Page 97 of Keepsake
After dinner, I washed the dishes as an excuse not to socialize. But when everyone began to depart, I told Griffin that I didn’t want a lift back to the bunkhouse yet.
“You want us to leave you here?” Griff asked, keys in hand. “It’s a long walk in the dark.”
“Leah will drop me. Or I’ll just crash on the couch,” I suggested. “I want to catch up with Chastity.”
“Okay, man. See you in the morning.”
Maeve wrapped herself around my knees and I picked her up and carried her into the Abrahams’ TV room. “Chassity!” the little girl said when we found my old…friend? Hookup?
“Hi, baby girl,” Chastity said. She patted the sofa beside her. “God, Zach. I can’t believe you’re right here.”
I cleared my throat. “I’d say the same about you.”
“I’m so happy I found you guys. Took me long enough.”
“So…” There was no more containing the question that had long been on my mind. “I just have one question. How much trouble did I get you in four years ago?”
“Lots!” she said with a smile that made no sense. “I got a beating like you read about. Still have the scars.”
There wasn’t enough air suddenly. “Sorry.”
“Hey! Wait until you hear the rest of the story, okay? It gets better. Everyone assumed that I’d been compromised.” She winked, and I wanted to die. “Nobody believed me. My mother didn’t speak to me for months. And nobody wanted to marry me when I turned seventeen.”
I set Maeve down on the floor and put my head in my hands.
“Zach.” Chastity prodded me with her toe. “I told you—this story isn’t over yet. Listen to me.”
I lifted my head and tried to cooperate.
“Nobody wanted to marry me, so I was a pariah for a while. My sisters were awful, and my mother wanted me out of the house. But my father was still in charge of provisions. Remember that?”
I nodded. Her father made many of the trips into Casper for fuel and cattle feed.
“So I asked him if there was a job I could get. And he set me up as a cashier at Walgreens.”
“The pharmacy?” I asked. I’d never heard of a girl on the compound having a job.
“That’s the place. He wanted the cash, you know? My whole paycheck went to him. I wasn’t allowed to keep the money.”
“Oh. Of course not.”
She smiled, and the look of it was so familiar it broke my heart a little. “I loved that job anyway. It was fun to watch the customers. And the manager was an interesting lady. She saw the position I was in, and she didn’t like it. So when I got a raise for seniority, she started to pay me the extra in Visa gift cards. And I hid those.”
“Really? And you didn’t get caught?” Hiding money from the elders would take balls. Chastity was braver than I’d ever known. A trespass like that would have earned her another beating for sure.
“I never got caught. That became my savings plan. I knew I wanted to leave. Working behind that counter taught me a lot about the larger world. And I wanted in.”
“Wow.” I pictured Chastity standing behind the cash register in her long yellow dress and braids, watching girls her age come and go as they pleased. “You would have met a lot of people.”
“Sure! And I read newspapers and magazines. The other people who worked there let me borrow their phones sometimes. Of course I never admitted any of that to my family. But I started to plan my escape. I looked up the cost of bus tickets and worked as many hours as I could to save up. But then my dad started making noises about trying to find me a husband. He thought that the scandal had probably blown over, and that he could get one of the Levite brothers to have me. And I didn’t want that. So I knew it was time to go.”
Just thinking of Chastity married off to an old man made the cold feeling return.
“So I started planning, and that’s when I searched your name on someone’s phone and found Isaac’s farm. I knew you must have landed here, and it made me so happy. Because—Zach, I felt like Ikilledyou.” Her eyes were glassy now.
“Naw, don’t go there.” I reached over and patted her hand. I found it easier to touch people now than I had just a month or two ago. “Getting kicked out was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
“You don’t know how relieved I am.” She moved over and threw herself in my arms.
