Keeping Faith: A Novel Read Online Free Page B

myself living without Colin.
Joan Standish narrows her eyes and sits down on her desk, across from me. “If you don’t mind my saying so, Mrs. White,” she begins, “you seem a little … removed from all this. It’s a very common reaction, you know, to just deny what’s been legally set into motion, and therefore to just let the whole thing steamroll over you. But I can assure you that your husband has, in fact, started the judicial wheels turning to dissolve your marriage.”
I open my mouth, then snap it shut again.
“What?” she asks. “If I’m going to represent you, you’ll have to confide in me.”
I look into my lap. “It’s just that …
well. We went through this, sort of, once before.
What happens to all … this … if he decides to come back?”
The attorney leans forward, her elbows resting on her knees. “Mrs. White, you truly see no difference between then and now? Did he hurt you last time?” I nod. “Did he promise you he’d change? Did he come back to you?” She smiles gently. “Did he sue for divorce last time?”
“No,” I murmur.
“The difference between then and now,” Joan Standish says, “is that this time he’s done you a favor.”
Our seats for the circus are in the very first row.
“Ma,” I ask, “how did you get tickets this close?”
My mother shrugs. “I slept with the ringmaster,”
she whispers, and then laughs at her own joke.
Her surprise from yesterday involved a trip to the Concord TicketMaster, to get us all seats at the Ringling Brothers Circus, playing in Boston. She reasoned that Faith needed something that might get her excited enough to chatter again. And once she heard about the libel, she said that I should consider the trip to Boston a celebration.
My mother hails a man selling Sno-Cones and buys one for Faith. The clowns are working the stands. I see some that I recognize–could they be the same after all these years? One with a white head and a blue smile leans over the low divider in front of us. He points to his suspenders,
polka-dotted, then to Faith’s spotted shirt, and claps his hands. When Faith blushes,
he mutely mouths the word “Hello.” Faith’s eyes go wide, then she answers him, just as silently.
The clown reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a greasepaint crayon. He cups Faith’s chin in one hand, andwiththe other draws a wide, splitting smile over her lips. He colors musical notes on her throat and winks.
He hops away from the divider, ready to entertain some other child, and then turns back at the last minute. Before I can manage to duck away,
he reaches for my face. His hand is cool on my cheek as he paints a tear beneath my left eye, dark blue and swollen with sorrow.
Although it is not something I remember, when I was little I tried to join the circus.
My parents took me to the Boston Garden every year when Ringling Brothers came to town, and to say I loved it would be an understatement. In the weeks leading up to the show I’d wake in the middle of the night, my chest tight with flips and my eyes blind with sequins, my sheets smelling of tigers and ponies and bears. When I was actually at the circus, I’d school my eyes not to blink,
aware that it would be gone as quickly as the cotton candy that melted away to nothing in the heat of my mouth.
The year I was seven I was mesmerized by the Elephant Girl. The daughter of the ringmaster,
glittering and sure, she stepped on the trunk of an enormous elephant and shimmied up it, the way I sometimes walked up the playground slide. She sat with her thighs clamped around the thick, bristly neck of the elephant and stared at me the whole time she circled the center ring.
Don’t you wish, she said silently, that you were like me?
That year, like all the other years, my mother made me get up ten minutes before the intermission, so that we could beat the bathroom lines. She towed me to the ladies’ room, both of us crowding into the tiny stall, and she loomed like a djinn with