I finished my cleaning, surveyed the house, found it good. I put the garbage in the wheeled cans, swept the front and back steps. I was done. I went back in to put the broom away.
Dill was standing in the kitchen.
He had a pile of mail in his hands, was shuffling through it. When the broom hit the floor, Dill looked up sharply.
"Hi, Lily, this was mighty fine of you," he said. He smiled at me, his bland and forgettable face beaming nothing but goodwill. "Hey, did I scare you? I thought you heard me pull into the garage."
He must have come in the back door while I was sweeping at the front.
Still tense all over, I bent to retrieve the broom, glad my face was hidden for a moment while I recovered.
"I saw Varena downtown," he said, as I straightened and moved to the broom closet. "I can't believe after all this waiting, it's finally going to be our wedding day tomorrow."
I wrung out a dishrag I'd forgotten and draped it neatly over the sink divider.
"Lily, won't you turn to look at me?"
I turned to meet his eyes.
"Lily, I know you and I have never gotten close. But I don't have a sister, and I hope you'll be one to me."
I was repelled. Emotional appeals were not the way to make a relationship happen.
"You don't know how hard it's always been for Varena."
I raised my eyebrows. "Excuse me?"
"Being your sister."
I took a deep breath. I held my hand palm up. Explain?
"She would kill me if she knew I was saying this." He shook his head at his own daring. "She never felt as pretty as you, as smart as you."
That didn't matter now. It hadn't mattered for more than a decade.
"Varena," I began, and my voice sounded rusty, "is a grown woman. We haven't been teenagers for years."
"When you're a younger sister, apparently you have baggage you carry with you always. Varena thinks so, anyway. She always felt like an also-ran. With your parents. With your teachers. With your boyfriends."
What crap was this ? I gave Dill a cold stare.
"And when you got raped ..."
I'll give him that, he went right on and said the word.
"... and all the focus was on you, and all you wanted was to get rid of it, I think in some way it gave Varena some... satisfaction."
Which would have made her feel guilty.
"And of course, she began to feel guilty about that, about even feeling a particle of righteousness about your getting hurt."
"Your point being?"
"You don't seem happy to be here. At the wedding. In the town. You don't seem happy for your sister."
I couldn't quite see the connection between the two statements. Was I supposed to wag my tail since Varena was getting married... because she'd felt guilty when I got raped? I didn't have any active animosity toward Dill Kingery, so I tried to work through his thought.
I shook my head. I wasn't making any connections. "Since Varena wants to marry you, I'm glad she is," I said cautiously. I wasn't about to apologize for being who I was, what I had become.
Dill looked at me. He sighed. "Well, that's as good as it's gonna get, I guess," he said, with a tight little smile.
Guess so.
"What about you?" I asked. "You married one unstable wife. Your mother's not exactly predictable. I hope you see nothing like that in Varena."
He threw back his head and laughed.
"You take the cake, you really do, Lily," he said, shaking his head. He didn't seem to find that endearing. "You don't say much, but you go for the throat when you decide to talk. I think that's what your parents have been dying to ask me for the past two years."
I waited.
"No," he said, quite seriously now. "I see nothing like that in Varena. But that's why I dated her for so long. That's why our engagement went on forever. I had to be sure. For my sake, and especially for Anna's sake. I think Varena is the sanest woman I ever met."
"Did your wife ever threaten to hurt Anna?"
He turned white as a sheet. I'd never seen anyone pale so fast. "What—how—" He was spluttering.
"Before she killed herself, did she threaten to hurt Anna?"
It was like I was a cobra and he was a mouse.
"What have you heard?" he choked out.
"Just a guess. Did she try to hurt Anna?"
"Please go now," he said finally. "Lily, please go."
I'd certainly handled that well. What a masterly interrogation! At least, I reflected, Dill and I had been equally unpleasant to each other, though I might have the edge since I'd talked about something new, something that wasn't common currency in Bartley—at least, judging by Dill's reaction.
I was willing to bet I wouldn't be invited to go on vacations with Dill and Varena.
It seemed possible that Dill's first wife had been capable— at least in Dill's estimation—of harming her baby. And page 23 was missing from a memory book that was most probably Anna's.
I understood what the word "heartsick" meant. I tried to comfort myself with the thought of Anna's birthmark. At least I'd learned one fact.
As I backed out of Dill's driveway I discovered I didn't want to go home.
I began cruising aimlessly—shades of being a teenager, when "riding around" had been a legitimate activity—and didn't know where I was going until I found myself parking at the town square.
I went into the furniture store, and a bell tinkled as the door swung shut. Mary Maude Plummer was typing something into a computer at a desk behind a high counter in the middle of the store. Reading glasses perched at the end of her nose, and she was wearing her business face, competent and no-nonsense.
"Can I help you?" she asked and then looked up from the computer screen. "Oh, Lily!" she said happily, her face changing from the inside out.
"Come go riding," I suggested. "I've got the car."
"Your mom let you have it?" Mary Maude dissolved in giggles. She glanced around at the empty store. "Maybe I can, really! Emory," she called. Out of the shadows at the back of the store, Emory Osborn materialized like a thin, blond ghost.
"Hello, Miss Bard," he said, his voice wispy.
"Emory, can you watch the store while I take my lunch hour?" Mary Maude asked in the gentle, earnest voice you use with slow children. "Jerry and Sam should be back in just a minute."
"Sure," Emory said. He looked as if a good wind would whisk him away.
"Thanks." Mary Maude fished her purse from some hidden spot under the counter.
When we were far enough away that Emory couldn't hear us, Mary Maude muttered, "He should never have tried to come to work today. But his sister's here, and she's managing the home front, so I think he didn't have anything else to do."
We went out the front door like two girls skipping school. I noticed how professional and groomed Mary Maude looked in her winter white suit, a sharp, unwelcome contrast to me in my sweats.
"I've been cleaning Dill's house," I explained, suddenly self-conscious. I couldn't remember apologizing for my clothes, not for years.
"That's what you do for a living now?" Mary Maude asked as she buckled up.
"Yep," I said flatly.
"Boy, did you ever think I'd end up selling furniture and you'd end up cleaning it?"
We shook our heads simultaneously.
"I'll bet you're tops at what you do," Mary said, matter-of-factly.
I was surprised and oddly touched. "I'll bet you sell a lot of furniture," I offered and was even more surprised to find that I meant it.
"I do pretty well," she answered, her voice offhand. She looked at me, and her face crinkled in a smile. "You know, Lily, sometimes I just can't believe we grew up!"
That was never my problem. "Sometimes I can't remember I was ever a teen," I said.