TWELVE HOURS BEFORE the big fire, I was on my way home from the Crier office with Mr. Travers’s letter in my pocket.
“I’m sorry, Cady,” he said when he handed it to me. “I’d keep you if I could, but…”
I was glad he didn’t finish his sentence. I didn’t want to hear it again. It was like Mrs. Hazelton telling me once that she didn’t want to punish me for slapping that townie girl, who, by the way, can best be described as rhyming with rich. Did I care whether Mrs. Hazelton wanted to punish me? Of course not. All I cared about was that I was confined to school for a whole month. I also knew that it definitely hurt me more than it hurt her. When Mr. Travers gave me the letter, I thanked him for it and for the opportunity and encouragement he had given me. I hoped he would interpret my gratitude as classy, even though the truth was that it was a calculated move. I wanted him to say good things about me if—no, when—someone called him to ask about my work at the Crier. Never spit into a well you may need to drink from. I heard a man outside the pool hall say that to his friend one day. I wrote it in my notebook. It made good sense.
I left the newspaper office and had gone barely half a block when Mrs. Danforth emerged from the drugstore. As soon as I saw her, I did an immediate about-face. My plan was to duck through the nearest door. I did not want to face her, not now, not ever again. But the nearest door was the one to the barbershop, where one man was being shaved and two others were chatting while they waited their turn. I couldn’t go in there. By the time I decided to walk right past her with my head held high (why shouldn’t it be?), Mrs. Danforth had seen me. She didn’t speak. I didn’t expect her to. Mrs. Danforth saw herself as a superior human being by virtue of her social position. She did not deign to greet or otherwise engage in conversation with anyone whom she deemed beneath her unless she was issuing instructions.
Well, I have eyes the same as she does, except that mine are sharper. I stared right back at her: Read what you will into that, you miserable cow. I knew perfectly well that it was Mrs. Danforth who had gone to Mr. Travers, not presuming to tell him his business—she would never do such a thing—but she felt it was her duty to let him know that she and the other ladies of the town, ladies whose husbands were successful businessmen and loyal advertisers in the Weekly Crier, were uncomfortable in the extreme with my position at the paper and were ready to complain to their husbands if the situation was allowed to continue.
The situation. I hated the way that woman talked, always using what Mr. Travers called five-dollar words when a good old everyday five-cent word would do the trick. What Mrs. Danforth meant, plainly put, was that if Mr. Travers didn’t get rid of me, Mrs. Travers and her do-nothing lady friends would make good and sure that their husbands canceled their advertising in the Crier. In a one-newspaper town, this was blackmail pure and simple, and Mr. Travers caved in even though boycotting the Crier would have hurt the businessmen as much as it hurt the Crier.
I would have walked right past Mrs. Danforth—I really would have—if Johnny hadn’t stumbled out of the store behind her, carrying a large paper bag. He started to say something to his mother but ground to a halt when he saw me. He used to smile at the sight of me. Smile and wrap his arms around me and kiss me on the cheek or the mouth, and then he’d want to go somewhere where we could be alone. This time the little weasel turned red in the face. He looked at his mother with a mixture of shock and apology. Honest, Mummy, I had no idea we would run into her, I swear! Please don’t cancel my allowance. I couldn’t believe I ever loved him, much less dreamed of a future with him. What on earth had I been thinking? Yes, he was cute and smart and loaded with charm, and he had what Mrs. Hazelton would call a lofty ambition—he wanted to be a doctor. But when push came to shove, he was a mama’s boy. He knew who buttered his bread. So after taking an initial stand to defend me against his mother’s slander, he finally yielded. This happened to coincide with the end of the school year, when he was set to graduate, which was when the car that he’d been promised as a graduation gift suddenly became, in his mother’s eyes, a bad idea because, my dear, I know what those girls are like, they will do anything to land a catch like you, a smart boy, a rich boy, a boy with a future, and, my dear, one of their common tricks—and I do mean common—is to get a boy like you to take them for a drive somewhere, you know what I mean, Johnny, and the next thing you know, she’s enceinte. I’d actually heard her use that word, as if French saved her from having to picture exactly how her son might end up with a pregnant girlfriend.
I stared at Johnny. I knew what he and his mother thought of me, but no one was ever going to be able to say that Cady Andrews was a coward or that she tucked tail and scurried away like a little mouse. I met the same eyes that used to melt me and held them just long enough to let him know that whatever he and his mother thought of me, I thought a thousand times worse of them. They had climbed up on high and judged me, and they had used as their measure not my character but my background, which I had had nothing to do with. Who did they think they were anyway?
Johnny, the coward, blinked first. He averted his eyes and stepped off the sidewalk. Shifting the paper sack to his other arm, he unlocked the trunk of his mother’s butter-yellow Buick, the color specially ordered and extra-specially paid for by Mr. Danforth as an anniversary gift. I stepped around Mrs. Danforth and continued on my way. No one spoke a word.
When I got back to the Home, I snuck down to the vast and warrenlike basement and retrieved my suitcase. It was a battered old black thing that I had found under a table at the back of the church-run thrift shop in town and had stashed behind the drying racks where we hung our clothes after fishing them out of the ancient washer. My plan: leave town. I had enough money saved from my wages at the Crier for bus fare to Toronto and maybe a couple of weeks at the YWCA. I also had Mr. Travers’s letter of reference.
I smuggled my suitcase—already packed—out to the yard and hid it under the shrubs at the back of the property, where no one ever went. I planned to retrieve it before dawn and catch the first bus out of town. By the time they discovered I was missing, I’d be halfway to Toronto, and there wouldn’t be anything anyone could do about it. I was almost seventeen. I was legal to quit school. I was legal to get a job. And it was about time I started living the life I wanted instead of the one that had been forced onto me by people I had never met.
So the fire didn’t make any difference to me. But I would be lying if I said I didn’t care. The Home had been my everything for nearly fifteen years of my life.
I had never experienced a house fire before, and it was a spectacular one. The whole main building where we all slept and ate, the building whose wooden floors, wainscoting, banisters, window frames and trim we washed and polished over and over again until every burnished surface gleamed in the midday sun, all of it was reduced to rubble and ash—and puddles of water, after the fire department arrived, too late to save anything. For hours, it was pure chaos, with girls and staff members running around, counting heads, comforting those who were scared (mostly the Little Ones) and making sure everyone stayed well away from the action. After that, silence. Most of us, I think, were wondering what would happen to us. But not me. I still had my plan, and as soon as things calmed down, I was going to collect my things and go. That was the plan.