Chapter 5

Grace

Mr. Carpenter didn't ask me for my choice right then. After he had offered it to me, he immediately started to climb out of the truck. He opened my door for me, and I got out numbly, trying not to think about anything at all.

He led me to the door of the farmhouse. There, a slightly plump woman about Mr. Carpenter's age, with honey blonde hair in a slightly disheveled bun, opened the door to us.

Shelly Carpenter—ma'am, Mr. Carpenter had told me to call her as soon as she had given me an unexpected hug—had supper ready. In a kind of daze at her direction, I helped get it onto the table. Chicken and dumplings. I blinked when I realized that my new foster mother had actually made the food that sounded to me like the most old-fashioned country meal imaginable.

And it tasted amazing. Part of that came from having only had a candy bar in the previous twelve hours, but most of it came from just how incredible a cook Shelly clearly was. Plus, sitting down with the Carpenters at an actual, honest-to-goodness wooden kitchen table in their cozy farmhouse made the food taste like nothing I'd ever eaten before.

"You come from the city, Grace, honey?" Shelly asked me, after I had taken a few bites.

"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.

Where some patriarch of pioneer days had first hung the length of leather that would serve as a reminder, even when he wasn't laying it across the bare backside of a naughty wife or daughter, that in this house proper behavior represented not an option but a requirement.

Mr. Carpenter let go of my arm.

"Fetch it down, honey," he told me, "and bring it to the table, like I told you."

I clenched my hands into fists in front of my midsection. It wasn't that I didn't want to follow his instructions, at this point. My new foster father had definitely conveyed the idea that I wanted to get the inevitable over with as quickly as possible. But my body had started to shake with fear, and I found I couldn't reach out my hand to touch the horrid thing.

"If I have to fetch it for you," Mr. Carpenter said, his voice growing more stern, "this little butt's going to be a lot sorer."

He put his hand there and squeezed. Startled, I let out a little cry, and jumped forward, trying to get away from that firm grasp. No one had ever done that to me before, and it sent a roiling mass of sensation and emotion through my system that I just didn't want to think about.

The hand followed me, though, still holding my bottom through my jeans, as if making sure I understood that my foster father would do as he chose, when it came to disciplining me. I had brought myself much closer to the strap than I wanted to be. Partly to keep from having to look at it, I turned to look at Mr. Carpenter over my shoulder. I could see Shelly in the kitchen, too, watching us with a look of sympathy on her face, but no disapproval of what her husband did.

He for his part had a hard look in his eyes. Not angry, or even disappointed: Mr. Carpenter's eyes seemed to say that he had undertaken the task of re-educating me—training me… bringing me up, even—and he meant to accomplish that task. In ‘fostering' a nineteen-year-old shoplifter, it seemed, he had known what he was letting himself in for, and he intended to apply the old-fashioned methods that had raised generations of obedient young women to graceful adulthood.

"Go on, now," he said. "It's time to start learning how to behave like decent folks, honey."

I felt my face crumple, and the tears start at the corners of my eyes again. I turned back to the fireplace, and the mantelpiece, and the awful brown strap. I reached out a trembling hand. It scared me so much that when my fingers touched it, near the loop of string that it hung from, I felt a little sting, like an electric shock. I pulled back my hand, and I turned my head a little, about to plead for mercy out of sheer instinct.

But Mr. Carpenter gave a firm squeeze with his hand on my ass. He said, his voice growing impatient at last, "You're going to have to get used to bringing me the strap, girl. There's no time like the present to start. Get it down so your foster mama and I can finish supper before I whip you."

I felt tears start to trickle down my cheeks. I reached my hand out again, and watched it shake as I fumbled to get the thing off its hook.

"Give it to me," my foster father said. "Then pull your jeans and your panties down to your knees. I'm going to give you a few licks now, for you to think about while we eat."