The Home for Wayward Girls

DedicationWith loveFor my parentsFrances and Emily always,Joanne and Tom, my strength,And our sister and brother gone too soon EpigraphYou gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing you think you cannot do.—ELEANOR ROOSEVELT ContentsCoverTitle PageDedicationEpigraphOne: New York CityTwo: West of the RockiesThree: West of the RockiesFour: New York CityFive: West of the RockiesSix: New York CitySeven: West of the RockiesEight: West of the RockiesNine: West of the RockiesTen: New York CityEleven: New York CityTwelve: West of the RockiesThirteen: New York CityFourteen: West of the RockiesFifteen: New York CitySixteen: West of the RockiesSeventeen: New York CityEighteen: West of the RockiesNineteen: New York CityTwenty: West of the RockiesTwenty-One: West of the RockiesTwenty-Two: East of the RockiesTwenty-Three: East of EverythingTwenty-Four: New York CityTwenty-Five: Speech to the Compass Conference for WomenA Year LaterPostscriptWhy I Wrote This BookAcknowledgmentsAbout the AuthorReading Group GuideCopyrightAbout the Publisher OneNew York CityLoretta was an independent woman. She was cautious about shadows yet her hunger for the future was distinct, subtle as fine jewelry, strong as her prairie roots. The silk scarf around her neck was not meant to hide her scars, although she covered the wounds she’d carried to New York. She wasn’t sure why. Even her hair was a mixed message, streaks of auburn, brown, and gold.“Hey, Siri, play my sunrise songs.” She paused to listen, to mark time, to affirm what came before and what was to come next. A singer’s husky voice, slight as a feather, floated toward the walnut floors of their Manhattan apartment. If it was a different morning, Loretta might have canceled her appointments and lingered over coffee with last Sunday’s Times, headed to Trader Joe’s, and made a stop at her favorite thrift store to scout for unexpected treasures. Had hers been a different life, perhaps this would not be the long-awaited Tuesday, a day of critical importance.Loretta stood by the window. She watched the hustle of the city eight stories below; the sounds of horns rose to greet her, an ambulance sped down Broadway. Her heartbeat raced, even her freckles trembled. The feelings of anxiety were too familiar. She wanted to hold herself in check, to keep her secrets bound to her soul, to tell the world off but also hug it close. Born on the cusp between Gen X and Millennials, she was now, at age thirty-five, tempted by the opportunities the twenty-first century presented. She felt close to unstoppable, she’d worked hard to prepare, knew to breathe, to find her center. It was a coerced strength, an internal muscle she’d trained. No giving in to fears today.“You ready?” Clarke called from the kitchen.“Almost,” she said. It was unlikely Clarke could hear her, but she was sure he was counting down the minutes as she was.“Nervous?”“Nope,” she said, although he’d know better. “Maybe I am. About talking to the reporter.”“You don’t have to, you know.” Clarke appeared in the bedroom doorway; his lucky tie hung from his shoulders not yet knotted. “Don’t let it mess with your head.”“No. I do have to. I’m committed. I must. It’s gonna help others.”“I knew that’s what you’d say.” He stopped long enough to catch her eye and offer his pep talk smile. “Come on. Coffee’s ready.”“Be right there.”Her friends asked how she stayed so calm. They didn’t know the skills she’d learned when she was a child, that hiding nervousness can give one a sort of strength, and that years of always keeping a safe arm’s-length distance wasn’t necessarily good for your spirit.“Do you meditate? Are you never anxious?” some asked.“I try not to let things get to me,” she winked and told those closest to her, the people she trusted with her sticky incontrovertible past where she’d both cowered and prevailed, led and fled. Her thoughts debated what she owed the decades that had fostered the person she’d become, those days and months when she would do anything, right or wrong, to get by. Is victory deserved if the journey included errors in judgment and turns that might have been avoided? These questions were the squatters that claimed space inside her head.“How is it that you are nothing like your parents?” Clarke had asked when she finally broke her silence and told him about her childhood and her life before New York. “It doesn’t seem possible. You’re not similar, not even close to how they sound.”“But I am,” she told him. “I grew up with William and Mama, worked on their ranch, cleaned the chicken coop, raised their rabbits. We had rabbit stew many times. Take a moment and think about that.” Loretta frowned as she remembered skinning and gutting the rabbits. “I’ve shot a gun—more than once. I stole things.”“You also read books. You were a great student. You were good to the other girls.”“Ha! You believe the best picture of me. But really?”“Really, what?”“I wasn’t always good. I was jealous of them. Especially when I was a kid. Like eleven or twelve. Those girls came to the ranch from nicer homes in bigger cities. And they got to leave. I didn’t. Then I realized who the real enemy was. That’s when I started to change. I really did—I’d do anything I could for the girls after that, and I began to hate William and Mama. I still do. Especially William.”“With good reason.”“Hmm. Sure. Yet although I don’t go to church, I know hatred is a sin.” Loretta scrunched her lips tight, her mind off to its private thoughts.Loretta slipped her arms into the brown corduroy blazer she’d worn to important meetings since grad school. Embers of jasmine and citrus perfume resided in the seams. A speck of dust beckoned from her western boots, leather dark as ripened avocados. She brushed it away with fingers manicured burgundy, straightened her worn extralong 501s, and urged waves of auburn hair behind her shoulders.“Choose life.” She whispered one of the few biblical quotes she clung to and grabbed the