"Hey." Lena's voice went soft. "You're Mabel's girl. Everybody knows that. Some rich lady's grief isn't your problem."
"I know." Nora pulled her cuff back down. "I know that."
But that night she stood at her bathroom mirror and looked at the star for a long time, really looked at it, the way you look at something you've owned forever and never actually seen. And for the first time in her life, it didn't look like hers. It looked like a question.
Chapter 3
Mabel's House
Greyfield was forty minutes inland from Port Calloway, past the last of the harbor fog and into farm country that had given up on farming sometime in the eighties. The road ran straight and empty between fields gone to weed, past a shuttered feed store and a church with a sign that hadn't been updated since Easter. Nora drove out on Sunday, the way she did twice a month, with a bag of groceries in the trunk and the photograph — she had taken it, she realized with a lurch of guilt somewhere around mile twelve, slipped it into her apron pocket before she left Tuesday and never put it back — burning a hole in her bag on the passenger seat.
Mabel Quinn's house was the third on a street of houses that all leaned slightly to the left, as if tired from standing so long. The paint was peeling in the same places it had peeled since Nora was six. Mabel herself answered the door in a housecoat and slippers, seventy pounds of iron will in a four-foot-eleven frame, sixty-eight years old and still doing other people's laundry for cash, still ironing shirts for the funeral home director and the bank manager's wife.
"You're early," Mabel said, hugging her hard enough to crack a rib. "You eat? You look thin. Come in, I got a roast in."
In the kitchen, over the ironing board that had paid for Nora's entire childhood — the board still set up permanently in the corner, the iron hissing softly — Nora told her. All of it. The dropped glass, the wrist, the photograph, the questions, the hundred-dollar bill, the card she'd fished out of the trash like a thief. She laid the baby photo on the oilcloth tablecloth between them, face-up this time, and watched Mabel's face.
Mabel went very still. It was a stillness Nora had seen maybe three times in her life, and it had never meant anything good. She picked up the photograph with hands that had wrung ten thousand sheets, hands mapped with veins and scarred with iron burns, and she looked at it for a long time. Then she set it down, carefully, face-down, and pressed her palm flat over it as if to hold it under.
"Rich people," Mabel said at last, her voice low and rough, "got nothing better to do than torment working girls. You stay away from that woman, Nora. You hear me? You stay away."
"She lost a baby, Mabel. A baby with a mark like mine. She showed me —"
"Half the babies in the world got marks." Mabel stood up abruptly and went to the stove, rattling pans that didn't need rattling. "You want to know about your mark? Your mama had one just like it. Right here." She tapped her own left wrist without turning around. "Runs in the family. That's all that is. Family. Now drop it."
Nora had heard the story of her mother ten thousand times, in pieces, over years. Her mother — Mabel's younger sister — had died in a car accident on the Greyfield Pike when Nora was eleven months old. There was a framed photograph on the mantel: a young woman with Nora's dark hair and tired eyes, holding a baby wrapped in a yellow blanket. Nora had grown up talking to that photograph when Mabel wasn't looking, telling it about school and scraped knees and later about tips and difficult customers, as if the glass could listen.
"Did Mama ever —" Nora stopped, her throat tight. "Did anyone ever take a picture of her wrist? Of the mark?"
Mabel's shoulders went rigid. "Don't be morbid."
"I'm not being morbid, I'm asking a question—"
"I said drop it!" Mabel turned, and her face was something Nora had never seen — not anger, exactly, but fear wearing anger's clothes. Then it smoothed, too fast, into briskness. "Roast'll burn. Set the table."
That night, Nora lay in her childhood bedroom under the quilt Mabel had sewn from old shirts — she could still pick out her father's? No. There was no father in the story. Just Mabel's shirts, and Ruth's blouses, the sister-mother's clothes cut up and stitched into warmth. Nora stared at the ceiling where the glow-in-the-dark stars she'd stuck up at age nine had long since fallen off, leaving little ghosts of adhesive. On the mantel downstairs, her mother smiled out of a silver frame. Nora tried to remember if she'd ever seen that woman's wrists. She couldn't. In the photograph, the baby — herself — was wrapped tight, only her face showing, and the mother's hands were out of frame, cropped by someone's careless developing.
She got up, went downstairs in the dark, the old floorboards cold under her feet, and stood in front of the mantel for a long time, studying the young woman's face for something — resemblance, warning, anything. Then, quietly, she went to the hall closet, where Mabel kept the cedar box on the top shelf — the box Nora had been told since childhood never to touch. "Your mama's private things," Mabel always said. "Some things a girl don't need to see till she's older." She was twenty-four. She lifted the box down. It smelled of cedar and lavender and time.
It was locked. It had always been locked. Nora held it for a full minute, feeling the weight of whatever was inside shift slightly, and then she put it back, her hands shaking, and told herself that wanting to open it made her a bad niece, an ungrateful girl, everything Mabel had never called her but might now. She went back upstairs and didn't sleep, and in the morning Mabel made pancakes and acted as if nothing had happened, and hugged Nora an extra beat too long at the door, her arms thin and fierce.