narrowed her eyes and grinned at Emmyconspiratorially—the way an older sister might. She thanked Nana for such loving and motherly advice, and slammed the door as she left.
Nana had asked Emmy where her mother had gotten the dress.
Emmy hadn’t known. Sometimes new clothes just appeared in Mum’s wardrobe.
“Don’t you wonder where she gets them?” Nana asked.
“She says the people she works with give them to her when they tire of them,” Emmy answered.
“Sure they do,” Nana muttered, and then she proceeded to show Emmy how to sew a perfect satin stitch.
An hour later, while Emmy worked on a dresser scarf and Nana showed Julia her wooden box full of colorful skeins of embroidery floss, Mum returned exuberant, and with a fancy black uniform over her arm.
Nana went pale. “They hired you?”
Emmy was astonished at the fear in her grandmother’s voice.
“Don’t act so surprised,” Mum said. “I bloody well know how to boil water.”
“I’m sure there are a lot of things you know how to do,” Nana said, softly. It was almost a whisper, but not quite.
Mum turned from laying the uniform over the back of a kitchen chair. “What did you say?”
“Nothing.”
Mum calmly walked to the front door and opened it wide. “I want you out.”
Emmy had looked from one woman to the other; surely she had missed something.
Nana’s lips flattened to a thin line. She slapped the wooden box of floss shut and slid it toward Emmy. “Youwork on those stitches, Emmeline,” she had said. “It will give you something constructive to do while your mother is out earning her keep.”
Nana kissed Julia good-bye and left. It was the last time Emmy saw her. Four months later she died of a massive heart attack. A telegram came to the flat from Mum’s uncle Stuart, Nana’s older brother and a man Emmy had never met, bearing the news of her passing. Mum read the telegram, lowered the piece of paper to the kitchen table, and then went into her room. Emmy didn’t see her for hours. When she emerged, Emmy was full of questions. Julia, at five, had only one. Where was Nana now? But Mum didn’t answer any of Emmy’s questions. And to Julia, she said Nana was in heaven where everything was perfect, so she ought to feel right at home. Emmy didn’t understand what her grandmother and Mum had fought about that last day. As far as she could tell, Mum had been hired to be a kitchen maid, and that was exactly what she became. Nana made it seem as though Mum was doing something bad in exchange for her new job but Mrs. Billingsley wasn’t running a brothel; she was a respected widow. And there were no men in Annie Downtree’s life; not since Julia’s father had walked out on her a year before.
Not long after Nana died, Emmy was at the kitchen table embroidering asters onto a pillowcase. Mum, on her way out the door to go to work, had stopped to stare at the colorful collection of flosses in the box and then whacked the lid shut. Emmy kept the box in her and Julia’s room after that.
Julia now appeared in the doorway as Emmy studied her reflection in the mirror. “I want to come to the bridal shop with you.”
Emmy reached for her hairbrush on the dresser. “I need you to stay here.”
“I don’t want to.”
“I’ll be back soon, Jewels. I promise,” Emmy said, running the brush through her hair with quick strokes.
“Take me with you.”
Emmy replaced the brush, and then knelt by her sister and took her hands. “I’ll only be gone for a little bit. I’ll be back before you know it.”
“But it will be dark soon.”
“And I will be back before dark.”
Julia’s fear-filled eyes glistened with stubborn tears. Nights were the hardest. The sirens, when they whined, nearly only whined at night. They sounded like the agonized wail of the desolate.
“Be a love and get Nana’s box of embroidery floss,” Emmy said.
“Why?”
“I’ll show you.”
Julia walked to Emmy’s bed, dropped to her knees, and