Two Shades of Morning by Janice Daugharty Page A

strongest in her palette of shades.
    I closed the door and dashed P.W.’s shirt to a chair. “My God! What am I doing?” I picked up the shirt again and took it to the kitchen, drew a sink full of water and dunked it.
    P.W.’s good white shirt, his only white shirt. I’d used too much Clorox and failed to rinse it out, then ironed it. A scorched brand of the iron showed below the back yoke: proof of my general slack. I hoped his mama never saw it. Now, when he went to church and funerals he had to keep on his wool suit coat—his only suit—hot or not. My face flamed thinking about the dress in our closet, in plain view because I’d said it was old, the price tag buried in the last of our coffee grounds at the bottom of the garbage. If I’d only left the price tag on and tucked it down the sleeve to wear the dress to church, I could have taken it back—the approval plan—and wouldn’t have had to pay for it, and I could have bought P.W. a new shirt, maybe even a suit, for what the dress had cost. But I couldn’t have claimed I’d never worn the dress with a straight face. Why did I always have to do what was right, not what was sensible? I scrubbed at the scorched place and it looked darker wet.
    I dressed and ate some smelly leftover broccoli. I ate it, hating it, but knowing it was good for me and tasted nothing. Then I scribbled a note to P.W. telling him where I would be, but realized he’d probably see me at the barn when he came by. So I scratched it and simply wrote “I love you,” because I needed to make the words. It was good to write something I knew, something that wouldn’t fly at me in the face of unreality. And yet I couldn’t touch love anymore than death, those two intangibles so powerful and dim.
    The cuckoo clock ticked, the foolish bird poked his head through the miniature brown door with a vibrating call, and popped back inside.
    Maybe this time I’ll be through with her, I thought, walking along the road in a flurry of red-winged maple seeds. She might die this very evening and free me. I wished I could turn around and go to Mama’s and Aunt Birdie’s to eat with them and let my shoulders drop. But already I could feel myself pulling away from that phase and pressing on toward Sibyl in her shell house—same as the cuckoo bird.
    * * * * *

Chapter 6
    But the house didn’t feel like a shell anymore; Sibyl was warm, and I could feel my hiked shoulders drop. Maybe she had change. I started to recognize the scope of her imagination and appreciate it, pushing back bad thoughts to the walls now papered in overlaid blue-and-beige plaid. As I followed behind, she told me that the blue picking up on beige throughout the house was called Windsor. The floors, stripped of white carpets, were heartpine planks, laid with wooden pegs, or what looked like wooden pegs. Mae told me on the sly that “they’s nailed down just like any other floor.” She said it as if she took great pride in at least knowing that wooden pegs concealed the nails. “I knows a heap they don’t think I knows,” she added, glancing around at Sibyl who was answering a phone call in the kitchen.
    The contemporary furniture had been replaced with antiques of oak and pine, primitive and quaint, knick-knacks and all, like turning a page in a decorator’s magazine. Beanpot lamps and hook rugs warmed the spots once held by cut-glass lamps and white carets; paintings and tables and chairs, all bought for the right blend of old-but-new. Kerosene lamps, fruit jars, and wire baskets heaped with fake eggs were arranged inconspicuously to be conspicuous. I wondered how many like relics had been bulldozed to Bony Branchwith the farmhouse. Even a screened pie safe, like Miss Lettie’s, but with a copper-screen countenance, now cater-cornered a nook of the dining room. Delicate china and stainless steel cookware, all gone, and in their places were earthen crockery and polished copper. Anything lending to the look of elegant living