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Show Moon -16 She would not let Anne go on. "A poor, poor man. He needs your help. Look at him!" She said this loudly, a command. David bowed his head, as if ashamed. Father appeared in the doorway behind Ruth and said, "Hush, Ruth, let her be." Esther bobbed up behind him. She was smiling. Anne was too shocked to move. It made no sense, not with the way her mother felt about David, his "arty sentiments" and "wild hair," the way she was about her husband's illness, the way she'd briskly ignored their childhood aches and pains. This didn't square with anything Anne had ever known about her. Here was something she had longed for all her life from Ruth. Here it was, and here it was all wrong. The room seemed to rock, the papered walls of the kitchen to undulate and heave around her, and for a moment she thought she had gone crazy. "Help him." Anne looked down at David. He leaned across the table, his palm frozen upward like a beggar's, his eyes pleading and wide. She touched the soft cotton of her skirt and crumpled it in her fingers like used-up paper, wanted suddenly to tear her clothes from herself. The impulse passed quickly, silently. Then something inside her seemed to go out. It was as if some other person inside her had stooped and blown out a candle. Now everything was dark and dangerous. She thought of the charcoal nudes her mother had torn off the walls of her room. She thought of Michael's hand under her nightgown. She reached out her hand to David and said, "I'll take you home." "It's because she's remembering her father," Anne's father said to her. He was alone in the living room when she came back from David's apartment. He |