The Sabbathday River by Jean Hanff Korelitz Read Free Book Online Page A

knowing it was the baby’s mother!”
    â€œNot the mother?” Ann Chase said shrilly. “Okay, then, where is the mother? Why don’t we hear her yelling and screaming about her baby’s gone missing and who took it? Somebody takes your brand-new baby out of its cradle and you’re on the horn to Nelson Erroll before the door slams, you know as well as me. Now where’s the mother if it wasn’t her?”
    â€œAnn,” Naomi said, “it might have been the baby’s father, did you think of that? Maybe he was mad about it. Maybe he didn’t want to be a father.” Even saying the words made her numb.
    â€œFine,” Ann said, her voice suspended between airy and arch. “You want to pretend it isn’t true? You go ahead. But that doesn’t make it not true.”
    Naomi sighed heavily. She eyed the stack of orders on Mary’s desk with something like longing, imagining herself flicking on her computer, setting down her coffee mug. Mary sat stiffly, her eyes averted. In the mill room, the shuffling of feet, but no voices. Ann, with a huff, turned and went back in, and Naomi—almost against her will—felt herself rise and follow. She laid a palm on Ann’s white sweater and the woman stopped, rooted. Behind her an arc of six or seven, rugs spread over their laps, faces rapt. They had abandoned the pretense of not listening. “What?” Ann said.
    Naomi swallowed. “Do you know something? I mean, you seem …” She glanced at the ring of heads. “If you know something, you should go to Nelson, or this D.A. from Peytonville. If you know—”

    â€œIf I know ?” Ann said, smiling unaccountably. “I was born here, Naomi. You think I don’t know my neighbors? You think I don’t know who lives here?”
    Baffled, Naomi simply stared.
    â€œYou think we’re in some big city and you can get away with thinking it’s a stranger?”
    This, Naomi thought, was somehow meant to refer to herself, but what it actually meant she found she ardently wished not to pursue.
    Ann smiled, showing an equal display of ivory denture, canary tooth, and coral gum. Then she stalked to her seat, smoothed the burlap across her lap, and, with the murmured assent of her company, yanked a vicious length of wool through her unfortunate spaniel’s paw. Naomi, for once relieved at the way the circle had closed, shutting her out, swung shut the door to the office and, beneath the fretful looks of Mary Sully, addressed her own work. That she knew fully well the unspoken lines of the conversation just past did not give her any comfort, but having spent the previous days pushing from her thoughts the dead baby in the river, Naomi found that little more effort was required to push this from her thoughts as well.
    The mood in the mill did not improve. Indeed, when Ann Chase headed home around lunchtime, and Naomi might reasonably have expected a dissipation of the tension, it seemed to grow even worse, as if, without their self-selected spokesperson, no one quite knew what to say to her and, not knowing, said absolutely nothing. A few times she had ventured into the back room, flashing a newly poured and steaming cup of coffee as if to advertise her willingness to talk—even to talk about that. But the heads stayed bowed over their work and nobody would look at her.
    Not, in itself, a very unusual state of play. What Naomi missed most about being married to Daniel—possibly, apart from sex, the only thing she did miss—was a level of conversational intimacy that dipped below the strictly ephemeral. Over the years she had felt the ties between herself and her women friends elongate into intangibility. There were such recognizable trajectories to their lives, she thought from her distant berth in the north country; they had entered professions, found mates, produced and nurtured children. Their heads were full of play groups and