CHAPTER 10
I avoided Hattie the next morning, waiting for sounds that she had headed off to the shower before emerging to have my breakfast. I took my cereal out to the front porch, and sat in a large, wooden porch swing my grandfather had made before his own early death, and reflected on how we had long been the Grey Gardens of St Margaret’s, and wondering how much more we could bear. The two weird sisters, growing into caricatures, dodging the ghosts of scandalous stories, insisting on living together in their dead mother’s home like women from a ghost story or a biblical parable.
What would the good people of St Margaret’s think if they knew what we had done, and that Hattie was asking me to carry the baby of her handsome lover in order to bear her a child? My face reddened as I wave
