Auntie Ruth’s visits had an effect on Kay’s mother; they made her girlish. The two of them set up folding cots on the screened porch so they could talk half the night away. They made themselves twin cotton dresses with wide circular skirts and wore them downtown. Once they dipped gumdrops in lemon extract, arranged them on top of a chiffon cake and set them alight at the table. Another day they dropped in on an old friend of Kay’s mother who told them she had had an exhausting morning-she had rinsed out her shoe laces and brushed her teeth. They couldn’t stop laughing at this, repeating it time and again and inventing variations. “I’m so tired, I just washed my feet and ironed a hanky.” “I’m just done in, I’ve blown my nose and changed my underpants.” On and on they went. Afternoons in the back yard, drinking glasses of iced tea, they speculated on their niece Ethel’s hurry-up marriage. “You only have to put two and two together,” Kay’s mother said knowingly. “You only have to put one and one together,” Auntie Ruth hooted, pitching them into spasms of hilarity.

At the end, though, there was trouble between them. Kay’s mother lay in the hospital for four months with cancer of the lungs, this despite the fact that she had never smoked a cigarette in her life. Her sister Ruth sent her a card every single day, but in all those months she never once came to visit. “I can’t, honey,” she said to Kay on the telephone, speaking up because of the long distance. “Since your Uncle Nat passed on I just can’t face hospitals, they get me down so.” Kay’s mother refused at last to open the cards. She was bitter. She made her daughters promise they would have nothing to do with Auntie Ruth in the future, and they did promise. But, in fact, it was a promise that none of them has kept, or ever intended to.

It grieved Kay, though, that her mother should die with her heart hardened and set. She seemed to have forgotten all the good times, how the two sisters, she and Auntie Ruth, would move the sewing machine out on the porch and, in the space of an afternoon, recover a chair or make a new set of kitchen curtains. They made these things for almost nothing, cutting them out of remnants they scrambled for in back-street fabric outlets.