Stony River by Tricia Dower Page A

fake. The one on the right held a bunch of sealed envelopes. The heavier and harder-to-slideout one on the left was stuffed with rubber-banded rolls of bills. She thought they were Russian until she unwrapped a roll and recognized the ones, fives and tens. She’d never seen a twenty or a fifty before. She dumped the rolls onto the bed, pulled off the rubber bands and started counting. When she lost track, she made piles of a hundred bucks each. They took up so much of the bed she made piles of five hundred, then a thousand. Nine piles. Enough to buy nine thousand sacks of White Castle burgers? She must’ve goofed. She started over and ended up with the same number.
    Plopping down hard on the bed, she gawked at the money and told her heart to take it easy. She’d figured Haggerty was poor. Everybody had. The rundown house, the scruffy clothes. People had seen him sift through garbage cans, beg scraps at the fish market and greengrocer. Just goes to show, Ma would’ve said.
    With nine thousand bucks, she and Ma could get away from Jimmy. Except he’d never give up the Chosen One, the fair-haired, fair-skinned copy of himself who read better than Tereza but couldn’t lie worth shit; Allen was doomed to do whatever he was told. Even if they could take him, Ma was too soft to leave Jimmy. “You don’t know how it was with no husband and a kid. I couldn’t support you proper. Jimmy was the only man who’d take us on.”
    Besides, the money was Miranda’s. No getting around that. Nofinders, keepers. If Tereza left it in the desk, somebody else would come across it and gyp Miranda out of it. Would it be so awful if she used a little and found a way to repay it someday? Enough for a ticket somewhere far away, some food and clothes?
    Whatever she did, nothing would be the same as it was before. In the basement, her idea had been to head downtown on Halloween dressed as a monk in the black robe and buy undies and dungarees with cash already in her pocketbook. After that, she’d ditch the robe and hitchhike on Route 1. Blow guys for meals and places to sleep. She’d charge big bucks to the first to pop her cherry. Vinnie said his cousin in Roselle paid for a week down the shore by auctioning hers off. If Tereza borrowed Miranda’s money, she wouldn’t have to hitchhike and she wouldn’t need any guy.
    She thought about how Miranda had led her to this moment, and at some point the voices in her head stopped scrapping over whether to take the money. She’d made the decision to leave home for good before she found it. Had already chosen to save herself. She rolled up ninety wads of a hundred bucks each and stuffed them into the four black socks from the wardrobe. “Ho, ho, ho,” she said, her voice bouncing off Haggerty’s ceiling. An early Christmas: stockings sagging with dough instead of oranges and walnuts.

    â€œMIRANDA!” Doris sounds out of breath as she crests the stairs to the hallway on St. Bernadette’s second floor. Miranda stands outside the visitors’ lounge, trying to quell the panic that has transformed her legs into rooted trees, not sure how they carried her from the nursery, where Sister Cameron said, “Someone was to have told you.”
    Doris points to her watch, then holds her palms out in a gesture of helplessness. She unbuttons her black-and-white-checked coat, yanks a white kerchief off her unfazed tight black curls and hurriesacross the floor to where Miranda has stood for ten minutes on the same beige linoleum square murmuring over and over catechism words that still the clamor in her head and help her breathe without gasping: “How shall we know the things we are to believe?”
    She considered going to Sister Celine, who sits behind the visitor registration table in the lounge. But what if Sister was supposed to have told her? Of all the nuns, she’s the most encouraging and understanding, treating