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cupboard expecting to find her mother’s china there, and each time she didn’t, she’d get upset and think that it had been stolen. Finally my mother gave up and put the china back in the cupboard. After that, Sapphy managed to break all her dishes one by one until the only thing left was the gravy boat. From then on, whenever Sapphy went looking for one of her dishes to have sherbert in, we’d give her the gravy boat and explain that it was the only thing clean at the moment. She’d laugh and say, “Well, I guess there’s no law that says a person can’t eat sherbert out of a gravy boat if she wants to.”
    I left Sapphy in the kitchen eating her sherbertand looking over the new coupons, and I got back to my homework. Pretty soon Marge came out with her jacket on and her purse slung over her shoulder. “That wash will be ready to go in the dryer in another fifteen minutes, and then you’ve got to remember to take it out half an hour after that. Don’t leave it sitting in the dryer or it’ll wrinkle. You hear?”
    I heard her, but I wouldn’t be going to the laundry shed in fifteen minutes. I knew Old Gray swept the shed out last thing every afternoon before he knocked off for the day, and I wasn’t about to risk running into him.
    After Marge left, I went over my math, checking all my answers twice before moving on to the spelling words for the week. A little while later I heard my mother get up and start to take a shower. She didn’t sing in the shower the way my father used to. He’d bellow at the top of his lungs. The morning of the day he left, I remember hearing him in the shower singing a country-western song about playing poker with a deck of fifty-one cards.
    I heard the water go off, and a few minutes later my mother came out with her head wrapped up in a towel like a turban, a menthol Kool danglingfrom her lower lip. She squinted to keep the smoke out of her eyes.
    â€œMarge gone?” she asked.
    â€œWho’s Marge?” said Sapphy.
    My mother took the cigarette out of her mouth, bent down, and kissed Sapphy’s forehead.
    â€œMarge is your nurse, Sapph,” she explained patiently. “She comes and takes care of you because you had an accident at the factory.”
    â€œIs that what happened to my hair?” asked Sapphy, reaching up and touching the uneven tufts of stiff hair that stuck up like patches of crabgrass all over her head. “I swear it wasn’t like this when I went to work this morning. I look like I stuck my pinkie in a socket.”
    Sapphy was always the funniest of the “gem sisters.” After the accident she still said funny things, but it wasn’t the same. She wasn’t the same. Her eyes didn’t sparkle; they were flat and dull, like the eyes of the bluegills my father and I brought home from the pond on the stringer. And when I talked, even though she still listened, she didn’t tilt her head to the side like a crow anymore. She couldn’t really hear me, at least not the way she used to.
    My mom opened the fridge, pulled out the bottom drawer with her foot, and took out a head of pale-green iceberg lettuce. Resting her burning cigarette on the edge of the sink, she tore the lettuce up and threw it in a bowl, poured bottled dressing over it, then boiled a pot of water to make macaroni and cheese. My mother used to cook real dinners back in Battle Creek. The house would start smelling good around four o’clock in the afternoon, and when suppertime rolled around at six, there’d be pot roast or pork chops or a platter of spaghetti and meatballs sitting on the table, sending up a cloud of steam. My mom always served up my dad’s plate first, and sometimes he’d be ready for seconds before she’d even had a chance to serve herself. He loved her cooking, and so did I. I wondered sometimes about that cashier from the MicroMart he ran off with and whether she