The Help / Прислуга. Книга для чтения на английском языке

All my close friends had dropped out to get married and I didn’t see the point in making Mama and Daddy drive three hours just to watch me walk across a stage, when what Mother really wanted was to watch me walk down the aisle[50 - to watch me walk down the aisle – (разг.) посмотреть, как я иду к алтарю]. I still hadn’t heard from Harper & Row, so instead of buying a plane ticket to New York, I rode home to Jackson in sophomore Kay Turner’s Buick, squeezed in the front with my typewriter at my feet and her wedding dress between us.

Kay Turner was marrying Percy Stanhope next month. For three hours I listened to her worry about cake flavors.

When I got home, Mother stepped back to get a better look at me. “Well, your skin looks beautiful,” she said, “but your hair…” She sighed, shook her head.

“Where’s Constantine?” I asked. “In the kitchen?”

And like she was delivering the weather, Mother said, “Constantine is no longer employed here.

Now let’s get all these trunks unpacked before you ruin your clothes.”

I turned and blinked at her. I didn’t think I’d heard her correctly. “What did you say?”

Mother stood straighter, smoothing down her dress. “Constantine’s gone, Skeeter. She went to live with her people up in Chicago.”

“But… what? She didn’t say anything in her letters about Chicago.” I knew that wasn’t her surprise. She would’ve told me such terrible news immediately.

Mother took a deep breath, straightened her back.

“I told Constantine she wasn’t to write to you about leaving. Not in the middle of your final exams. What if you’d flunked and had to stay on another year? God knows, four years of college is more than enough.”

“And she… agreed to that? Not to write me and tell me she was leaving?”

Mother looked off, sighed. “We’ll discuss it later, Eugenia. Come on to the kitchen, let me introduce you to the new maid, Pascagoula.”

But I didn’t follow Mother to the kitchen.

I stared down at my college trunks, terrified by the thought of unpacking here. The house felt vast, empty. Outside, a combine whirred in a cotton field.

By September, not only had I given up hope of ever hearing back from Harper & Row, I gave up on ever finding Constantine. No one seemed to know a thing or how I could reach her. I finally stopped asking people why Constantine had left. It was like she’d simply disappeared.