“. . . A titch of lemon,” Lis sang back under her breath, directing her imitation at the dolls perched on a continuous row of shelves just below the kitchen’s beamed ceiling. Miss Sorrel had begun placing dolls there back in the day when she had no trouble hopping up on a chair to do so. Now Lis did the hopping for both of them, along with any light and heavy lifting that needed doing around the house.

Miss Sorrel’s dolls stared ahead, impassive, miffed perhaps that Lis never lavished them with more than perfunctory attention. At one end of the shelf were Victorian dolls with bisque heads, creamy complexions, glass eyes, Cupid’s bow mouths, and stiff wigs. At the other end sat bald, celluloid baby dolls, placid and patient, their painted eyes forever open. Once a week Miss Sorrel supervised as Lis climbed from the chair to the table so she could give each doll a thorough dusting.

The kitchen dolls were not Miss Sorrel’s best. Her Madame Alexander Alice in Wonderland with a hand-painted cloth face and yellow-yarn wig was tucked in beside a pair of rare Cherokee rag dolls in a pair of glass china cabinets in the dining room where the rest of her rarest and most valuable dolls resided. Also in a dining room cabinet was a shelf of porcelain dolls Lis’s mother had made herself—Miss Sorrel dolls, as they were known to collectors. Their bodies were soft, and the legs and arms unglazed bisque porcelain. But their heads were why the Miss Sorrel dolls were considered art, albeit folk art: each face was a carefully sculpted and painted portrait of a real child. The Miss Sorrel dolls were as valued for their eerily realistic features as for their scarcity. The first ones had been portraits of Lis and her sister, Janey.

Though Miss Sorrel had long ago given up making Miss Sorrel dolls, she kept herself busy with “the projects”: temporary residents, aged and injured dolls that had been brought to her to be repaired and refreshed. Those were carefully wrapped in acid-free paper and tucked into plastic bins, each doll catalogued and shelved in the workroom at the back of the house. There, Miss Sorrel worked with her longtime friend and next-door neighbor Evelyn Dumont to gently restore them. The women went through mounds of Q-tips cleaning them. Restringing legs and arms, reweaving and sometimes replacing wigs, resetting glass eyes, de-stinking plastic bodies, and doing whatever else was needed while preserving each doll’s authenticity.

Binty, Miss Sorrel’s aging Irish setter, wheezed hot doggie breath on Lis’s ankles. Miss Sorrel used to brush Binty and save the dog’s once rich, lustrous strawberry-blond hair to make wigs for dolls.