The Star I Sold Out From Under Her

The Fifth Point

The first thing Berniece Brannock did when she laid that pattern sheet on the cutting table was look at the fifth point.

Not at me. Not at the four women on either side of me. She smoothed the paper flat with the heel of her hand, the way she used to smooth a lunch menu before she taped it up in the cafeteria, and her eyes went straight down the page to the fifth point of the star and stopped. She has looked at that star for thirty-nine years.

I knew what she was seeing. There is a small hitch in the line there, a place where a pencil slipped in the winter of 1987 and caught the paper, and it is on exactly one drawing in the world. It is not on any of the tracings that have gone out in this county. It is on the one I had traced for the kits.

So when she looked up and asked who would tell her about it, and nobody spoke, I did the only thing I could think of to keep her eyes off that line. I turned them on me.

I said, “Berniece, you handed that star out on freezer paper for forty years. You don’t get to call it yours the day somebody finally made it pay.”

It was a good sentence. I want to be honest about that, because I have heard it back in my own head a hundred times since, and it keeps coming out polished. I had not planned it. What I had practiced, in the truck, in the shower, in the hours I lay beside Orris pretending to sleep, was a kinder one: We should have told you. I had said that one to the windshield on Route K some twenty times.

What came out of my mouth in front of eleven women was the cold one.

She did not argue. She did not raise her voice, which in thirty-five years of friendship I have heard her do exactly once, at a man who backed a delivery truck over the school flower bed. She picked up the sheet and her purse and walked out through the bolts of flannel, and the bell over Mrs. Ashcraft’s door rang behind her.