the occasion. I wore, too, the dark glasses from our trip to the airport together, not to prevent the reporters and photographers from recognizing me, as that was hopeless, but to prevent them from seeing me cry, and capturing it with their cameras.
As it was, photos of me from the service did run in all the major papers-the first photos of “the Cocktail Waitress” since her controversial release from prison. I only regret one thing, which was my decision at the last moment before I left the house to rouge my lips, for it got commented on in every piece of coverage without exception. But I felt I needed a little color, so as not to look like a corpse myself.
We didn’t hold a separate service, just went direct to the cemetery and met up there with the one clergyman I’d found who had been willing to do the honors. He kindly glossed over Tom’s suicide in his remarks, and also kept them brief, and for his pains took home a fee healthy enough to refurnish his church, or his home if he preferred.
Liz was there, and Bianca, both of them weeping copiously at the loss. “I can’t believe he did it,” Liz said. “It’s my fault, Joanie, all my fault.” I tried my best to reassure her that it wasn’t, but I was afraid my words rang hollow to her. So I just held her tight and let her cry and patted her shoulder. When she finally let go, I saw a woman standing behind her that I didn’t recognize at first, but knew that I knew. Then I realized it was Pearl Lacey. I hadn’t thought she’d known Tom so well, but then remembered she’d been fond of him. I went over to shake her hand. “Shocking, shocking,” she said. It was the only word she spoke to me the whole time.
I want to say you know the whole story now-what happened, and how it happened, and why. But there’s one more piece I haven’t told, and that’s what happened when I got home from Tom’s funeral. I realized something, walking through the door, and began to cry, not weeping softly as I had at the cemetery while looking down into the freshly dug grave, but sobbing so hard I could barely catch my breath. Araminta rushed me a glass of water from the kitchen and I almost choked getting it down.
Then I asked her, gasping, for a calendar. She brought one, a tiny thing she kept pinned to the front of the Frigidaire with a magnet. I turned back a page and counted, though I hardly had to. I’d missed my period this time for sure.
Since that day, nine months have passed, nearly; my due date is tomorrow. The doctor who will deliver my baby is the same one who came when, in the first heat of panic, I called and begged him to bring over to the mansion whatever apparatus he needed to perform a test on the spot. He came, he performed the test, and sure enough, this time it wasn’t a delay caused by stress, though god knows I’d had stress enough to dry me up for a lifetime. No, it was a baby, and I’ve carried her ever since.
Of course I don’t know it’s a girl-not so I can be sure. But I have a feeling about it. I’ve had dreams in which she’s spoken to me, and in all of them it’s been a little girl’s voice. Who knows if that’s reliable, the doctors say no, but some women I’ve talked to take a different view.
It’s been a difficult pregnancy, with lots of morning sickness and bed-rest needed. Little Tad has been an angel about it, but it hasn’t been easy on him, for sure. Of course we now have the money to hire ten caretakers if need be-but that isn’t the same as having Mommy there to pick you up and whirl you around the room.
Fortunately, I had some of Hilda’s pills left-a few-and they helped me through the worst of it. I couldn’t ask a doctor for more, of course. Any pills but those, perhaps; but if it got out that the Cocktail Waitress had asked for more Thalidomide-god help me, the newspapers would have a field day with it. As it is, the coverage has picked up, people interested in the story again now that the baby’s almost due. A KILLER’S CHILD, read one headline I passed on the street. I didn’t know if they meant me or Tom. But that night I began recording this. To make sure the truth gets told.
I can’t wait to see my little girl, to hold her in my arms. Tom’s baby. With a father like him … she’s bound to be a beauty, a perfect little beauty, and I want her to have the life I never did, and that even Tad lost out on, the first four years of his life. He’s a good boy, but every now and again a frightened one, you can see he’s one who’s known pain. But his little sister-I pray she’ll be spared all the cruelties we’ve endured.
I seemed to be all taped up-that must be all.
For now.
