three.
The next morning.
Dawn was still edging over into day—the sky from navy to lavender to the shade of robins’ eggs, the air from cool to an inferno—when Marsden crept back into the kitchen from checking the covert. She yawned as she tossed off her shoes, a cloud of ginger wafting from her bare arms and hair. It’d already been proven that she couldn’t hide the covert from Wynn forever, but Marsden was never going to accept it. That would be like choosing to sink into the quicksand that was the whole town.
When it wasn’t summer, her job meant helping cook dinners, to be served in the common dining room, for the boardinghouse staff and its guests every weekend. When it was summer, she worked every day and had to cook and serve breakfasts, too. The one thing that never changed during the year was the johns who stayed overnight. Unlike official guests, it was an unspoken rule that they never saw the inside of the dining room. Neither were they served food in the bedrooms with Nina’s girls. Instead, they slunk out of the boardinghouse through a side entrance while breakfast was served to everyone else.
Marsden never felt bad that the johns had to leave the boardinghouse hungry. They hadn’t come for the food anyway.
She was stirring eggs and milk and laying down sausages on the grill when footsteps sounded overhead. They were stealthy, secretive, and Marsden steeled herself. It wouldn’t be the first time she’d had to make breakfast with some of the girls Nina employed right there in the kitchen with her, tired of listening to the snoring of the johns still taking up space in their beds.
It was never easy when they tried making conversation with her. Usually, all she could think about were the secrets she held and the way her hands still recalled the feel of cold, stiff limbs as she tucked away stolen cash. She’d gotten used to being lonely, she supposed; the town had long ago painted her with certain brushes and into too many inescapable corners. Letting Nina’s girls get close was a waste of time, and dangerous—for her, for Wynn.
It was the main reason why Marsden minded them being in her space. But loneliness lingered, an echo that seemed without end—which meant she also didn’t mind.
They descended the stairs and swarmed into the kitchen like butterflies—if the insects came in pairs, wore flimsy silk robes, and smelled more of perfume and old makeup instead of the outdoors.
Peaches puffed on a cigarette as she leaned over Marsden’s shoulder to watch her cook. “Why do you even bother?” The other girl’s voice was husky from smoke. Marsden heard the pointed sneer in it, the clear impatience. “Cooking, I mean.”
Early twenties, curves like the women had in one of those old-fashioned paintings and which Peaches wielded like weapons. Wild auburn curls, skin like porcelain. Her hazel eyes were always hungry, her smiles slow and wide—johns loved her, and she knew it. Originally a college student from North Dakota—or maybe it was South, Marsden could never remember—she decided one day she was tired of classrooms and dropped out of college. Meandering across the country in the name of alternate education had somehow ended up with her in Glory.
Of all of Nina’s girls, Peaches was the one most comfortable in her skin. Marsden sometimes liked her but usually feared her—and always she wondered what it would be like to have even a bit of that confidence. Would it have already led her from Glory, or would she simply already be working for Nina?
“It’s my job,” she finally said. And she was good at it. Glory’s best bed-and-breakfast—simply named The Boardinghouse—prided itself on its breakfasts and dinners, and guests always rated them as one of the best parts of their stay.
“Just give it back to Dany,” Peaches said.
Marsden would never. Couldn’t. “I like it.”
“Slaving away over a stove—over eggs—when your face alone is enough to save you from this?” Peaches laughed, shaking her head. Her messy updo bobbed along. “Just how much is Nina paying you, anyway?”
So little it felt like she would be saving up forever to get herself and Wynn out of town. Especially since Nina made her own deductions: a cut for how much it cost for Shine and her daughters to live there, a bit toward the debt they still owed her for paying off the loans Grant Eldridge had died with. The two women had once been friends in high school, and Nina had offered Shine a job when no one else in town would. But Nina was, more than anything else, a businessperson.
Marsden had been fourteen the first time a john had asked about her. It was then that Nina had begun to eye her like property instead of the pseudo daughter Marsden had convinced herself she was.
That was when she wormed her way into the kitchen as staff, convincing Nina to be satisfied with owning her in that way, at least. The town’s businesses had already decided she was off-limits; hiring her themselves would mean risking Nina’s wrath as one of Glory’s wealthiest, most ruthless businesspeople. Nina, with her rose-tipped thumbs jabbed in pies all over the place.
Fourteen was also when Marsden began skimming in earnest, with the goal of escape in mind.
“The eggs are going to taste like your cigarette smoke,” Marsden said to Peaches, continuing to stir so she wouldn’t have to look at her. “You can be the one to tell Nina that when the guests complain.”
“Always so worried.” Peaches blew out a thick stream of smoke. She took the spatula and poked at the sausages. “It’s going to age you if you’re not careful.”
“Oh, leave her alone, Peaches.” Lucy leaned in from Marsden’s other side, peering closely at the eggs through her large tortoiseshell glasses. They were the same ones Nina had detested until she realized they held an appeal of their own. “Marsden covering the kitchen just leaves Dany more time for the rest of the house.”
Despite being a couple, Lucy couldn’t have been more different from Peaches, a subtle carnation to a heady orchid. She had long, blond Alice in Wonderland hair, complete with hairband; along with the glasses, there was a sense of innocence about her that kept johns coming back. A runaway, Lucy had hitched her way north from Florida five years ago. She had arrived at Glory with sad eyes and a quiet voice she rarely used. Both gave away nothing about why she’d run in the first place. She wasn’t so quiet anymore, and her eyes weren’t so sad, but Wynn had once whispered to Marsden that she didn’t agree. Lucy just hides the sadness better. And we’ve forgotten to look.
Peaches rolled sausages with the spatula’s edge and smirked. “I guess Marsden is the better cook.”
“Don’t ever tell Dany that, you’d break her heart.” Lucy took a wooden spoon from the drawer and began to stir the eggs, yawning behind a hand.
“And risk having to do my own laundry? Never.” Peaches squinted against smoke. “Hey, aren’t these sausages done?”
Marsden felt hemmed in by how closely the girls stood around her, the easy way they spoke to each other. “Give them another couple minutes.”
“You got a timer going?”
“I don’t use one—cook enough of anything, you just know.”
Life as a kid with her parents in their old duplex had been little more than a string of broken images—her father placing money on the kitchen table before leaving again; her mother screaming into the phone about late bills and not having enough, then smiling with empty eyes as she tucked Marsden into bed. By contrast, she remembered her grandmother’s visits like entire shows.
She’d been the one to teach Marsden all about food.
And those times Shine was out of the house, Star had been the one to cook what Shine had declared too strange, too Chinese.
Your mother, always wanting to pretend you two look the same as everyone else in this town, Star would mutter over setting chicken to steam as she stir-fried. Pretending her grandfather didn’t go on to marry a Chinese woman, that I didn’t go on to marry a Chinese man. Don’t be ashamed of looking different, Marsden. Don’t be afraid of hearing what others might not.
Her grandmother’s dying led to two things:
First, Shine decided that the covert—and the family ability to hear the dead—would no longer be subjects she was interested in talking about. Second, Shine became a housekeeper for Nina in exchange for room and board, a job that lasted until Wynn’s birth six months later. When she took on another kind of work, as soon as she was able to.
Peaches gave the sausages another jab with the spatula. “I can’t wait until my guy finally leaves. Older than Methuselah, swear to God. And he wanted to play teacher, because he found out this place used to be a boarding school.”
The school had gone up after the state bought half an acre of land from Marsden’s great-grandfather. Nina’s family then bought it in turn, keeping bits of the original structure intact as they converted the school into the boardinghouse-slash-brothel it was today—pine-framed windows, gray velvet flocked wallpaper, navy tiled floors. The heart of the covert remained untouched, a swath of forest west of the place.
Lucy moved to Peaches’s other side and kissed her. “Well, my guy smells.”
They both laughed against each other’s mouths, and Marsden, her face on fire, turned down the grill’s heat so it only warmed.
How did that work, anyway? To love someone knowing that, at times, they were someone else’s? To touch them knowing it would soon be someone else’s turn? She wondered if such questions ever crossed their minds anymore, or if they just didn’t let them because they were too hard to answer.
Down in the staff wing, a radio began to play. A song from that week’s Top 40.
Marsden was sure Wynn had set it. Her sister had discovered that most of Nina’s girls listened to the radio as they got ready in the morning. Which meant she would, too.
Peaches and Lucy danced their way back upstairs, and Marsden found herself moving in a rush now, struggling to finish before Nina stormed into the kitchen, demanding to know why breakfast wasn’t in the dining room yet.
It left Marsden annoyed, being in a hurry. She should have known better than to let Peaches and Lucy distract her. It would never be worth it to risk Nina cutting her pay.