Baptism in Blood Read Online Free

nose. A sloppy woman dressed in a frayed blue cotton shirt and tight synthetic-fabric shorts in very bright red. Rose wrinkled her nose in distaste. It only went to show you. Men were necessary for women. Without men around, women let themselves go all to hell. You could see it in those women from the camp. You could see it in those lesbians.
    A sudden vision of Zhondra Meyer came into Rose’s mind: the tall thinness, the high cheekbones, the big dark eyes. Rose pushed the vision away and opened the door to the front rooms. The woman in there was wandering around among the displays, looking dazed. She stopped in front of a pile of pastel kitchen tiles with the Mother’s Prayer printed on them and blinked.
    “Excuse me,” Rose said. The woman jumped. “Is there anything I can do for you?”
    The woman looked down at the Mother’s Prayer again. Then she turned away. She really was a homely woman, Rose thought. Her skin was terrible. Her hair was like straw. Now she was blushing, sort of, mottling up and look­ing strained. Rose had a sudden urge to shake her by the shoulders and put her on a diet.
    “Oh,” the woman said. “Yes. I was looking—for a baptism, you know—for a—”
    Most of the women who came into Rose’s shop were looking for something to buy for a baptism. Either that or they wanted Christian books and didn’t think they were going to get to Raleigh-Durham anytime soon to shop in a real Christian bookstore. There were stories all over town about the kind of baptisms that went on up at the camp, though. Rose didn’t know whether to believe the stories or not. She went behind the checkout counter and picked up a little stack of bookmarks with the face of Jesus printed on them, preserved under laminate that could be cleaned with a wet sponge.
    “You can’t want to buy something for a christening now,” Rose said. “Don’t you realize there’s a storm com­ing?”
    “Storm,” the woman said stupidly. “Oh, yes. Yes. I was in the library, you see—”
    “The library is open today?”
    “It was. For a little while this morning. And I’d heard about the storm, of course, but I didn’t think, you know—”
    “Hurricane Hugo knocked out a third of the South Carolina coast,” Rose said. “We had a storm down here a couple of years ago that took down half the houses on the beach.”
    The woman’s skin mottled again. “That was the kind of thing they were saying at the library. The woman there, the one with the lace collars and the green glasses, she told me—”
    “Naomi Brent.”
    “Excuse me?”
    “Naomi Brent,” Rose repeated. “That’s the name of the woman at the library who wears the lace collars and the green glasses. Naomi Brent. She tried out for Miss North Carolina the year she was eighteen, but she didn’t make it.”
    “I wanted to buy a gift,” the woman said. “For a baptism. I wanted to buy one of those pictures, you know, with the mother and child—”
    “A Madonna.”
    “—and I thought you’d have one. A big picture in a frame. That you can hang on a wall.”
    “Are you a Catholic?” Rose asked.
    The woman looked startled. “Catholic? No. No, of course not. Why would you think that?”
    “That’s who mostly wants Madonnas,” Rose said. “Catholics. It’s a kind of Catholic specialty.”
    “Oh.”
    “Regular Christians want pictures of Jesus. Either that or they’re grandmothers, and then they like angels, espe­cially for granddaughters. You shouldn’t buy a Madonna for a regular Christian.”
    The woman’s face seemed to close off. “I want one of those pictures of a mother and child,” she said. “One that can hang on a wall. With a frame.”
    Rose moved around from behind the counter. She didn’t have many Madonnas. There were more Catholics in North Carolina now than there had been when she was growing up, but there still weren’t a lot. She went over to a shelf along the west wall and took down what she had: four different pictures