Chapter Two

CHAPTER TWO

Marie did, indeed, take a bath. Such a luxury, time spent on herself when she should have been cleaning, or catching up on that night’s batch of work, or taking the soup to her mother with Aleta. But she didn’t. She did neither of those things.

She pinned her dark hair up. It was thick and streaked with gray, but sometimes it still managed beauty. She liked to think so, anyway, when she caught unexpected glimpses of herself in mirrors and store windows.

“I don’t look half bad,” she sometimes mused, and very nearly tossed her head. If she did so, perhaps her hair would fall over one eye. Perhaps it would hide the heavy circles under it, the weariness that peered out of her irises. Perhaps somebody’s eyes would be drawn to that rather foppish section of hair instead of the worry lines around her mouth.

Worry lines. Not laugh lines. Grim Marie knew this, knew there was a difference. She knew she wore her station and her sorrows on her face like other ladies wore fine hats. Her eyes would skitter away from her reflection, and she’d continue on, her head down, her fingers counting the few dollars in her pocket.

But now, she thought no such thing. She pinned her hair high on her head. The water was decadent, almost unseemly hot, and she had put in a little hand soap to create bubbles.

“Mom,” Aleta had told her before, rolling her eyes. “I have some real bath stuff. Good stuff. You should use it. Stop acting so poor all of the time. If you do, it’ll stick.”

“One day I’ll buy my own,” she had promised, and she meant it at the time. She still did. But now was not that time, and the “good stuff” belonged to Aleta. She didn’t want to use it. Besides, the hand soap smelled good, as it should. She had made it herself. And it didn’t remind her of working, as dish soap did. This bath was enough luxury without completely losing her head over it.

Well. Maybe a little. She could perhaps go a bit wild.

She took down a candle, precious to her. Something small and meaningless, perhaps, to somebody else. An extra gift for Christmas. Something that came free when you ordered something in the mail. She couldn’t remember exactly, but she knew this candle meant time, and it meant a touch of elegance, and it meant that she was doing something for herself because she, Marie, was a good person and deserved good things.

This made her sniffle and rub at her face with the back of her hand. And that made her laugh. Then it made her cry. Who was she to believe she deserved so little? She had been full of dreams, once. She and her husband and Aleta, all.

Misplaced dreams. Ill-suited dreams. Nearly unseemly in her unabashed, wide-eyed dreaming of them. She should be embarrassed. She should be ashamed to have dreamed such feral dreams at all. They weren’t for little people and nobodies. They weren’t for her.

Her refuge, reward bath turned into a cold comfort for an undeserving woman. Marie covered her face with her hands and cried. Louder and louder, less and less controlled, she sobbed until she howled, like the ecstatic howl of The Wolf, and these noises covered the scream and cries of her sweet little Aleta as she floundered and eventually fell under The Wolf’s snarling jaws.