“Your aunt is a good woman,” he said reassuringly, as he began to drive, with her bags in the back of his pickup truck, and Marie-Ange made no comment. She hated her already for taking her away from her home, and Sophie. Marie-Ange had wanted so much to stay there. More than any of them could fathom.
They rode together for an hour, and it was nearly one o'clock in the morning, when he turned off the highway onto a narrow road, and they bumped along for a few minutes. And then she saw a large house loom out of the night at her. She saw two silos, and a barn, and some other buildings. It seemed like a big place to her, but as different from Marmouton as though it had been on another planet. To Marie-Ange, it might as well have been. And when they stopped in front of the house, no one came out to meet them. Instead, Tom took her bags out of the truck, and walked into the farm's old, somewhat dilapidated kitchen, and Marie-Ange stood hesitantly in the doorway behind him. She seemed as though she were afraid of what she would find when she entered. And he turned to her with a gentle smile and beckoned.
“Come on in, Marie,” he said, losing half of her name. “I'll see if I can find your Aunt Carole. She said she'd wait up for you.” Marie-Ange had been traveling for twenty-two hours by then, and she looked exhausted, but her eyes seemed huge as she watched him. She jumped when she heard a sound, and then saw an old woman in a wheelchair, watching them from a doorway, with a dimly lit room behind her. It looked terrifying to a child of eleven.
“That's a silly-looking dress to wear to a farm,” the woman said by way of greeting. She had a harsh, angular face, and eyes that were only vaguely reminiscent of Marie-Ange's father's. And she had long bony hands that rested on the wheels of her wheelchair. Marie-Ange was startled to see that she was crippled, and a little frightened by it. “You look like you're going to a party.” It was not a compliment, but a criticism, and Sophie had packed a great many other “silly” dresses like it. “Do you speak English?” the woman Marie-Ange assumed was her great-aunt asked brusquely, as the child nodded. “Thanks for picking her up, Tom,” she said to her foreman, and he patted Marie-Ange's shoulder encouragingly as he left them. He had kids of his own, and grandchildren, and he felt sorry for the child who had come so far from home, for such tragic reasons. She was a pretty little thing, and she had looked terrified all the way from the airport, despite all his efforts to reassure her. He knew that Carole Collins was hardly a cozy woman. She had never had children of her own, and never seemed interested in talking to them. The children of her employees and friends meant nothing to her. It was an irony that, so late in life, she should find her path crossed with this child. And the foreman hoped it would soften her a little.
“You must be tired,” she said, as she looked at Marie-Ange, once they were alone in the kitchen, and Marie-Ange had to fight back tears, as she longed for the loving embrace of Sophie. “You can go to bed in a minute.”
Marie-Ange was tired, but more than that, she was finally hungry, but Carole Collins was the first person that night who did not offer her anything to eat, and Marie-Ange was afraid to ask her.
“Do you have anything at all to say?” she asked, looking straight at Marie-Ange, and the child thought it was a reproach that she had not thanked her.
“Thank you for letting me come,” she said in precise, but accented English.
“I don't think either of us had much choice in this,” Carole Collins said matter-of-factly. “We'll have to make the best of it. You can do chores here.” She wanted to get things straight right from the beginning. “I hope you brought something more sensible than that to wear,” she said over her shoulder, as she turned her wheelchair around with a practiced hand.
Carole Collins had had polio as a young girl, and never regained the use of her legs, although she was able to drag herself around on crutches with braces on her legs, but she chose not to. The wheelchair was less humiliating, and more efficient, and she had used it for more than fifty years. She had turned seventy that April. She had been widowed when her husband died in the war, and had never remarried. The farm had been her father's, and she ran it well, and had eventually annexed it to her brother's land after he died. John's father had been her brother, and his wife had remarried and moved away, and was only too happy to let his sister buy her out. Carole Collins was the family's only survivor. She knew a lot about farming, and absolutely nothing about children.
She was giving up her spare room to Marie-Ange, and she wasn't pleased about it, although she seldom if ever had visitors anyway. But it seemed like a waste of a good room to Carole, and she led Marie-Ange to it, through the dimly lit living room, and down a long dark hallway, as Marie-Ange followed. She had to fight back tears every inch of the way, from grief, terror, and exhaustion. And the room she saw when Carole turned the light on for her was spare and barren. There was a cross on one wall, and a Norman Rockwell print on the other. The bed had a metal frame, a thin mattress, and there were two sheets and a blanket folded neatly on it, a single pillow and a towel. There was a small closet, and a narrow dresser, and even Marie-Ange could see that there would be nowhere to put what she had brought in her three huge suitcases, but she would have to face that dilemma in the morning.
“The bathroom is down the hall,” Carole explained. ‘You share it with me, and you'd better not spend too much time in it. But I guess you're not old enough to do that.” Marie-Ange nodded. Her mother had always liked to take long, leisurely baths, and when they were going out, she spent a long time doing her makeup, and Marie-Ange loved to sit and watch her. But Carole Collins didn't wear makeup, and she was wearing jeans and a man's shirt, and her gray hair was cut short, as her nails were. There was nothing frivolous or particularly feminine about her. She just looked old and grim to Marie-Ange as they looked at each other. “I assume you know how to make your bed. If not, you can figure it out,” she said with no warmth whatsoever, and Marie-Ange nodded. Sophie had taught her to make her bed long before, although she was never very good at it, and when Sophie would help her, Robert always complained because he had to make his own bed.
The two distant relatives looked at each other for a long moment, as Carole narrowed her eyes appraisingly. ‘You look a lot like your father as a child. I haven't seen him in twenty years,” she added, but without much regret, as the words mean-spirited leaped to Marie-Ange's mind, and she began to understand. Her great-aunt seemed cold and hard and unhappy, perhaps because she was in a wheelchair, the child decided. But she was polite enough not to ask her about it. She knew her mother wouldn't have wanted her to do that. “I haven't seen him since he went to France. It always seemed like a crazy thing to me, when he had plenty to do here. It was hard on his father when he left, working the farm, but he didn't seem to care much. I guess he went over there chasing after your mother.” She said it as an accusation, and Marie-Ange had the feeling she was supposed to apologize to her, but didn't. She could see now why he had gone to Paris. The house she was in looked depressing and sad, and his aunt at least was anything but friendly. She wondered if the rest of the family had been like her. Carole Collins was so totally different from her mother, who was warm, and gracious, and lively, and filled with fun, and so very, very pretty. It was no wonder her father had gone to find her, particularly if the other women in Iowa were like this one. Had Marie-Ange been older, she would have realized that what Carole Collins was, more than anything, was bitter. Life had been unkind to her, crippling her at an early age, and then taking her husband from her a few years later. There had been very little joy in her life, and she had none to offer. “I'll wake you when I get up,” she warned, and Marie-Ange wondered when that would be, but didn't dare to ask her. “You can help me make breakfast.”