Doll must have been following her from place to place somehow, even though Lila didn’t know herself where she would be from one day to the next. Doll wouldn’t have wanted Lila to see her panhandling, but it was hard to think how else she’d have been getting by. It might just have happened that Doll was in that town and saw her there, and watched to see where she lived. And it might just have happened that Doll and that old fellow had their knife fight there, close enough to Lila’s room that Doll could come to her when she had to. It could have been that the man, maybe her father, meant to find Lila, and Doll threw her husk of a body and her dreadful knife into making sure that didn’t happen. What might he have said to her, to Lila? She could only imagine him white as he was in that box, whiter at the bone of his nose. He’d stand there all slack in his joints like a zombie, stupefied by how dead he was, mumbling a little, and she would feel so sorry and so relieved that he couldn’t tell her what it was he came to tell her. Things like that happen in movies. That was probably where she got the idea. He might have wanted to tell her that he and her poor dear mother hadn’t meant to leave her long, but something happened. They were on the way to find her, and — what could he say? — the train went off a cliff and all their arms and legs were broken, and when they came to, they didn’t even know their own names. Years in the hospital. And while he was telling her some such thing Doll would come flying out of nowhere to cut him one more time. No wonder her thoughts were strange, considering what she had to think about.
But as long as the one thing on her mind was Missy’s baby, she was just plain happy. The best of everything she remembered became the whole dream of what she could look forward to. So when the memory of some pleasant day she had put out of sight came back to her, even the taste of a clover blossom or the smell of the wind at evening, the pleasure of it was a sort of shock, and if she forgot that she shouldn’t be talking out loud, she’d say, “Yes, yes,” as if time could be coaxed into getting on with itself. She made a little garden out behind the house, a row of peas and a row of carrots, and planted some marigolds by the front steps. There wasn’t really enough sunshine, the buildings were so close, but she wanted the feel of real dirt on her hands, not just the grime and mess she was always dealing with. The dirt would clean away the feeling and the smell of it. She walked a long way to find a store that sold seeds, the farthest she had been from Mrs. since she came there. It made her light-headed. Mrs. had begun talking about attracting a better class of customer now that the place had a little polish, and she mostly let Lila do whatever she wanted, pretending she was the one who had thought of it. The other girls wouldn’t even go down the block to buy a loaf of bread because they thought people looked at them, but Lila didn’t really care about that. She always felt strange in a town, but that was all right. It reminded her of the way she and Mellie used to steal a look at their reflections in a store window, waving their arms and making faces if they thought nobody was watching, laughing at the laughing ghosts of themselves for just the minute their pride let them risk, then walking on, thinking they had done something anyone else would notice or give a thought to, and laughing. Sometimes Lila walked away from that house as if she might just keep walking, block after block after block, imagining the night when she really would leave. Then she’d turn and go back to the house again, not because of Mrs., just waiting for the baby.
She hated to remember how swept up in it all she had been, how ridiculous she would have seemed to anyone who knew what she’d been thinking. That’s one good thing about the way life is, that no one can know you if you don’t let them. Oh, they noticed that she was acting different, and they tried to guess the reason for it, how she could have a boyfriend when she was so tough and wore out and never even curled her hair now that she was just a cleaning woman. Never you mind. He’s some old bum on the street. No business of yours. Probly found him picking through a trash can. They were just mean no matter what, so she didn’t even listen.
Lila spent her time waiting, working so far as anyone could see,
