“The younger was such a pretty girl, wasn’t she?” she said.
“Both of them are.”
“Young girls are often pretty simply by being young. Your girl was more than that. But the other one, she seemed a bit funny.”
I turned my back on the woman and took another nail from my pocket, trying to hold the poster in place. When I swung the hammer, I swung too hard for posters, but not for other things.
“Funny,” the woman said again. “She would come into town and stand at the market door to watch people going in and out. And when Nick Wallis complained, she folded her arms and asked him what he thought she should do about it.”
“Esther is strong-headed, certainly.”
“She wasn’t like any other girl I’ve known.” The woman stepped to my side, squinting as if to match the drawings to some likeness in her head. How similar she was to her sister — that hair a frizz around her ears and her cheeks fat, her eyes only slits, though this sister had blue instead of brown. “Don’t you think those pictures are strange?” she started. “Aren’t the girls a good year older now, at the very least?”
I drove another nail. “My sister Agnes did her best from a photograph. It was the most recent we had.”
“When my girls were that age, they changed every month. My daughter’s hair turned black and she was thin as a reed in less than a year. But that’s the way with daughters.”
“They aren’t my daughters.”
“That’s right, your mother, poor thing. ”
I headed off, determined to hang all the posters I could. “It was nice seeing you, Mrs. Clark.”
She came after me in little bird steps. “No, no. Mrs. Meyers. You’ve gotten me and my sister confused. Of course, she is your neighbor.” The woman looked at me blankly. That’s what I remembered of the sister, then — she was a bit off in the head. Mrs. Clark, she was right as rain. “All I was trying to say,” she went on, “is, what good will it do? With that picture so old?”
“It’s only a year.”
“You don’t understand. Why, my own brother went off like that. He was a grown man. Thirty-two years old. I can’t imagine seeing him now.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
She waved the words away. “All I’m saying is, sometimes it’s best to let things lie. I don’t know what I would do if I discovered Eddie on my porch today. Scare me to death.”
I stopped and Mrs. Meyers came up short beside me. “You wouldn’t be happy to see him?”
“Oh no, certainly not. It’d feel like a ghost knocking on my door. Like the dead. Nothing good could come of it. I think once people have gone strange, they aren’t relations anymore, and you don’t want any of those fists to come hammering. I wouldn’t invite my own twin in after that.”
If the brother was anything like the sisters, I pictured Mrs. Meyers opening the door to her very own image and shutting it at once. Behind me, she made her farewells and walked off. In the wind, the poster I’d hung had ripped at the corner, a tear that crossed Esther’s forehead. I tacked it together. Myrle peered out from the other side, her chin longer than I thought right. Agnes with her pencil, sketching one face after another — but over the weeks, her drawings had grown careless and my sisters seemed little but strangers. If we ever had a chance to open that door, how much would they have changed?
“You shouldn’t listen to her.”
“Excuse me?” I turned. Carl McNulty stood watching me, and I stepped back. He raised a hand in surrender and only then did I realize the hammer was still in my grip, cocked as if I might strike.
“I said you shouldn’t listen to her.” He reached for my arm, pressing his thumb against the underside of my wrist. With a slow sweep of his hand, he lowered it. How well I knew the smell of him, sour like milking — and underneath, that warm cedar. Something of your own, Dora had said. I closed my eyes and saw instead a fence with four sides and an easy spot of land in between, the fence painted blue. I had dreamed of such a place ever since Mother went. When I looked up again, Carl had released my wrist. My skin felt terribly cold and I drew down my sleeve.
“Hello, Nan,” he said.
“Carl,” I said at last.
“I was wondering where you’d gone.”
“I haven’t gone anywhere.”
“Neither have I,” he said. “At least not for a while.”
“Carl, look at you. I’m afraid we couldn’t stop the other day. We were. ”
“Not much, am I?”
“I was sorry to hear about your mother.”
“And yours.” He paused, seeing the poster above my head. When his eyes fell to me again, his grin had its old mischievous twist, though now he seemed as slow and even-tempered as his name.
“You must be alone in that house,” I said. “You must be all by yourself.”
“I’ve grown used to it.”
“You have?”
He drew his hand through his hair, looking at the poster again and off down the street. The whole of Main appeared abandoned. How often I’d imagined that farm all his own, the quiet of this man and the house to ourselves, blue fence or no.
“I guess not.” He caught my eye. “I should make you a visit.”
“That would be all right.”
He took the hammer from me. Wrenching the lowest nail from the poster, he fixed Esther’s face, the way she must have looked those many months ago, when he might have seen her himself. He smiled at me then, slid the rest of the posters from under my arm, and carried them down the street until he’d hung them. At last, he turned back to me and slipped the hammer in my bag.
“It’s cold as a brass button, don’t you think?” He took my hand and I let him, leading me down a narrow alley, one I had never dared walk through by myself. Behind the low row of buildings, he knocked on a door. When it opened, an old man in an undershirt stood on the other side, the white crown of his hair twisted from sleep. The man’s face colored, and he reached for a jacket. “Give me some warning with company, mind you,” he said. “Come in, come in, before you freeze yourselves.”
In a circle of lamplight, he sat us at a small wooden table and brought cups of hot milk with cinnamon. Canvas sacks lined the walls, the stink of meat. It was the back room of the traders, I guessed, and the man himself, he seemed to live there — a simple cot pushed up against the wall, a small stove, and a shelf of dry and canned foods. I hadn’t recognized him when he opened the door, not in that state of dress.
“Nan, is it?” he said.
“I didn’t know you at first.”
“The eldest Hess girl. Yes, I remember you. But never so tall. How’s the family? Your father?” He caught himself and dropped both elbows on the table.
“It’s all right, Dennis,” Carl said.
But Dennis squeezed his knuckles. “Such an awful thing. I’m sorry, I am. I heard about the girls. But for a minute I didn’t. Do you have minutes like that? Sometimes I wish they’d last.”
I felt the cup warm between my fingers and thought back to both my sisters’ faces, posted high on wooden planks. “Why do you wish that?”
“Sometimes it’s not so bad to forget a thing.”
I let myself smile. “I’d never have known you were here. In town, I mean. Your windows are dark.”
“Dennis likes to keep to himself,” Carl said.
“Until this man here interrupts. But I suppose I can take interruptions from someone like him.” Dennis eyed Carl’s limp sleeve. “His mother was a good woman. Awfully good. And Carl, he’s a hero to us. Any more of that, miss?”
My cup was empty. I wondered how long we had sat together in this room, and why I didn’t mind, with so much to do at home. I licked the cinnamon from my lips.