me in prison, but I’ll kill him.”
    “Did he hurt you?” her father said. “Did he threaten you? You don’t have to be afraid to tell me.”
    “Don’t do anything you’re going to regret,” he said. “A life lasts for a long time, you may not know that yet.”
    Of course, these conversations linger in her mind now that she’s alone. Her father says, “Just let me help you, babygirl. You’re my daughter. I’ll do anything for you.”
    ——
    That is the worst part of it, she thinks sometimes: knowing that she has hurt him perhaps more than she has hurt herself. It aches to think of him, to picture him sitting in the mornings, hunched over his cup of coffee at the kitchen table, licking the lead of his pencil as he fills in the daily crossword in the newspaper, alone in the small house. She knows that he is already thinking of this baby of hers, that he won’t let it go, that it will be on his mind for the rest of his life. She knows that the coldness and stubbornness she’d turned toward him will be like a cloak she has put on, which she can never take off.
    But she cannot choose what he wants for her. Her father is a lover of babies, of families, of connection and structure, and she is not. She knows his stories, the events of the past that he’s turned into little trinkets in his mind, telling them over and over, the same words, the same welling of emotion—wet eyes, constricted voice—at the same precise moments in the telling of his sad, sentimental tales. The orphan train, how they picked him up off the streets of New York City when he was only four years old and sent him all the way across the country to be adopted by a cruel farmer and his wife, who didn’t want a child but a slave; how he’d run away at the age of fifteen. Or her mother, so beautiful and young, and him almost twenty years her senior, but they were soul mates from the start, his pretty little brown-eyed Sioux lady, how can he live without her now that she’s dead? And Nora herself, his own babygirl, the way she used to follow him around and imitate whatever he did,
she even wanted to put shaving cream on her face and pretend to shave, just like her daddy!
    Oh, these stories—by the time she was fifteen they were almost unbearable. She would feel a smooth airtight window sliding up inside her, impervious to sympathy or pity. “I’ve heard this before,” she’d say softly, but that wouldn’t stop him.
    Here at Mrs. Glass House, at least there is silence. At least there are no stories, and she is glad, because she can’t transform what has happened to her into a romance. The boy, the father, is almost gone from her mind now, lingering only in her awareness of her own stupidity. Soon, the baby will be gone, too.
    ——
    But until then, there must be punishment. Humiliation.
    Here, at Mrs. Glass House, they are herded from place to place. They move, very docile, single file down the stairs to the basement cafeteria; they are preparing to walk down the hill toward town, where they will eat ice cream and see a movie. Mrs. Bibb distributes “wedding rings,” cheap gold-painted strips of tin, which they are to wear on their left hand, third finger. The Home is said to be a convalescent house for expectant mothers. No one says words like
unwed
, or
bastard
, or
whore
. Certain aspects are pretended. Nora watches as Dominique is given a ring, watches as Dominique slides the ring on, over the chewed fingernail and ugly, wrinkled hillock of finger joint.
    They line up. They will be led down the long winding driveway toward the town, young girls in various stages of pregnancy, ripeness, swollen and swelling girls marching single file from the doorway of this place that looks like a haunted house in movies or dreams—The Mrs. Glass House, with its three-story, turreted facade, with its loose gutters and peeling white paint, the long lawn and spike-tipped, curlicued cast-iron fence. If this