“Your father was a man named Sam Delaine who drove for the network on Thursdays and who married me in 1983 and who raised you and who is your father in every single way there is.”
“He knew?”
“He was house eleven’s driver, honey.
He knew before I did.”
Dad d*ed when I was twenty-six.
I sat in that kitchen and thought about a man who fixed my bike and never once talked about himself and who, I now realized, used to disappear for a few hours on Thursday nights and say he was “running parts.”
“He was running women,” Mom said.
“For nine years.
Two hundred and six of them, we counted once, and then we stopped counting because Corinne said counting was how you started thinking of them as a number instead of a Thursday.”
The flower came in 1982.
“I got it in the kitchen of house nine, from a woman named Delphine who did them with India ink and a sewing needle, and it hurt like the devil, and Corinne held my hand and told me I could still say no.”
“Why did you say yes?”
“Because I’d been the woman who needed to see one,” Mom said.
“On a checkout clerk at the Piggly Wiggly on Delmar.
That’s how I knew to say yes when Bernadette asked me the question — because I’d seen a flower two weeks before, and I hadn’t understood it, but I’d remembered it.”
“That’s the whole idea, honey.
You don’t have to explain it.
You just have to be seen wearing it.”
So she ran house eleven from 1983 to 1990 — a three-bedroom on Alder Street with a finished basement, which is the house I was born in and grew up in and have a thousand memories of, and in every one of those memories there is, I realize now, an extra woman in the kitchen.
“Aunt Ida.”
“Not your aunt.”
“Miss Ruby with the cast.”
“Not your aunt.”
“Mom.
Half my childhood was strangers.”
“Half your childhood,” she said, “was women having their first week of sleep in four years.”
Then why the silence?
Why thirty-one years of “I got it when I was young”?
Mom opened the folder.
Inside was a single page, typed, from 1994.
A settlement.
In 1993, a man in the next county found out where his wife had gone and sued three of the network’s women — for “alienation of affection,” for “interference,” for the house.
The women had no money.
They had a lawyer named Marguerite who worked for free and lost anyway, because in 1994 the law had not caught up to what everyone in that courtroom knew.
The settlement dissolved the network and bound every woman who signed it to permanent non-disclosure.
Mom’s signature was on page three.
“We shut the houses in June of ’94,” she said.
“The county opened a real shelter in ’96 — with a board and a budget and a sign out front, which is what we wanted, that’s what we always wanted — and the deal was: you get your shelter, you shut your mouths.”
“So I did.”
“For thirty-one years.”
“Even when you asked.”
“Especially when you asked, because I was not going to hand my daughter a secret she’d have to keep.”
I looked at the flower on her wrist.
“Mom, that agreement — the lawyer — is it even enforceable now?”
“I have no idea, honey.
I’m a bus driver.”
“Mom, one more thing.”
“What.”
“Vernon.”
Her face closed.
“Is he — “
