Highsmith, Patricia by The Price of Salt

she remembered of her mother.
    Then she had become fifteen. The sisters at the school had known her mother was not writing. They had asked her to write, and she had, but Therese had not answered. Then when graduation came, when she was seventeen, the school had asked her mother for two hundred dollars.
    Therese hadn’t wanted any money from her, had half believed her mother wouldn’t give her any, but she had, and Therese had taken it.
    “I’m sorry I took it. I never told anyone but you. Some day I want to give it back.”
    “Nonsense,” Carol said softly. She was sitting on the arm of the chair, resting her chin in her hand, her eyes fixed on Therese, smiling. “You were still a child. When you forget about paying her back, then you’ll be an adult.”
    Therese did not answer.
    “Don’t you think you’ll ever want to see her again? Maybe in a few years from now?”
    Therese shook her head. She smiled, but the tears still oozed out of her eyes. “I don’t want to talk any more about it.”
    “Does Richard know all this?”
    “No. Just that she’s alive. Does it matter? This isn’t what matters.” She felt if she wept enough, it would all go out of her, the tiredness and the loneliness and the disappointment, as though it were in the tears themselves. And she was glad Carol left her alone to do it now. Carol was standing by the dressing table, her back to her. Therese lay rigid in the bed, propped up on her elbow, racked with the half-suppressed sobs.
    “I’ll never cry again,” she said.
    “Yes, you will.” And a match scraped.
    Therese took another cleansing tissue from the bed table and blew her nose.
    “Who else is in your life besides Richard?” Carol asked.
    She had fled them all. There had been Lily, and Mr. and Mrs. Anderson in the house where she had first lived in New York. Frances Cotter and Tim at the Pelican Press. Lois Vavrica, a girl who had been at the Home in Montclair, too. Now who was there? The Kellys who lived on the second floor at Mrs. Osborne’s. And Richard. “When I was fired from that job last month,” Therese said, “I was ashamed and I moved—” She stopped.
    “Moved where?”
    “I didn’t tell anyone where, except Richard. I just disappeared. I suppose it was my idea of starting a new life, but mostly I was ashamed.
    I didn’t want anyone to know where I was.”
    Carol smiled. “Disappeared! I like that. And how lucky you are to be able to do it. You’re free. Do you realize that?”
    Therese said nothing.
    “No,” Carol answered herself.
    Beside Carol on the dressing table, a square gray clock ticked faintly, and as Therese had done a thousand times in the store, she read the time and attached a meaning to it. It was four fifteen and a little more, and suddenly she was anxious lest she had lain there too long, lest Carol might be expecting someone to come to the house.
    Then the telephone rang, sudden and long like the shriek of a hysterical woman in the hall, and they saw each other start.
    Carol stood up, and slapped something twice in her palm, as she had slapped the gloves in her palm in the store. The telephone screamed again, and Therese was sure Carol was going to throw whatever it was she held in her hand, throw it across the room against the wall. But Carol only turned and laid the thing down quietly, and left the room.
    Therese could hear Carol’s voice in the hall. She did not want to hear what she was saying. She got up and put her skirt and her shoes on. Now she saw what Carol had held in her hand. It was a shoehorn of tan-colored wood. Anyone else would have thrown it, Therese thought. Then she knew one word for what she felt about Carol: pride. She heard Carol’s voice repeating the same tones, and now opening the door to leave, she heard the words, “I have a guest,” for the third time calmly presented as a barrier. “I think it’s an excellent reason. What better?… What’s the matter with tomorrow? If you—”
    Then there was no