“You’re welcome.” Mr. Harris sat in the big gold chair under the window, reading the Burlington paper. He had two other newspapers stacked up beside him. Job hunting. He’d run a car dealership in Cookshire before the accident. All those cars still sat on the lot, shiny, only a couple of miles on their odometers. No one would ever own those cars. No one would ever drive them. They’d rust, the tires crack and give out, they’d turn to dust where they sat.

“How fast is your batch coming?” Muncie asked, leaning around me to see how much wool I’d carded so far. “I bet I can comb more than you can.”

“I don’t want to race, Muncie,” I said.

Carding wool reminded me of brushing doll’s hair. I didn’t like that, either.

I had a doll once. She came dressed in pale blue overalls with elastic around her ankles and tiny pink flowers on her shirt. She was a gift from my mother, given to me when we moved in with Gran and Gramp.

The doll’s fine hair matched my own, and my mother’s, too. I guess that’s why she chose her. The whole time of my mother’s illness, I kept the doll perfect.

I was six when my mother died. I hardly remember anything before that. There aren’t pictures. But I do remember that doll.

Mostly Gran and Gramp kept me out of the back bedroom during my mother’s illness. Then one day they let me in.

I was so eager to see her. I burst in, raced over to the bed. I touched her hand. Cold. I’d expected to find my mother sitting up, deep-voiced and smiling. Her withered body barely rippled the sheets. I stepped back, terrified. That was not my mother. That could not be my mother.

Her foul breath rattled in her throat like wind worrying a sheet on the line.

Something changed in the room. I felt it inside my chest. The air weighed too much, and then it weighed nothing at all.

Gran said, “She’s gone.”

Someone, a neighbor I think, pulled the sheet up, covering her face, her patchy bald head.

Someone else reached for my hand.

I broke away and ran up the stairs. I hid in the knee-wall under the eaves, taking my doll with me.

Huddled among the cobwebs and the mouse droppings, I cowered, trembling for hours.

Gramp found me. He pulled me out, and after calming me, he plunked me into the bathtub. I came clean, more or less, but my doll didn’t. Filth caked her clothing, her hair tangled hopelessly.

Days later, while Gran and Gramp attended my mother’s funeral, Aunt May stayed with me, sitting silently in the kitchen.

I spent the whole morning shivering in my room, though the house wasn’t cold. I just kept shaking inside. I dragged my brush through the doll’s hair, over and over, working away at the snarls until the last hair lay smooth.

But I’d pulled so much hair out in the process, the doll was nearly bald. Her rubber scalp showed dull orange. The dark holes of hair shafts curved around the scalp in a pattern. The doll’s baldness terrified me. I wrapped it in a pillowcase and buried it in the trash.