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Sarah is the only one like Mama, that soft pretty woman Sarah can hardly remember right now, sweet Mama who died of a racing heart twelve years ago.
    Sarah left work the minute she got the message, and drove all night long to get home in time to see to every detail ofMama’s funeral. Then she volunteered to stay home to take care of Daddy, who was just lost without Mama, it was really the saddest thing. You can’t imagine how he carried on.
    But instead, here was Ashley back from California, flat broke, to recuperate from the second of her two divorces.
    So Sarah stayed on in Richmond, where she is a buyer for the housewares section of Miller and Rhoads, a perfectly elegant downtown department store with branches in all the suburbs. In Richmond, Sarah has her book group, her bridge club, and a whole host of lovely friends. To be perfectly honest, Sarah was
glad
to stay in Richmond, in her new condominium with its eggshell walls and its silk ficus in the foyer. Daddy was disorderly and always had been, not to mention his drinking. Drunk and disorderly, ha!
    Come to think of it, they were
all
disorderly—Daddy, Hubert, and Ashley—not to mention all of Hubert’s and Ashley’s spouses and children, a great straggling parade which Sarah loses track of.
Lost
, Sarah corrects herself. Which she has lost track of, as Ashley herself is lost.
    Poor Ashley wasn’t even married to the man who caused her last, fatal pregnancy. At the time, she wasn’t married at all, and he was married to somebody else. But she was sure he
would
marry her, Ashley had confided to Sarah that summer morning nine years ago. They were sitting in the kitchen after breakfast, drinking coffee. It was already hot. Mama’s climbing rose was blooming profusely all over the trellis.Sarah remembers that morning like it was yesterday. Ashley leaned forward, so excited that spots of color stained her porcelain cheeks. She looked like a person running a fever. She spilled coffee on her flowered robe.
    “He loves me so much,” she said. “You can’t imagine.” Two weeks later she was dead of an ectopic pregnancy.
    Sarah drinks her iced tea. She finishes with the knives: thirty-six of them, all accounted for. She smiles at Gladiola. “There now,” she says.
    Gladiola grins back. She’s a fat, foolish woman, poor white trash if Sarah ever saw it, of course up here in the mountains this is common. People spill over from one social class into another all the time—it’s hard to know who’s nice. This is not true in Richmond, where the help is black and a proper distance can be maintained.
    Sarah has been absent from her job at Miller and Rhoads for five days now, but she will be back on Monday. She can’t afford to stay any longer. As it is, they will begin carrying three new lines of china during her absence, all of them informal: Pietri, heavy painted pottery from Italy, covered with fanciful animals and fish; Provence, oversize French china patterned in wild flowers; and Hacienda-Ware from the Southwest, all earth colors (terra-cotta, sagebrush, sunset, and dawn, ha!), which looks like hell in Sarah’s opinion. All of it looks like hell. So does that new girl they’ve hired to “help” Sarah with the expanded china department, a girl with rat’s-nest hair and dead-white makeup and some kindof a degree in “design.” Sarah knows she will hate everything this girl likes.
    What Sarah loves with all her heart is her mother’s delicate bone china right over there in the breakfront, china so thin you can practically see through it. It will just kill her to split up the set with Hubert, who is totally unable to appreciate it. Well, a salad fork is missing, no surprise. Also two butter knives—no,
three
butter knives!
    Out the window, Sarah sees Everett Sharp drive past in his little green car. Everett Sharp is the undertaker who buried Daddy two days ago. Sarah had lost touch with him since their high school days, but she was pleasantly surprised by