I’ve been in the hospital four days when they put another woman in the room with me — an old farm wife from Beardstown, by the name of Trudy Deere. Trudy Deere has been in a car accident. She’s recuperating.
I don’t say a word to her. I don’t have nothing to say that people want to hear, anyway. So I keep my mouth shut. Besides, I heard her tell my sister that she has five children of her own, so I know what she thinks of me, lying in my bed with my face to the wall when the nurses bring the baby in. It’s nothing against the baby in particular, but nobody can see that. I’m a bad mother is all they see. People like to speculate. I guess by now everybody has speculated about me.
