The Star I Sold Out From Under Her

The Cedar Chest

On Tuesday the twenty-seventh I went to guild.

I do not know why. Orris said not to, and then he said I should, and I realized he meant both. I sat at the far end of the long table, forty feet from Berniece, and cut fabric for two hours with my head down. She did not look at me once. I could feel her not looking, the way you feel a draft. Before the coffee was done I put my cutter in its case and left, and I stood on the sidewalk by the courthouse with my knees going.

I drove home. Orris was on the porch. He did not ask.

“I’m going to get it,” I said.

“I know.”

We went into the bedroom together. He lifted the chest from the foot of the bed himself, which he is not supposed to do, and set it on the quilt, and we both looked at it. The cedar smell came out when I opened the lid. My veil. The christening gown. The boy’s shoes, no bigger than my palm. The good tablecloth, folded in squares.

And on top, where I had left it in the fall, the manila envelope. I did not need to open it to see the note. Verdis’s handwriting had come through the paper in a faint brown stain, and the straight pin had rusted a small round mark into the corner.

I took out the freezer paper. Thirty-nine years old, and it still unrolled the way she had drawn it: eight points, the pie plate circle in pencil, a dogwood in the center, and at the fifth point the little hitch. I wrapped it in the plain white pillowcase from our wedding set, the way you would wrap something that had once been a baby’s.

“I’ll go with you,” Orris said.

“No.”

“Then I’ll sit up.”

“Do that.”

He put his hand on my face, once, with the whole palm, the way he did the morning of the surgery. “Carry it right,” he said. “Don’t set it down on the way.”

I drove into town after dark. Route K was empty, and the corn stubble stood out pale in the headlights, and I held the pillowcase on the seat beside me with one hand all the way. At the foot of the Brannocks’ drive I stopped the engine. A television murmured in the front room, and then it went quiet, as though someone inside had heard me.

I got out. I stood at the bottom of the porch steps with the bundle against my chest. I had thought of a hundred ways to begin. I could not remember one.

“Berniece,” I said. “I’ve got something of yours.”

The porch light came on.

The Porch

She opened the door and stood in it with Arvel behind her left shoulder, large and still, in his stocking feet. She did not ask me in. She did not come down. For a time she only looked at the white bundle, and I held it out in both arms like a thing I was ashamed of.

“Let me say it first,” I said. “Before you take it.”

She waited.

“I sold your star, and I lied to my husband about it, and I lied to you for thirty-five years about where the first one was. All three of those were me. I’m not going to tell you why, because you’d have to hear a reason, and I don’t want you to have to hold one.”

Her face did not move.

I came up the steps then, slowly, and put the bundle on the porch rail where the light fell, and folded back the pillowcase. The freezer paper lay there, the color of tea.

I watched her see it.