Mrs. Crandall reached for her dress. She had to go home. It was almost dinnertime. Now was my turn to beg, cajole, and abase myself, even cry. I could not let her go. That night I had to squeeze from her the last drop of information about McCabe. My pain must have been real, even if my theatrics weren’t; I couldn’t tell anymore. She was moved. She held me like Mary held the Baby Jesus, giving me her breast to suckle, putting my tiny hand inside her warm cunt. I cross-questioned her gently, careful that her cunt did not come to a boil too soon, enjoying the slow release of her wetness, the swaying of her hips, delicate at first because we were sacred mother and child. “Mercy can be very funny,” she said. I did not immediately realize to whom she was referring. McCabe hated her given name and never used it. She was plain McCabe to all. Was Mrs. Crandall that distant from McCabe, or that close? No, she could not remember if she ever called McCabe that name to her face. Unlike her jolly predecessor, New McCabe had no sense of humor. The few jokes I tried on her fell flat. Music, birds, food, wine, bandages were our only shared language. “She can be quiet, but she can talk up a storm.” About what? I asked. “Oh, everything, and nothing. Art and life. She’s been everywhere and met everyone. But she’s not stuck-up. Deep down she’s still a healthy Iowa farm girl,” said Mrs. Crandall. I exhaled, surprised. “She says so herself,” Mrs. Crandall added soothingly, with a maternal tremor of her hips. I asked her what they and Petrona had cooked together on Thanksgiving eve. “Your Thanksgiving dinner. What else?” she said, kissing my ear while her cunt wrapped itself tighter around my hand. She had bought the suckling pig in Shangri-La at McCabe’s request. Tears rolled down my cheeks. Mrs. Crandall kissed my eyelids and held me tighter. “That’s all I know,” she said, declaring the interrogation closed as her hips warmed. I believed her. She was innocent. “Poor baby,” she said, tenderly, her cunt arching and flooding my fist. I kissed her on the lips, for the first and only time. Mrs. Crandall then abandoned herself entirely to me. Passion made her body more voluptuous than ever. Her cunt was fleshier and warmer, her breasts more bountiful. She had kept most of herself out of my reach until this moment, while I had thought she had nothing more to give or show me. I put my ear on her belly to listen to the palpitations of her cunt, the sound of my fingers touching her deep inside. I was so stunned by how passion had transformed her flesh that, when her cunt began to quiet down, satiated, I lowered my guard and, in turn, abandoned myself to her. She fucked me like the Mother would fuck the Child. Licking, whispering, sucking, touching. She had learned. I came a dozen times, on her lips, hands, and breasts. I was inside her milky womb when she was inside me. When she stopped, breathless, my face still buried in her breasts, I almost retched in disgust. I had let a stranger touch me. Worse: a stranger with an opaque connection to McCabe, someone who could have been lying to me all along. “I don’t want to fuck her any more than you do,” Mrs. Crandall said sweetly, as if reading my mind. She held my gaze long enough for me to check her sincerity, then said: “Mercy and I just had the beginning of a beautiful friendship that might have flowered if she had stayed in Elmira.” That was Mrs. Crandall putting me in my place. How foolish of me to think that McCabe would stay here with me until death did us part.