Eleven Hours Read Online Free Page A

financially?
    Diana overheard and scolded Marjorie terribly. Asa had slept with Lore’s best friend , she reminded her. And Lore didn’t need some asshole’s help: she had a good job and good benefits, she would manage on her own. Very sure of Lore, very cavalier about Lore’s finances, was Diana.
    The shrieking woman has fallen silent. Maybe she is all right. Maybe the baby has emerged and it is all over for her. Maybe they gave her an injection that took away the pain.
    â€œWould you like some water?” asks Franckline.
    â€œYes, please.”
    Franckline brings her a paper cup from the sink, and when Lore is done with it offers more. After three cupfuls Lore sinks back onto the bed feeling much better, as if her veins and tendons had needed watering. She sighs. It is not so bad to lie here between pains, waiting, daydreaming. She likes the silence, and she likes Franckline for preserving it. A bolt of sun pierces the big window, dashing a stripe onto her blue hospital gown and warming her face. Soon she will sit in the rocking chair on deposit at Babies ’R Us (she would not take it home with her, nor has she stenciled the living room, nor put together the crib: it is not good to tempt fate)—soon she will sit in such an offering of winter sun, a single ray warming the baby and the breast at which it suckles, and they will rock and rock in a shaft of time that has stilled just for them. While the baby sleeps Lore will cook green things in a big skillet, and water the plants: the geranium and the coleus and, in honor of her mother, the Starfighter lilies tended from the bulb all winter. Her mother had labored patiently over her lilies in the rocky little yard of their house in Hobbes Corners. Lilies her favorite, but there were also cosmos and phlox, tulips and roses. At night, moonlight drinkers tossed empty bottles onto their lawn.
    Then her mother got sick. Multiple myeloma. Lore’s father, gone long before this: blurred images of a man in a cream-colored sweater with leather patches on the elbow. As a child, Lore liked to run her finger across the smoothness of those patches onto the coarse hairiness of the knit, shivering at the transition. The wearer of this garment disappeared by the time she was four. Apparently the three of them had once lived in a small Greenwich Village apartment, a place Lore did not remember at all. A law school student, her mother claimed. She did not say where they had met, or how; in fact she spoke of him only very rarely in a tone meant to dissuade questions. But apparently his parents, Jewish, had disapproved of her, a Catholic girl with only a tenth-grade education. When the marriage, never stable, disintegrated, Lore and her mother had gone to live with Aunt Janine in Lockport, New York. Lore remembers the arguments between the two sisters, Aunt Janine shouting and her mother hissing quietly in response, the separate stashes of flatware and glasses, her mother’s tears at night in the room that they shared and that even at four years old Lore knew Aunt Janine begrudged them (it was her son Sam’s room—Sam who now had to double up with his older brother). At some point before grade school they moved forty miles or so to Hobbes Corners, and then Lore did not have an aunt anymore. There were grandparents—Lore remembers occasional visits, both older people chain-smoking—but later, somehow, there were not. For a couple of years, Christmas presents still arrived from them: gifts that broke easily or seemed designed for a child younger than herself.
    Junior year of high school: coming home to find her mother lying on the couch, having left work early and too tired to lift the remote to turn off a program in which two middle-aged men were arguing about Central Europe. Her eyes were hidden behind an unhealthy film. Days of missed work, Lore on the phone with her mother’s longtime boss begging him not to fire her, promising that they