Page 64 of If Looks Could Kill

Pearl unlocks the door to her apartment for the last time and lets herself in.

No one is home. Tabitha’s bed is a mess, as always.

To Pearl’s surprise, her clothing is gone. And Tabitha’s. So are their suitcases. Has someone moved them out? She disappears for a day and already her existence here is erased?

So why does that bother you, Pearl? she asks herself. This isn’t your life anymore.

Yes, well, she needs clothes, and she would at least like her own things.

Pearl searches in the back of a drawer and finds something her ransacker left behind: the drab-green traveling suit she’d worn here.

She unbuttons the bodice of her uniform.

She had been so proud of it. As one of the first sets of factory-sewn clothing she had ever owned, the even regularity of its seams felt luxurious to her then.

Its blue, she secretly felt, complemented her eyes.

Vanity, of course. She lays the bodice upon her bed and buttons it back up.

She unhooks her skirt, then tucks its waistband into the bodice, as if a Hallelujah Lassie made of air is resting up on the bed before bringing more of Jesus to the poor.

She strokes the uniform one last time. Was it vanity, how she had loved it so?

Pearl feels a lifetime older than that girl.

She can almost smile with affection for the young, innocent thing, fresh off the farm, so excited about her pretty blue suit matching her pretty blue eyes.

Not so sinful, not really. Just human, and hopeful, and young.

She puts on her green suit. It’s tighter. Harder to button. She hasn’t known hunger since coming to New York. The Army has fed her three meals a day. Most of them soup.

She looks at herself in the small mirror they’d shared, dangling from the wall by a nail. No snakes. Only the blond hair people constantly comment upon.

She takes a last look at the rumpled copies of The War Cry on Tabitha’s bedside table. At the little placard painting of Jesus poking out from under the armoire. At the children’s primer used for lessons at the Mission School. At the Salvation Army suit stretched out like a corpse on her bed.

She leaves the apartment, locks the door behind her, and slides her key under the door. It’s time to go. It’s time to face the Devil on Tenth.

On her way around the corner, she glances, out of habit, through the foggy window of Reggie’s Bakery. There sits Tabitha, alone. She closes her eyes and interlaces her fingers together under her chin. She’s praying, Pearl can tell. For her. She can’t prove it, but she knows it’s true.

Where’s my luggage, you barkeeper-chasing menace?

Yet it’s hard to stay vexed, even with the world’s most aggravating, nattering roommate, who’s never done a hard day’s labor, who’s had everything handed to her on a platter, whose father and aunt stand ready to fund and fix whatever woes may befall her, when she sits in a bakeshop, praying for you.

I will never see her again, Pearl realizes.

That’s best for Tabitha. Safer. Wiser.

Be happy, Tabitha. Have a long, useful, happy life.

Pearl smiles and turns away before Tabitha can open her eyes and discover her. There’s no point in another meeting. She will hold on to this memory and call it forth whenever Tabitha comes to mind, for the rest of her life.

However brief that life might be.