“ ‘Hie thee home to me,’ ” she would say to Arthur openly or secretly to Lancelot, and she went so deep into believing, it was hard to come back and be Rosalie again. Sometimes she wondered if she could have been onstage like Father had she only looked like Mother. It still seemed possible then that she might come into her beauty. If she did, she’d run away and join a troupe and be someone else every day of her life. They’d played this game in what Henry called the green light of the forest, and it kept them out of the sad, sorry house where children died.

One day Lancelot had been sent off into the trees on a quest. Five minutes later he’d reappeared. “Rosalie! June!” he’d called. “Come see!” Between the path and the forest was an open space that led all the way to the swamp and every inch of it was covered in wild lilies. It was Henry’s idea that they pick some for Mother, an extravagance of lilies, as many as they could carry, to overwhelm her with the sheer mass of beauty.

“How lovely!” Mother had said and immediately taken them in armloads, more than she could carry in a single trip, to the graveyard.

Henry’s own grave remained in England. There was no way to bring him home.

—

Grief has destroyed Rosalie’s parents right before her eyes. No wonder Edwin was born so anxious. No wonder Asia was born so angry. It seems to Rosalie that God has reached down and scooped out the middle of her family as casually as if He were eating a watermelon.

iii

If all these deaths made June stolid, and Edwin anxious, and Asia angry, then what of Rosalie?

Rosalie has become cautious. Since Henry’s death, she hasn’t spoken above a whisper. She’s the only child who suffered neither cholera nor smallpox, but one’s luck will always run out eventually. Henry Byron’s did.

She still goes to the Mount Zion church with Mother, but now it’s a part she’s playing, the pious daughter. This is not her first falling-out with God. One Sunday morning, when she was eight, she overheard two women talking about her. Such a shame about Rosalie, one had said, her voice low and sympathetic. Rosalie didn’t understand at first. What about her was such a shame?

But then the other woman—And her mother so beautiful!

No girl knows she’s ugly until someone tells her so and every ugly girl remembers the someone who first told her. Rosalie had gone home and looked in the mirror, hoping the women were mistaken. She couldn’t really assess her own face and this kept hope alive until the years brought further confirmation. Still, it hurt and it seemed to Rosalie that God shouldn’t have allowed her to learn this in His very own church. He shouldn’t have made her look so much like someone she was not. Or, what if she looked exactly like who she was? What if it turned out she wasn’t beautiful on the inside either?