Chapter 24: Everyone In

On the eleventh of October, the apple tree had dropped half its leaves onto the table, and nobody brushed them off.

The captain said they were decoration.

His sister said they were a mess, and then she arranged them in a line down the middle of the pine.

I woke at five in the back bedroom of the cottage, in the bed I had slept in as a girl.

For a few minutes I lay there and listened to the water.

Nobody had asked me to fold a napkin.

Libby had done all forty the night before, in a fan shape she'd learned from a video.

She had made me promise not to touch them.

At nine, Kenzie's fiancé's father arrived with a van full of lanterns.

The captain stood in the lane and directed him in with one hand up.

At ten, the bookkeeper from the boatyard got out of a station wagon in a navy dress, with a casserole in a carrier.

"I wasn't sure I was invited," she said.

"You were on the list."

"Carl's lawyer says the back wages are coming. I thought, well, I can still bring a dish."

"Put it on the table," I said.

At eleven, the attorney handed me a letter at the porch steps.

"It came to my office this morning," she said. "It's from Mrs. Pierce's lawyer. It's for Kenzie."

I took it upstairs.

Kenzie sat on the edge of my bed in her slip while Libby pinned her veil.

I held the envelope out, and the round, careful handwriting on the front was Rosalie's.

"You don't have to read it today," I said.

Kenzie looked at it for a while.

Then she slid it into the nightstand drawer.

"Not today," she said. "Maybe not ever."

"It's yours either way."

She put her hand over mine.

"Was it hard?" she asked. "Not giving her a chair?"

I thought about it honestly.

"A little," I said. "Not enough to change it."

She nodded, and Libby handed her a tissue, and the veil stayed on.

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