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pats her hand. “We’ll all do it together, when we’re coming into New Orleans, like Charlie requested. You shouldn’t have to deal with it all by yourself.”
    Oh yes I should, Harriet’s thinking as Courtney signs the check. “Wait,” she says too late. “Let’s go Dutch on this.”
    â€œOh heavens no.” Courtney waves to the waiter. “My treat.”
    In school, Harriet remembers, Courtney was poor, too, like she was. It’s nice that she’s apparently gotten rich now, she always wanted it. She was always so concerned about the “right” thing to wear or the “right” thing to do. Now she epitomizes the right thing. And yet she’s still nice, too, she really is, just as nice as she was when she wasa girl. Harriet remembers Courtney as wearing badges all the time which identified her as helpful in various ways: freshman orientation leader, student government representative, dorm counselor, Honor Court. She remembers Courtney staying up all night with Baby on a bad drunk, Courtney vacuuming their dormitory lounge. And Courtney’s brown eyes still look out on the world with that same level gaze; her smile is just as frank and open. Harriet fights back an impulse to throw herself into Courtney’s capable manicured hands, to say, for instance, Okay now, Courtney,
what about me? Whatever happened to me?
    But Courtney is asking her something. “Weren’t you from some place fairly close to school? Was it Lexington? Or Charlottesville?”
    â€œStaunton,” Harriet says.
    â€œOh yes, of course, I remember Staunton.” Courtney is so polite that it’s impossible to know whether this is true or not. “Staunton is a
charming
town. Historic, isn’t it?”
    â€œYes,” Harriet says. “Very. Yes, it is. Historic, I mean.”
    â€œAnd you went back there right after college?”
    â€œYes.”
    â€œAnd you never married, you smart girl?”
    Harriet knows that Courtney is just saying it this way to be nice.
    â€œNo.” Something more seems called for here, some further explanation, but Harriet can’t think what it could possibly be. “I always thought I would,” she says, “but then I didn’t, somehow. You know.”
    Courtney nods, but of course she
doesn’t
know. “But really, Harriet, here you are, still looking exactly the same—it’s eerie, honestly! How do you manage it? What’s your secret? And you still live in the very town where you grew up . . . That’s unusual, I think, at least by today’s standards. So, whatever have you been doing all these years? Tell me about yourself.”
    Harriet drains her glass. “I don’t have any secrets,” she says apologetically, standing, a little wobbly. “There’s really nothing to tell.”
    Nothing she
can
tell anyway. It all began in her mother’s little sewing shop on Water Street in Staunton so many years ago, and in many ways, she’s never really left. Oh, she has her own house now, of course, on Confederate Hill up near the hospital, she’s been there for years and she loves it, really she does, with everything arranged just the way she likes. Flowered wallpaper in the dining room, stenciled borders in the hall (she did them herself), and the cutest little Chinese red library with a gas log fireplace, everyone comments on it. Her mother’s old table Singer sewing machine sits in the library now, holding a lamp and a Boston fern.
    But Harriet still gets the funniest feeling in her stomach every time she drives past the boarded-up sewing shop on Water Street. She would feel better if it were a yogurt shop or a travel agency or, well,
anything
. As it is now, Harriet has the awful sense that their life—her life—is still going on behind that blackened, dusty pane, those ramshackle boards, that nothing has ever changed.
    T HE STOREFRONT ROOM was