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This began to seem strange to Lily and Nona—if not unreasonable, then certainly unkind. They agreed that the forgiveness of the parent should always be extended to the erring child, even posthumously. So Lucille and I began to anticipate the appearance of our mother’s sister with all the guilty hope that swelled our guardians’ talcy bosoms. She would be our mother’s age, and might amaze us with her resemblance to our mother. She would have grown up withour mother in this very house, and in the care of our grandmother. No doubt we had eaten the same casseroles, heard the same songs, and had our failings berated in the same terms. We began to hope, if unawares, that a substantial restitution was about to be made. And we overheard Lily and Nona in the kitchen at night, embroidering their hopes. Sylvie would be happy here. She knew the town—the dangerous places, the unsavory people—and could watch us, and warn us, as they could not. They began to consider it a failure of judgment, which they were reluctant to account for in terms of my grandmother’s age, to prefer them over Sylvie. And we felt they must be right. All that could be said against Sylvie was that her mother omitted her name from virtually all conversation, and from her will. And while this was damaging, it gave neither us nor our great-aunts anything in particular to fear. Her itinerancy might be simple banishment. Her drifting, properly considered, might be no more than a preference for the single life, made awkward in her case by lack of money. Nona and Lily had stayed with their mother until she died, and then moved west to be near their brother, and had lived many years independently and alone on the money that came from the sale of their mother’s farm. If they had been cast out and disinherited—they clucked their tongues—“We’d have been riding around in freight cars, too.” They chortled in their bosoms and their chairs shifted. “It’s only the truth,” one said, “that her mother had very little patience with people who chose not to marry.”
    “She’d say as much.”
    “Before our faces.”
    “Many a time.”
    “God rest her.”
    We knew enough about Sylvie to know that she had simply chosen not to act married, though she had a marriage of sufficient legal standing to have changed her name. No word had ever indicated who or what this Fisher might have been. Lily and Nona chose not to bother about him. Increasingly they saw in Sylvie a maiden lady, unlike themselves only because she had been cast out unprovided for. If they could find out where she was, they would invite her. “Then we’ll use our own judgment.” After the note arrived, they began to put their letter in final form, being careful to suggest but not to promise that she might take her mother’s place in the household if she wished. Once the letter was mailed, we all lived in a state of anticipation. Lucille and I argued about whether her hair would be brown or red. Lucille would say, “I know it’ll be brown like Mother’s,” and I’d reply, “Hers wasn’t brown. It was red.”
    Lily and Nona conferred together and decided that they
must
leave (for they had their health to consider, and they longed to return to their basement room in the red-brick and upright Hartwick Hotel, with its stiff linens and its bright silver, where the arthritic bellhop and the two old chambermaids deferred so pleasantly to their age and their solitude and their poverty) and that Sylvie must come.

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    It was still late winter when they sent for her and it was not yet spring when she came. They had urged her to consider before she replied, and they had assured her at length and in the kindliest language (the letter was some days in composition) that there was no urgency in their request and that she must take all the time she needed to set her affairs in order before she came, if she should do so. And then one day as we sat at supper in the kitchen, and they worried