She held it open and handed Vera the pencil. Vera guided the pencil in awkward motions over the page. Her muscles on the right side, although recovering, still weren’t operating as they had before the stroke. When she put the pencil back on the nightstand, Violet turned the notepad toward herself and read what Vera had written.

“Oh, in the back here?” she asked as she paged forward in the notepad, past blank pages, until she was almost to the last one. She held the open notepad out to Vivian, who had crossed her ankles and placed her pocketbook in her lap.

“Hmm?” Vivian said, but accepted the notepad, laying it on top of her purse.

She looked up at Violet.

“She wants you to read that,” Violet offered with a shrug, and then turned to Vera. “Are you hungry? Can I get you something to eat?”

Vera offered the grotesque half smile again as her gaze went to the notepad.

“Oh, yes.” Vivian handed it back to Violet, who opened it to the front again, where there was blank space to write.

“Some toast,” Violet read, after Vera had picked up the pencil and labored over another bit of writing on the page. “All right, you just sit tight, and I’ll be right back.” She handed the notepad back to Vivian, who leafed through to locate the message in the back again.

As Violet’s pumps clacked across the floor and out of the room, Vivian started to read. As she read, she realized that her sister had written her an apology. An apology for exposing the secret about Edward’s first wife.

Chapter 50

It’d been just after Halloween, and Vera McGinty Irwin had been sitting on Zella Johnson’s front porch in the late afternoon sunshine up in Akron. Zella went around with Forest Sadler, one of Wally’s drinking and gambling buddies. The one who’d been fired from Freedlander’s department store for being a drunk Santa Claus. Vera and Zella had been laughing about Wooster.

“They’re country club people, the Wooster relations, you know how they are.”

“I do, I do,” Vera said, remembering the year and a half she spent taking care of the Dean and Thompson kids. It’d been the height of the Great Depression but Edith Dean and Beverly Thompson came home from shopping in town, bragging about how Beulah Bechtel’s was selling every dress for just $14.95. They’d bought two each! Vera would’ve had to work forty hours just to make enough to buy one of those dresses.

“We’re not the cousins the Reeds and Millers like to parade around, if you get me.” Zella said “we” like she was talking about more people, but she might’ve just meant herself. “How ’bout a drink?”

“Sure,” Vera said.

The screen door slammed as Zella disappeared into the house. It was too warm for November, and Vera removed the cardigan sweater she’d been wearing and let the late afternoon sun warm her bare arms. The whole day had been a lazy one, and Vera wasn’t about to ruin that with the washing or housework. She stretched her legs out on the steps in front of her and leaned back onto the heels of her hands. A leftover Halloween jack-o’-lantern sat just inches from her fingers, grinning out at the street. It looked a little like Vivy used to before she got her pretty new dentures. Vera smirked to herself, but the smirk quickly faded. She took a deep breath and blew it out through puffed cheeks. She didn’t quite know how to feel about Vivian, her husband, their marriage, and this new fly in the ointment of it all. The fly Vivy didn’t even know about. Vera’s thumb ran back and forth across a nail head sticking out of one of the porch planks. Sticking out there like her nagging thoughts about her younger sister.