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for sure.”
    “Yes, that’s for sure,” said Lena. She suddenly saw Pa as he had been the day of her wedding. He was smiling. It was so unusual that she mentioned it to Will at the time. “Your dad seems happy,” she said.
    Will grinned and nodded. “Yeah, he thinks I did pretty good marrying you.”
    “Well, he’s right. You did,” Lena retorted smugly.
    Later, as Pa was leaving the reception, he slipped a few bills into her hand and murmured awkwardly, “Get yourself something nice now.”
    It was hard to believe he was gone.
    Lena finished the cup of coffee, kissed Julia on the cheek, and left her to the comfort of her cat. As she walked slowly home, she wondered over Julia and Gertrude. No two sisters could be more different. All the qualities that usually got mixed up in people, the good and the bad, the light and the dark, had been separated; all that was heavy and dark had fallen on Gertrude, and all that was delicate and light had gone into Julia. There was something of the fragile aristocrat about Julia, even though she’d grown plump around the middle over the years, and nothing, Lena thought with distaste, but the thick peasant about Gertrude. The resemblance between them was apparent only in the squareness of their faces and the color of their eyes—a rare cloudy shade of hazel. But with the color, the resemblance ended. The expression in Gertrude’s eyes alternated between the dullness of a fish and a bovine fierceness like that of a placid cow roused to defend her calf. In Julia’s eyes there flickered a girlishness that was at times becoming, even charming, and at other times disconcerting, emanating as it did from a face creased with the myriad fine lines of old age. Lena wondered at those times, where had she been, this old lady, while her body aged, not to have matured at the same rate on the inside. But these were fleeting impressions and Lena did not dwell on them except to attribute Julia’s manner to the fact of her spinsterhood and never having children of her own.
    Lena shuddered. She was not a spinster, but she was thirty-four and still childless. There was no point to a life without children. Now that she was getting older, she felt it more painfully than ever. Anyway, Lena would never be girlish again. She already felt old as the hills.
    Lena entered her own house gratefully. It wasn’t much, this house, but she had taken pains to make it comfortable and pretty, sewing curtains for every window and covers for the old furniture. She kept the wood floors shining the way her mother had taught her: cold water and vinegar. Nothing else. Scrub them with that every week—the wood bleached out pale and glowing. She never had to wax them. She couldn’t afford wax anyway.
    Lena lit her stove, put on the coffee pot, then went down to the cellar for a jar of her sweet rhubarb sauce, which, besides the bread and cookies, was all she had left in the house to eat. There was still plenty of coffee and sugar, thank the Lord, but in a few days she did not know what she was going to do. There was no money. Without Will working there would be no money.
    She took down a bowl, and as she unscrewed the cap on the jar of sauce, the jar slipped out of her hands and fell to the floor. Half the contents spilled out. She grabbed a rag, sopped it in the bucket of water in the sink, wrung it out and got down on her hands and knees to wipe up the pink, sweet mess. She was on her hands and knees again, on all the floors she had cleaned and scrubbed since she was old enough to tote a bucket of water—first for her mother and grandmother, then for all the people she’d been hired out to for pennies a week and a place to stay—up to her elbows in water, scalding hot or freezing cold, depending on the job to be done and the whim of the lady of the house. Lena was a young woman and her hands were ugly from work. But this, at least, was her floor.
    She began to cry. This floor was the reason she put up with Will