God Bless This Child - Softcover

Chapter One

Bailey Bender -- named after Mildred Bailey, whose swingy rendition of "Thanks for the Memories" on the car radio had driven Bailey's mother past the A & P, past the post office, and halfway across the country before she realized she was pregnant and had to return, only temporarily, she swore, to Bailey's father -- didn't think of herself as a failure. More like a case of arrested success. There'd been a time, years ago, when she'd been sure she was going to set the world on fire. There'd been a time after that when she'd figured she could hang in there. Now she was concentrating on the life after -- after the career-track job, after marriage, after a lot of things she didn't want to think about anymore.

Of course, there was another way to look at it. Some people would say she was stopping to smell the roses. But Bailey wasn't one of them.

Mostly she was trying to survive. She'd taken the money she'd made during the brief period when she was on the way up as a writer-slash-director-slash-producer of television news -- at least what was left of it after the years trying to hang on freelancing in all those capacities -- and bought a small house, which turned out to need more work than the engineer's report had indicated, on a wooded acre of land that wasn't exactly isolated, but in the summer when the trees were full there was no one else in sight. In the winter when they were bare, lighted windows hung in the darkness framing her neighbors eating dinner and watching television and arguing. She told herself it was better than listening to them through the thin walls of a Manhattan apartment, except when it was worse. At least the people she lived among now were known quantifies rather than anonymous potential muggers and murderers and other familiar figures of the urban landscape. And she did take a certain pride in the fact that now when something went wrong, instead of calling the super, she got out her toolbox and hammered and wrenched and screwed her way into the body and soul of her house.

She'd also got a job at Livres of Grass, the local bookstore. The name was forgivable, or at least understandable, in view of the fact that the store sat on the tree-shaded main street of a town at the eastern end of Long Island that survived on the largesse of summer residents and weekend trippers. And in all fairness to Maude Thwait, who'd bought the store with a legacy from her late husband and against the advice of her two sons, the name had come with the business.

Technically Bailey worked in the store, but for two months every winter when Maude went to Arizona and for a good part of the rest of the year when Maude had other things on her mind, Bailey ran the store. It wasn't a bad arrangement. Maude trusted Bailey. Bailey liked Maude and the chance to read during slow afternoons, though there were fewer of those than she'd expected, what with the placing of special orders, and the unpacking of shipments, and the packing of unsold books to return to the publisher for credit; but Maude passed on the galleys she got for early reading and never minded when Bailey took a book home to finish. They were both expatriates from other worlds and felt faintly alien in this one, and some nights after they'd locked the door and turned off the lights in the front of the store, Maude took a bottle of Johnny Walker Red from the bottom drawer of her desk, and Bailey got the ice tray from the small refrigerator in the office at the back of the store, and they put their feet up on cartons of books and talked about everything under the sun, except their past lives, which they kept stowed away like old clothes that might come back in style some day but probably wouldn't. Though once as Maude was refilling their glasses, she did mention that her late husband had disapproved of women drinking straight whiskey. He'd thought mixed cocktails were more ladylike.

They were even making a living. During the summer Maude took on several part-timers and did a healthy business in pricey collections of the area's architectural gems and gardens, local histories of the good old days when the town was a village in more than name only and old salts plied the waters, and beach fiction. During the winter Bailey kept the store open for the few intrepid weekenders who braved the cold and desolation and the rare year-rounder who had a little discretionary income and was willing to spend it on something other than videos or kitchen gadgets or enough beer and whiskey to dull the pain or dispel the boredom or camouflage the loneliness.

But now it was early May, and summer rentals were up, and everyone was saying that the town in general and Livres of Grass in particular were in for a good season. Maude was pleased, but then, these days Maude was usually pleased. She'd had a successful career as And-His-Lovely-Wife that had spanned the years from cream cheese and pimiento loaves to crème fraîche, and seen two sons through childhood diseases, adolescent anxieties, and Ivy League educations. Now her late husband lay beneath a dignified granite headstone several towns away, and her sons had gone out into the world, and she was free to do exactly as she liked. What she liked was to read in bed long into the night, discuss with friends and customers what she was reading and what they ought to be reading during the day, and garden, wearing as little as possible, at odd hours of both. Sometimes when the summer foliage enfolded her property, she mucked about in nothing but sneakers and a pair of her late husband's boxer shorts. It was a relief, she'd confessed to Bailey once, after all those years of hoarding her charms, to be suddenly profligate with them, especially since they were no longer of value to anyone but her. Bailey, who hadn't quite shed her city apprehensions, warned of ticks, but Maude was fearless.

She was also impatient. Like most people who come to contentment late in life, Maude had a powerful sense of time running out.

Bailey saw her look at her watch again. There was no clock in the store. One of the cardinal rules of retailing was to suspend the customer in a timeless world of perpetual purchasing possibility. You didn't want people who were finally zeroing in on buys suddenly noticing they were twenty minutes late for something else.

"You can leave," Bailey said. She knew Maude had a long drive ahead of her that night, though her sons insisted she shouldn't drive at all and one of them had offered to come get her. "If things pick up, it won't be until people start coming out from town or back from the beach, and Nell will be here by then."

"She should be here now," Maude answered in the tone that had got her sons to a place in the world where they could offer advice she didn't take.

"She's never late," Bailey said.

"She never used to be late," Maude corrected her, and Bailey knew she was right.

Nell Harris was what used to be called, and probably still was, though Bailey couldn't be sure because she didn't have a daughter of her own to worry about, a late bloomer. At fourteen she'd looked ten and acted, alternately, like an unruly child and an opinionated old woman. She'd been angular and awkward and in constant collision with things and people and ideas. She'd also had big ambitions. At various times she'd planned on a career as a veterinarian (the preadolescent love affair with horses), astronaut (the space shuttle was in the news a lot), television journalist (that had something to do with Bailey), and, for a few weeks, actress (some things never change). The last Bailey had heard, Nell had decided the best way to save humankind and see something of the world was to study medicine -- human, not animal -- and sign on with an international relief organization. In the meantime, she was settling for whatever vicarious adventure she could pick up working part-time in the bookstore.

The day