Girl Waits with Gun by Amy Stewart Read Free Book Online Page A

animals: elephants and lions, fish and sea monsters. We were forbidden to touch them.
    She never opened the door for strangers. She read salacious newspaper stories to me and Norma as we worked at our sewing, hoping, I suppose, that with each stitch her shocking morality tales would teach us the dangers that a knock at the door could bring. I can’t look at our childhood samplers without remembering the disgraceful fate of Laura Smith, age seventeen, who was lured away from her home by the grocer and ruined by him, or that of thirteen-year-old Lena Luefschuetz, found dead for reasons having to do with her “undesirable companions.” A girl named Amelia was arrested for “going into a hallway with an Italian” and was detained as a witness for two weeks, which prevented her from boarding a steamship that would have carried her back to the bosom of her family in Germany and away from the horrors that a city like New York could visit upon a young girl.
“Arme Amelia, so weit weg von ihrer Familie,”
Mother would say under her breath. Amelia lived constantly in her prayers.
    For weeks we followed the story of a girl arrested for waywardness after her mother called the police and demanded that they take her away. Her own mother! The girl had been out past her curfew, which, we were shocked to learn, was ten o’clock. The girl claimed that the door was locked and her mother would not let her in, so she had no choice but to ride her bicycle all night long. A trial was held in which her cyclometer was presented as evidence. It showed that she had traveled fifty miles. A church pastor testified on her behalf, as did a Sunday school teacher. The magistrate seemed inclined to let the girl go until her mother held up a letter the girl had written to “a young physician in Manhattan.” (Mother read this in a grim tone, suggesting that nothing good could come of correspondence with physicians.) The magistrate read the letter, gave the girl a shocked and stern look, and committed her to the Wayside Home until she turned twenty-one.
    If Mother knew what that letter contained, she wouldn’t tell us. All she wanted us to understand was that in America, letters were dangerous, as were hallways, bicycles, doctors, and Italians. We could be locked up for any of it, and ruined.
    She would have been terrified by our accident, not just because of our injuries and the damage to the buggy, but because it left us so exposed. The thought of the three of us thrown into a heap on Market Street, a crowd gathered around us, everyone watching, everyone wondering who we were—Mother dedicated her life to avoiding that very thing.
    And now I had gotten into a fistfight with a factory owner. If my mother had nightmares, this would have been one of them.

7
    FLEURETTE AND NORMA didn’t look up when I walked in. They were engaged in a game of preference, with Fleurette holding two of the three hands.
    â€œOh, good,” Fleurette said when she saw me. “Come and take Mother’s place.”
    â€œYou’re bidding for Mother?” I said, dropping into a chair across from them. Fleurette was on the divan with a pillow propped up next to her in the place of a third player. Norma was seated across from her with her own hand, wearing a look of high skepticism.
    â€œNo, she’s bidding for a pillow,” Norma said, “and I have begun to suspect that the pillow is cheating.”
    â€œConstance wasn’t here,” Fleurette said. “We’ll never have a threesome if you’re always running off by yourself like that.”
    â€œI’m not always running off,” I said.
    â€œDid Mr. Kaufman pay?” Fleurette asked.
    I had decided that Fleurette shouldn’t know what had happened. She was an excitable girl, prone to vivid dreams and wild ideas. If she thought we had an enemy, she’d keep me up half the night with elaborate cloak-and-dagger schemes.
    â€œMr.