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“Mm-hmm,” I said, not really paying attention to anything but the dumplings.
“Yes, ma’am,” Mr. Carpenter said sharply.
I looked up at him across the table, my heart starting to race. I saw in his face that old-fashioned family life represented a matter of real importance to him; his eyes had narrowed a little, and he regarded me in an assessing kind of way. I swallowed hard, thinking about the awful choice he had given me.
At the same time, I found that the defiant part of me had begun to feel desperate for a way to challenge this craziness. I came from the modern world, and I intended to go back there. I was nineteen years old, much too old to call these fake ‘foster parents’ sir and ma’am. For a moment I met Mr. Carpenter’s gaze with a hard expression, a narrowing of my own eyes and a sarcastic curling of my lips. I didn’t really intend it—not all of me, anyway. I just needed to show him that I didn’t intend to let him push me around.
He smiled, very slightly, and he turned to his wife.
“Grace here already has a whipping coming,” he told Shelly.
I let out an involuntary cry of embarrassment and alarm, my jaw dropping in horror as I stared at him. He glanced back at me for a moment before returning his attention to his wife.
“Does she?” Shelly asked, as if it represented the most natural thing in the world. “Well, that’s too bad, but maybe she’ll remember her manners afterwards.”
“I…” I said.
Mr. Carpenter paid me no attention.
“I’ve given her the choice of whether she’s going to get it tonight before bed, or in the morning. Maybe you could help her decide.”
I turned to Shelly with wide eyes. I realized that my brain had decided to use Mr. Carpenter’s offer to delay the punishment as an excuse to put it out of my mind—as if my ability to delay it meant it might not happen at all. The expression on my foster mother’s face told me how unwise that had been.
She reached out her hand to touch mine.
“Get it over with tonight, honey,” she said. “That way your little bottom’s going to feel better tomorrow. You’ll have a bit of trouble sleeping—but you’d probably have more trouble if you’re thinking about the strap all night.”
My mouth opened and closed, and opened again. I had a question I desperately needed the answer to, but I didn’t know how I could possibly ask it. My cheeks felt as hot as an oven, and they got hotter at the realization that I probably already knew the answer; I just really didn’t want it to be true.
Shelly smiled gently. “Are you wondering if Mr. Carpenter whips me, when I misbehave?” she asked.
I felt my forehead crease very hard, and I chewed on my lower lip. I nodded quickly.
“Of course I correct my wife,” he said, a note of disbelief creeping into his voice. “Your foster mama is the best woman I’ve ever met, but she’ll be the first to tell you she needs the strap across her backside to keep her that way, from time to time.”
I swallowed hard, looked from him to Shelly, and, at the undiminished smile on her face, back to him. A slew of further questions crowded into my brain—when had he whipped his wife last? For what? How often did he do it? Where did it happen? How did she feel about it, really? I could see in his eyes that he had no intention of satisfying my curiosity, and I felt the blood in my face get hotter at the realization that the punishment of Shelly Carpenter must represent a very intimate thing for the couple.
“Grace,” he said, his voice changing from a conversational tone to one of command, “whatever your choice is going to be, I think you should go get the family strap and bring it to the table. That’s a good, old-fashioned way to help a girl to remember her manners.”
My eyes went back to Shelly’s face. I could see that she thought her husband’s command a little strict, but I didn’t see anything like real disapproval in her expression.
“The strap is in the living room, honey,” she told me. “It’s hanging on the mantelpiece.”
I lowered my eyes, feeling just how red my face had become, from my neck to my scalp, and I rose from the table. I plotted a path to the living room that took me past the front door, and I started walking. My legs didn’t wobble because I had absolutely no intention of reaching the living room, let alone the fireplace.
When I judged that I had gotten as close as I could plausibly get to the front door, before I would have to turn a little to go toward the living room, I darted to the door and grabbed the handle, turning and pulling. I got the door open, and I started to move around it.
Then Mr. Carpenter had me by the arm, with the same grip just above the elbow that he had used when I had talked back to him in the New Modesty office.
I expected him to raise his voice when he spoke, but the calm severity of his words put more butterflies in my tummy than shouting could have.
“Well, Grace, I guess we’ll have to consider that you’ve made your choice. It got you a few extra lashes, but you’re definitely going to get it over with before bedtime.”
I whimpered, as much at the message Mr. Carpenter had just delivered as at the discomfort in my arm. As he turned me around and marched me into the living room, I could see it hanging there: the family strap, a strip of worn brown leather with a loop of braided string at the end to let it hang from the iron hook set into the old wood of the mantelpiece. It looked like it had hung there for a hundred years or more, coming down from the hook to serve its purpose and then returning there to await the next lesson in manners that the head of the family had to deliver.
You’ve made your choice. To my distress, I realized that he had spoken nothing but the truth. In a very real sense, by foolishly trying to get out the door I had actually accepted Shelly’s advice, though in the least helpful way possible.
We arrived in front of the fireplace. I blinked as I took it in fully. A word—a very old word, I knew—tugged at the back of my brain, from somewhere in one of my high school language arts books, maybe. Hearth. The family hearth. I had never seen one, just as I had never tasted chicken and dumplings. Here I was, standing on the Carpenters’ family hearth, where I could tell somehow, from the way the bricks were worn or the rug was frayed or the stones that made the chimney seemed to have come from the very first plowing of the fields, that this family had gathered for generations.
