When had I seen her wear it last?
I laid the dress out in pieces and held up my lantern. My stitches stood along the hem. Stains spotted it front and back, as if the girl had rolled in something in her playing. The dress had been torn in half and half again, bundled up like a hated thing. Folding the pieces together, I crushed them in my hand, a sob rising in my throat. That girl. With no mind to the expense and the time I had spent. The time I didn’t have.
At dinner that night, I watched the others at the table. Ray and Father hunched at either end, their faces chapped. Ray bit at a bloody tear of skin on his lip. Across the table, Agnes wouldn’t look at him, her bandaged fingers heavy in her lap. Outside, the fire we had lit to finish what was left of the animal smoked low in the distance. It wouldn’t last. I’d carried the dress back to the house, closed it away in my bureau until I could decide what it meant — if it meant anything. Never make too much. For so many years, I had lived and worked close enough to my siblings I could name their breathing in the dark, but now in every quiet face, I sensed something hidden. The way Patricia gnawed at her bread. The way Ray gripped his fork with those crooked fingers, his knuckles white. My youngest sister, tucking her good dress away with the rags. If she could do such a thing — so ordinary, one might think, but possibly not — what might my other siblings be planning?
“Such sour faces,” Patricia let out. She helped herself to another bowl of soup. Unlike the rest of us, the woman had not lost weight the last few months but instead thickened in her grief. Ray caught her wrist to stop her spoon, but she shook him off. “Lee would have eaten two or more bowlfuls,” she said. “Now, I’m not saying one way or another, but I never knew that boy to be gone for more than a day. Other than the war, that is. And not a word for weeks.”
Father threw his napkin on the table. He walked down the hall, banging his door closed after he went. The dining room seemed to shrink, the lantern bright. Agnes tried to pull her sleeve over her bandage, but the sleeve was far too short — I hadn’t once this season taken a needle to let out her hems.
“He must have run out of money,” Patricia went on. “Even when he telegrammed, he never gave us an address that lasted more than a night.”
“He will write when he writes,” I said, but I wasn’t so sure about that.
Patricia grated her spoon against the bottom of her bowl. “A little conversation at a meal. That’s all I ask.”
Ray raised his head, bleary-eyed.
“I don’t see anything wrong with showing some warmth to each other,” Patricia said. “Like normal people. Normal people talking about what’s on their minds.”
Agnes reddened, but I didn’t have the heart to play peacemaker, not then.
“Nan agrees with me,” Patricia said, “Don’t you, Nan?”
“You want to talk about Lee,” Ray asked. “Is that the kind of talk you want?”
Patricia slumped. “Well, yes. ”
“The boy can’t remember where he put his own hat when it’s on his head.”
“Nan,” Agnes started. “Do you hear what he’s saying?”
Ray swung his knife. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he never finds his way back.”
“You wouldn’t?” Patricia gasped.
“You can’t say that.” Agnes looked at me. “He can’t.”
“And you.” Ray pointed at Agnes. “If you want to run away too, then go on, why don’t you? All of you. Just you try it.”
Patricia dropped her spoon in her bowl. “Ray, I never. ” He rested his arms on either side of his plate, too tired to lift a finger though his face seemed anything but. Patricia touched his cheek. He pressed a hand over his eyes. “No one’s leaving,” Patricia whispered to him. Down the hall, a door fell shut. We turned our heads. I pictured Father having listened to us in the dark, the door cracked open again, until he’d heard enough.
“It will be okay, won’t it, Nan?” Agnes asked, her cheeks hot. “Like you said?”
I stood to gather the plates. A fork fell to the floor. When I dropped to my knees to fetch it, the dark under the table showed three pairs of legs and three laps. The empty chairs looked cold, the rest of us nothing more than cuts of wood. I imagined Myrle’s dress again, strung up as if from a rope outside that window. In my mind it hung starched and ironed, a paper cutout for a paper doll. I made to stand, but something burned from my stomach to the bridge of my nose. I left the fork where it fell and headed for the kitchen, carrying away the rest of our meal, finished or not.
That night I shut myself away in my room and thought about Carl. A hero, the grocer had called him. He’d even won himself a Cross. Lee had served in the war, but he didn’t have much but the limp to show for it. Both my brothers had worked the land for years, but it wasn’t the thing of medals. And it didn’t save our family from whatever the town cared to make of us. We were foreigners — no matter how long ago Father and Mother had staked their claim. And land grubbers at that. The parents who couldn’t trouble themselves to learn their English proper, to change their name. The children who pretended they didn’t know their native tongue. We were fooling no one. If anyone had seen Carl together with me, I knew just what they thought: What was the man doing spending time with the Hess girl again? A girl so tall and plain, the one the neighbors could only call handsome. The kind of girl too proud to keep a man’s ring. Wasn’t she rather old for such things? Before the war, even my family had been surprised.
A knock on my door. “Nan?”
“Go to bed, Agnes.”
“Are you all right?”
I imagined her waiting, her hand raised to knock again, the one that had been burned.
“Nan?”
I opened the door and lay back in my bed. Agnes pinched at her skirts and eased herself onto the edge of my mattress. “You looked like you were going to be sick in there.”
I didn’t answer.
“How can you stand the way those two go on? It makes me want to scream.” She fiddled with her bandage.
“Have you seen Myrle’s comb?” I asked.
“Her comb?”
“The one she keeps on her dresser.”
“I never saw it.”
“Agnes.”
She sighed and reached into her pocket. “I didn’t think you’d want it.” When she drew it out, the comb seemed nothing more than a piece of bone, no larger than her palm. She laid it on the mattress between us and I rubbed my thumb against the handle. “I’ve hardly used it,” Agnes said. “Really. I only thought. ”
Between my bitten fingers, the comb was soft with strands of Myrle’s hair, the same ivory as the handle, and Agnes’ darker strands threaded through. “Agnes, those posters you made. ”
“You know how hard I worked on those.”
“But sometimes when I try to think of the girls, all I see are those drawings. Their faces don’t move anymore.”
Agnes took my hand and held it in both her own, though it pained her to do so. “Nan, don’t quit on me now. I couldn’t stand it.”
“I’m not quitting.”
She turned my fingers over as a child would, studying them.
“Fine,” I said. “Everything will be all right.”
She smiled at that. The bandage on her fingers was trim and white. Earlier it had shown spots where her blisters had broken, but she must have changed it herself. When had she grown so old, this sister? She was nearly nineteen and far from a girl — though I had trouble thinking of her as anything but. “Can’t we just say it’s done?” I wanted to ask her, but I didn’t. Not even to myself. Waiting was a grim thing. Just outside our door, years seemed to pass, when it’d only been months.