For a long while afterwards, they sat at the kitchen table, the coffee cooling in the tiny china cups her sister had inherited from their mother, smoking cigarettes and staring out the window as a flurry of slushy snow began to clump down from the gray sky.

“It’s the only way,” her sister told her. “I just can’t believe she did what she did. And now of all times.”

“Well, it’s done.”

“You’re a good mother,” Dottie said then. “It’s what a good mother would do.”

Evelyn could only nod at this.

“When’s she come home?”

“I don’t know. A few days, I guess.”

“Well, we’ll get over there to see her as soon as Tom gets home. Anyway, you did the right thing. Anyone could see that.”

“Why do you keep saying that?”

“Well, honey, it’s just that you look so sad.”

“But I’m not,” Evelyn said, a sharp edge in her voice now. “I’m fine. I know I did the right thing. Helen knows it too. I think you’re the one who thinks different about it.”

“I don’t though, Lynnie. You know I don’t. I’m always on your side.”

“It sure doesn’t seem like it.”

“Now wait a minute,” her sister said. “I opened my home to you and to Helen. I’ve done right by you both.”

“All right, all right,” Evelyn said. “Fine. You’ve done right.”

“Well, I have.”

“I said all right, Dottie. Can I just sit here for a minute, please?”

They visited Helen later that evening, the hospital’s halls filled with the muted confusion of murmured and indistinct conversations punctuated by muffled squeaks and clicks as if the long white spaces were filled not with human activity but with the movement and industry of insects.

Helen’s room was on the second floor. Her aunt had given the girl a few issues of Movie Show and Life and Photoplay and she laid one of these aside as they entered the room. Rita Hayworth sucking a soda fountain drink through a pair of straws.

“How are you feeling, honey?” Dottie asked her.

“All right,” Helen said. “I’m ready to go home now.”

“Is that what the doctor told you?” This from her mother.

“Not yet.”

“We’ll need to wait and see then,” Evelyn said. “Probably tomorrow. Depends on what the doctor says.”

“I want to go home, Mama.”

“I know. And we will.”