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follow his example.
    I told the girls I was leaving, but they hardly even blinked at the news. They loved me wildly unless George was around, and then they could barely remember who I was. Such is the fickle nature of the five-year-old. I was grateful to be able to leave without a sobbing daisy pulling at my ankles. It happens sometimes.
    I wanted to stop off at the liquor store on the way home and buy the wine that Taffy liked, but all I could remember was that it was white and French and prohibitively expensive. I wasn’t sure what kind of fruit she might want or what she ate for breakfast. As I tried to remember, I forgot that my sister drove me crazy, and instead gave myself over to feeling bad that we hadn’t been closer over the years. We could make lists together. I would bring in whatever she wanted. I would buy flowers for her room and make sure the sheets were fresh. If there had been time, I would have cleaned the oven and rearranged the linen closet and turned over every cushion on every chair and vacuumed it. I was feeling the onset of a kind of nervousness that tended to manifest itself in weird and unnecessary cleaning. After all, my sister was getting divorced, my daughter was getting married. It was enough to make me want to put down new paper on the kitchen shelves.



chapter four

    T HE VACUUM NEEDED TO BE REPLACED . I T STILL MANAGED to suck up a certain amount of dirt, but for the past year it had made, simultaneously, a horrible, high-pitched whine and a loud clacking that no amount of repair could get rid of. I could hear it before I even opened the door. There were no signs that my sister had arrived. It was only Woodrow and Kay sitting at the kitchen table, a stack of magazines between them.
    “Who’s vacuuming?” I said, raising my voice over the roaring that seemed to be coming from down the hall.
    “Mr. Kelly,” Woodrow said. Mr. Kelly was the plumber who had been brought over to assess how much pressure the crumbling foundation was putting on our pipes. “He’s almost finished.”
    “George told me one of your guys was going to vacuum.”
    “Kevin was all set to go, he was plugged in and everything, but Mr. Kelly just took over. He says he loves to vacuum.” Woodrow was practically having to scream. I hadn’t thought about it before the vacuum was on, but he was a soft-spoken man. He waved me over to come and sit down at the table.
    “I was showing Woodrow a few dresses,” Kay said. She held up a picture in a magazine. It looked like a costume for A Midsummer Night’s Dream , a blond nymphet tied up in panels of lace.There were a dozen different kinds of flowers woven into her hair. The dress seemed more appropriate for an ascension than for a marriage.
    “I think she can go either way on the sleeves,” Woodrow said.
    “What do you think of sleeves?” my daughter asked me.
    I didn’t have a quick answer. I was still reviewing the questions: Why was someone who charged thirty dollars an hour for plumbing running my vacuum? Why was the contractor hashing out the issue of sleeves for a wedding dress that wasn’t making an appearance for at least another six months? And, on behalf of my husband, why wasn’t Kay at work? “Why aren’t you at work?” I said.
    “Markus Jones came in first thing this morning. It was like a miracle. I walked into the office and there he was, waiting for me. I ran him through his testimony, passed off some paperwork, picked up a stack of magazines, and here I am.”
    “Then help me get ready for Taffy.”
    Kay looked puzzled, almost hurt but not quite. “Don’t you want to see which dresses I like?” She ran her finger over another page. The picture reminded me of Glinda the Good Witch in the scene where she shows up in Oz to tell Dorothy it’s time to go home. It was a dress that cried out for a wand.
    “Has the wedding been moved up? Are you getting married this weekend?” It was something about the sound of the vacuum. It made my nerves