Chapter 5: The Women of the Club

Pearl drove me out of the lot in her station wagon before anyone could say the table wasn't closed.

Nobody tried to stop her.

Thirty women walked out of that church behind us, and the men let them go.

The Hendry farm sat fourteen miles out on gravel road, a white house with a porch and a barn behind it.

Pearl's husband had died there four years ago, and she'd stayed.

She sat me at the kitchen table and put a mug in my hands.

"Drink that," she said.

It was coffee with enough whiskey in it to stand a spoon in.

I drank it.

"I didn't know," Pearl said.

She said it to the stove, with her back to me.

"I want you to hear that first. I fed that man. I fed all eleven of them, and I washed Elena's apron. I didn't know."

"I know you didn't."

"I could see your face, in the main room," she said. "You looked at me like you'd checked."

"I had."

She turned around.

Her eyes were wet, and she wiped them with her wrist and looked angry about it.

"Then listen to me," she said. "You're not going back to that apartment. You're not going back to anything that man owns. You're staying here."

"I've got no clothes. No money. No car."

"You have my late husband's flannels, and I have a car, and you have thirty women who are about to learn how many of their husbands lied."

By dark, nine of them were in the kitchen.

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