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There was a home in Omaha run by an organization called the Florence Crittenton, for girls in trouble. That was what it was called then, *girls in trouble*, as if trouble were a place you went and lived in. Girls went there from all over the middle of the country. They stayed through their time, and had their babies in the hospital attached to it, and the babies went to good Christian families who could not have their own, and the girls came home and said they had been visiting an aunt in Denver, and everyone in town knew and nobody said a word. It was the decent way. It was what was done.
Marian had wanted to keep the baby. She had said so at the kitchen table. She had said they could raise it, the two of them, as their own, there was precedent in every county in Iowa for a grandchild raised as a late-life son or daughter, and Walt had said absolutely not, and Ellen had said nothing at all.
Then, a week after the Kerrigans' call, Ellen had come down to breakfast with her suitcase packed and said, "I'll go to the home." Just that. Her voice flat as a tabletop. Walt had felt relief go through him like warm water, and he was ashamed of the relief, and the shame made him angry, and the anger made him short with her, and so the last week before they left was a week of short sentences.
They left at six in the morning. Marian did not come. She said she could not. She stood on the porch in her housecoat, and when the car was going down the lane Walt looked in the rearview mirror and saw that she had sat down on the steps with her face in her hands, and he had looked away.
Ellen sat in the passenger seat of the '62 Chevrolet in her blue wool coat with a cardboard suitcase at her feet and a lunch Marian had packed in a paper sack on her lap. Two bologna sandwiches in wax paper. Two apples. A thermos of coffee. Four of Marian's molasses cookies.
They did not talk. There was nothing to say that had not been said at the kitchen table. Walt drove and Ellen looked out the window at the harvested fields going by, gold stubble and black dirt and the white farmhouses set back from the road with their windbreaks of cedar.
West of Walnut she said, "Are you hungry, Daddy?"
"No."
"You didn't eat breakfast."
"Not hungry."
She opened the paper sack anyway and took out one of the sandwiches and unwrapped it and broke it in two along the middle — she did not tear it, she broke it, carefully, the way you break a communion wafer — and held half out to him across the seat.
He did not take it.
She held it there for a long time. A mile. Two. He could feel it there at the edge of his vision, the white bread and the pink bologna and her hand, which was a small hand still, a girl's hand, with a white scar across the pad of the thumb from where she had caught it on a corn knife when she was ten, and he had carried her into the house with his own handkerchief tied around it and held her on the kitchen counter while Marian put in the butterfly stitches.
He kept his eyes on the road.