generosity of spirit. Why else would the most eligible bachelor in town-my widowed father-have married her?
Not for her money, though she had enough of it. But then, he does-rather,
Not for her well-regarded family name, either. Our own name is equally-if not more-illustrious in this particular corner of the world.
Nor did he marry her to raise his motherless daughters. I was going on five when Abby moved in with us, but my sister was a de cade older; she took better care of me than anyone. I have never needed-or wanted-a stepmother.
I barely remembered my own mother, having lost her when I was just a toddler. Yet I have always missed her. Does that make sense?
Never mind; I don’t care if my feelings make sense to anyone other than myself.
My Uncle John told me once that my mother doted on me to the point where people whispered that I was spoiled. But who could blame her for indulging her third daughter when she’d buried her second just two years earlier?
As for her firstborn-if my sister had minded being overshadowed by my birth thirty-odd years ago, she either got over it or hid it very well, because I’ve never sensed resentment from her.
Not even now.
“Are you all right?” she asks anxiously from across the breakfast table, and I’m touched by the concern in her eyes, brown and somber, like our father’s…
A terrible, wonderful fantasy sweeps through me, and then I realize it isn’t a fantasy anymore. It’s a memory now, a fresh one; I indulge it until my sister utters my name and repeats the question.
But I just nod at her, and I sip the hot, decadently sweet brew.
She arches a dubious brow, because, like most people, she subscribes to the theory that things aren’t always as they seem-and because she herself couldn’t be farther from “all right” on this hot and sunny August morning.
She will be, though, in time. The worst of our nightmare is over at last. What lies ahead is nothing compared to what we’ve been through.
I contemplate helping myself to another biscuit. There’s no reason not to. I break one open and slather it with butter, then drench it in honey.
Before I can sink my teeth into the gloriously rich, sticky crumble, Maggie sticks her red head into the room to ask in her thick brogue, “Shall I open the drapes in the front room?”
“No!” my sister and I say in unison.
“Don’t open the drapes in any room until we tell you otherwise,” I instruct her. “Do you understand, Maggie?”
Something flickers in the house keeper’s blue eyes-eyes that seem sharper today, as they focus on me, than ever before. She used to look through me, through all of us, as the help should-and vice versa.
But now, as we exchange a glance-mine wary, Maggie’s dangerously shrewd-I wonder whether she understands far more than just my orders to shroud the windows from prying eyes.
She slinks away, and I eat my biscuit in silent contentment. My scalp is soaked beneath my thick auburn hair; it must be ninety-five degrees outside already, and considerably warmer here in the kitchen.
This, however, is nothing compared to yesterday morning, when the red- hot stove threw off additional heat. My sister wasn’t around to ask me why it was blazing away on the steamiest day of the year. Maggie was here, but of course it wasn’t her place to question anything.
In the next room, the clock chimes the half hour.
“It’s almost time.” My sister pushes back her chair. Half past ten.
Nearly twenty-four hours ago, my father unexpectedly came home from the office. He wasn’t feeling well, he said. Sick to his stomach. He was going to take a nap before heading back to work.
He didn’t bother to ask where Abby was.
I didn’t tell him.
“Aren’t you going to come upstairs?” my sister asks from the doorway.
“No need, I’m ready,” I tell her, smoothing my full skirt as I stand up.
My dress is, appropriately, black.
Earlier, I locked my bedroom door before I removed the dress from its designated hook at the back of the wardrobe in my room. Slipped beneath the dark black silk, snug as a lining, was the blue cotton dress I’d had on yesterday morning.
It will obviously have to be dealt with-but not today. So I took a plump goose-down pillow from my bed, remembering how many times I had futilely pulled it over my head to smother ghastly sounds in the dead of night.
Again, the irony.
Even now, left alone in the kitchen, I don’t smile. I am thinking about how I carefully slit open a pillow seam to create an opening just a few inches. After wadding the blue dress into a tight little ball, I tucked it through the opening, pushing it deep into the feathers. When I had carefully stitched the seam closed again, there was no sign of tampering, no telltale lump, even when I patted the pillow hard, all over.
I’m confident that no one will ever find the dress before I have a chance to destroy it.
I eye the cold iron stove.
Unlike fabric-and, for that matter, wood-metal cannot absorb telltale stains. But wood and fabric are so easily transformed to ashes, and ashes tell no tales.
I stood over that blazing stove yesterday morning, sweat pouring down my face with salty tears-not tears of grief, but of sheer relief.
It seemed to take forever to incinerate that wooden handle, its top freshly splintered, and all the while I was aware of father lying there on the sofa in the next room, Abby upstairs, Maggie in her third-floor quarters…
I knew that at any moment all hell could break loose.
It did-but on my terms: when the wooden handle had been thoroughly cremated.
I’m certain fabric will incinerate in no time at all.
I’ll burn the blue dress tomorrow.
Today, wearing funereal black; I must attend to other things.
In the cemetery over on Prospect Street, two freshly dug graves wait in the family plot beside the dead mother I don’t remember and the dead sister I never met.
They’re better off there, I have often thought.
“When you came along, you healed your mother’s grief,” Uncle John told me once, years ago. “She adored you. So did your father-still does, as far as I can tell,” he’d added.
Those words made my stomach churn, yet I said nothing. Neither did my sister, who was there. She didn’t even look at me; there were some things we would never dare to discuss, close as we were.
But she knew. Of course she did. So did Abby, whom my father married not in spite of the fact that she was a fat, dour recluse, but because of it. He correctly assumed she was so grateful to have been spared an old maid’s fate that she’d overlook his miserly flaws; forgive him anything.
I, on the other hand, have never forgiven him. Or
Nor would I pretend to; that isn’t my style.
Thus, it’s no secret around town that ours is hardly a warm, cozy house hold. My father and Abby and my sister and I went about our daily business, merely co-existing under the same roof.
Until yesterday morning.
The night before had been sleepless, as so many are. I lay in my bed, cloaked in a quilt and a high-necked gown despite August heat as oppressive as my own familiar dread. When I was a girl, I would dress in layers and pile on the bedding, in a futile, pathetic attempt to shield myself. I’ve long since realized that was impossible, yet
