At the Corner of King Street by Mary Ellen Taylor Page A

the sink, washing the pie plates. She left the coffee cups on the table and refreshed both. “I’ll put a call in to the social worker in the morning and get this sorted.”
    â€œWho was that you were talking to?”
    â€œScott. He owns the vineyard.”
    â€œThe boyfriend.”
    â€œYes.”
    She placed the first dish in a rack by the sink. “Does he want children?”
    â€œHe says his sole focus is the vineyard. The grapes are his children.”
    â€œBeen my experience that most men, when they reach a certain age, want a child, a legacy.”
    Not a child who’s cursed. Not a child who swings between highsand lows and doesn’t know when to stop spending money or cut back on the drinking. Not a child who yells and screams at imagined monsters in the shadows. Not a child who has no future.
    When I turned twenty, I feared I’d have a child cursed with madness. My mother was dead by her own hand and my sister off on another manic adventure. And so I arranged to have my tubes tied. The doctors spoke to me over and over about the consequences of the surgery.
Just wait. What’s the harm in waiting?
At the time, I saw no other resolution to a problem that would never go away and I refused their counsel.
    â€œEric is doing all right,” Grace said.
    I pictured my crying niece with her red face and tight belly. “What if Scott and I have a girl?”
    â€œYou’ve a fifty-fifty chance.”
    â€œYou and I both know that’s one hell of a dice roll.”

September 5, 1750
    I had the good pleasure to meet Mistress Smyth, wife of Captain Smyth, owner of the
Constance.
The Smyth’s home is also to be constructed of brick, but unlike our home they have yet to lay down their foundation.
    Mistress Smyth and I shared a honey cake and tea in her temporary wooden home. The air was so hot and thick and I longed for Aberdeen. It does my heart good to know I am not the only one without a permanent place to call my own. I summoned the nerve to ask Mistress Smyth about Faith. Her face turned sour. She told me Faith is an indentured servant who fancies herself a midwife. Always growing herbs in her gardens and mixing concoctions. She warned me to, “Stay clear of that one.”

Chapter Six

    S leeping at Grace’s warehouse apartment bordered on miserable. The lumpy mattress squeaked and groaned each time I rolled on my side or back. A draft blew above the floorboards and shadows played on the walls, dancing and swaying in time with the moon. I forgot how creepy this place could feel at night. As a child, it took me weeks to adjust.
    At three A.M. I stared at the ceiling, listening to the chilly whispers of wind whistling down the center hallway. A cool breeze blew under my threshold and across my face like fingertips.
    The warehouse’s quirks were easy to accept when I was a kid because, honestly, imagined ghosts and spirits were an improvement over shouting drunks lingering near the motel room Mom and Janet and I shared. The spirits didn’t argue or create such a disturbance that the cops were summoned.
    Janet feared the warehouse’s ghosts and specters hovering in the fragments of older homes destined for demolition. They played havocwith her already failing sanity, so she spent most of that summer living with the McCrae sisters. The summer of endless sleepovers. Janet was nearly the same age as Daisy and Rachel and the trio spent the summer running around the city.
    Janet missed the excitement and stimulation of life with our mother, but I adored the quiet of the warehouse. I read. Slept late. And though Grace and I never talked much, I always found an excuse to help her in the shop downstairs. Grace taught me how to take the fragments of old homes and either spruce them up for resale or dismantle them and refashion them for the endless stream of customers. Old doors became coffee tables. A large round gear from an old sugar-processing plant