Now, two days left—forty-seven costumes completed. Emily felt satisfied and proud just looking at them: the ten wool blends with braid trim, the fifteen corduroy (the nap had been hard to handle), the seven plaid skirts with piping, and a row of plush capes with gracefully draping hoods. Now, with the end in sight she had abandoned the simple Folkways patterns they had given her and begun to copy a dress from the old Sears catalog, with a high-standing collar, a square yoke in front, and shoulder capes. She had made it twice, once in a royal blue, and now she was almost finished with her favorite, a lovely fawn corduroy with double feather stitching around the hem. Secretly, at the beginning of the week, she had left off taking the little pills, and now, Thursday, the twitchy, jumpy feeling was almost gone and she could just sit and sew, enjoying the weight of the skirt in her lap, the soft hand of the fabric, and the small sounds in the room—the tiny tap-tap of the needle against her thimble, the rustle of the catalog pages, and her mother whispering the names of horse-drawn conveyances: runabout, cabriolet, surrey, phaeton. Through the ripply, old glass of the tall windows the green of the grass and bushes looked smeary and distant, and Emily could almost forget it was just an overgrown yard on Dawson Street and imagine a meadow with wide paths in graceful curves.

Then all at once up the walkway came Lucille, dragging an ice chest on wheels and a canvas bag of clean sheets. She set Ned down in Mrs. Nash’s lap and grabbed up the lovely fawn corduroy skirt, snatching the thread out of the needle.

“Horse, horse,” said Ned.

“…that little top buggy, and the prettiest little brown-and-white pony you ever saw, Apple Jack was his name,” said Mrs. Nash.

“Emily, what are you thinking?” said Lucille. “You can’t be hand-sewing feather stitching around three yards of hem with less than forty-eight hours to go, can’t you see that? It won’t show from a distance anyway, you should be hot-gluing this braid on here.”

“Horse,” said Ned.

“Oh, Emily!” said Lucille. “Look at this, you can’t let Mama sit on the upholstered furniture, you have to take her to the bathroom, you know she won’t go by herself and, Lord, Ned wet, too, and we don’t even know who peed on who!”

“Whom,” whispered Emily.