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doorway giving onto a small railed roof facing south. Papa had insisted that Charles include the veranda so Mother could step out and enjoy fresh air and sunshine whenever she felt the need. But Mother hardly used the veranda anymore. Its door stood open now throwing sunshine across the varnished floor of the room where she lay upon the immense sleigh-design bed in which Emily and Frankie had been born. Upon that bed, Mother looked frailer than ever.
      She had been handsome once, her hair thick and glossy, a rich bay color. She had worn it with as much pomp as she'd worn her bustles, the rich dark skeins twisted up tightly into an impressive figure-eight knot that thrust out in back even as her generous bust had thrust forward in front. Now her hair was lustreless lying in a limp braid, and her bust nearly nonexistent. She wore a faded silk bed jacket instead of the crisp sateens and malines she once had donned. Her skin had taken on an alarming number of wrinkles and had become flacid on her frame. While Emily studied her sleeping mother, Josephine coughed, covering her mouth with the ever-present hanky, a function that had become as involuntary as the cough itself.
      Emily's sad eyes moved to the cot against the side window where her father had taken to sleeping in recent months so as not to disturb his wife—reasoning over which Emily often wondered' since it was most certainly Mother's coughing that disturbed Papa.
      She stood for a moment, wondering things a proper Victorian young lady ought not wonder, things about mothers and fathers and shared beds and when—if ever—that sharing ceased to matter. She had never seen Papa touch Mother in any but the most decorous manner. Even when he came into this room, if she—Emily—were there and Mother was having a bad day, he never kissed her, but only touched her forehead or her hand briefly. Yet he loved her unquestionably. Emily knew he did. After all, she and Frankie were living proof, weren't they? And Papa was so sad since Mother's illness had worsened. Once, in the middle of the night Emily had discovered him sitting on the front porch with tears running down his face reflecting the moonlight. She had crept back inside without his ever suspecting that she'd discovered his secret grief.
      If a man loved a woman, did he display it in the respectful way Papa displayed it to Mother, or by touching her as Charles had recently begun touching Emily? How had Mother reacted the first time Papa had touched her so? And had he done it before they were married? Emily had difficulty imagining her mother allowing such intimacies even when she'd been healthy, for there was an air of propriety about Josephine Walcott that seemed to shun such possibilities.
      How disrespectful to be thinking such thoughts in the doorway of her parents' bedroom when her mother lay ill and dying, and her father faced not only that sad truth but a business crisis as well.
      "Emily?"
      "Oh, Mother, I'm sorry. Did I wake you?" Emily moved to the bedside taking her mothers frail hand. Josephine smiled, closed her eyes, and rolled her head weakly They all knew she rarely slept soundly anymore but existed in a state of quasi-sleep as tiring as a day of manual labor might be for a healthy person She opened her eyes and tapped the bedding at her hip. More and more often lately she used motions to convey her messages, saving every possible breath.
      "No," Emily replied. "I'm dirty. I've been helping Papa in the barn. And besides, I have some things to do downstairs. Can I get you anything?"
      Josephine answered with a desultory wag of her head.
      "If I can, just ring the bell." A small brass handbell had rolled down along the ridge of bedding below Josephine's knee, and Emily retrieved it and put it near her palm.
      "Thank—" A spasm of coughing interrupted and Emily escaped the room feeling guilty for having brought it on and for preferring even washing clothes to watching her mother