“She always took Edward’s side against Father. I can see her now at Sunday dinner—a huge dinner, you know, chicken and ice cream and all the fixings, and mother sitting there, flushed from the cooking in a white frilly blouse, her eyes very bright blue, saying that Edward thought there ought to be a ballfield down on the other side of the tracks, as if God had spoken.”

“And what did your father say to that?”

“Asked for more chicken,” and Bel smiled. It was all so clear and bright in her mind as if she were seeing it on a screen. “Or else Father gave a lecture on the kind of people who chose to live in slums and wouldn’t work themselves into decent surroundings. Often it seemed as if he wanted to bait Edward, did it on purpose. There was never any peace,” she said, and now she was not looking at a bright screen, she was inside the old pain and wishing Henry would drive faster, drive her out of it.

“I shouldn’t have started to remember all this,” she said, lighting a cigarette. Her hands were shaking.

“I don’t know,” Henry kept his eyes on the road, but he reached over and laid his right hand on her knee. “Maybe it helps.” But what helped was this touch, was this contact, as it always did, and she squeezed his hand hard. The terrible thing with families, she thought, was the aching tearing love that never could express itself simply like this. All through her childhood she had looked and looked at Edward, as if through a pane of glass, but she could never hug him. It was never simple.

“I suppose you and Edward were quite close,” Henry said, giving her hand a gentle squeeze before he let it go.

“I don’t know. I used to follow him around, down by the river where he and the Donovans had a secret place. It seems to me I was always calling, ‘Edward, where are you?’ and often he didn’t answer. After all, little sisters are a nuisance. Everybody knows that.”

“But you minded.”

“Oh, Henry.” She said what she had never said to him before. “I felt I was always outside everything.” And then she stopped, amazed at what she saw. “But that’s what Edward felt too. Only he could break through in his own way, and I didn’t have any way.” She realized that she had without even being aware of it, let down the walls she had maintained all these years, that the walls were sliding away. She could talk to Henry about Edward, at last. “I keep forgetting,” she said, wrenched back to the reason, “what this is all about, why we’re doing this.” She peered out through the fog, in a panic suddenly. “What’s the time?”

“There’s ten minutes—take it easy, honey.”