I
Three months after her mother's death, Kara stood outside the bedroom her parents had shared. The mourning period was over. Her father had moved back into the room the night before, and today Kara was to clean the room as her mother had done every day of her marriage.
She pushed open the door quietly. Her father was asleep on the bed. He had taken a second job, working nights, to help take his mind off his wife's death. After the worst of his grief had passed, he decided he liked the extra money he was earning. He was now able to buy some things his wife had forbidden when she was alive. He kept the job even though it wore him out physically and kept him from seeing his grieving daughter very often. Most days, they saw one another only at lunch. He ate quietly, as was his lifelong habit, but after many meals he would say "You remind me of your mother more and more" as he left the kitchen and prepared his things for his afternoon job. Every morning, he sat down and ate only half the breakfast she prepared. Then he dragged himself to the sofa and slept for four hours. Now, with the mourning period over, he dragged himself to his old bed in the big bedroom in the back of the house. The first night time there without his wife was not as odd or as lonely as he had feared, since he fell right into a deep sleep from being so exhausted from working all night.
Kara turned 18 just after her mother's death, but she looked much younger. At her mother's graveside, all of her aunts took hold of her face, looked down into her eyes, and said, "You're not strong enough or woman enough to manage a house. Your father better marry again, soon, or his house will go to ruin." Her father simply put an arm across her shoulders and walked all the way home with her. As he stopped to feed a few yard hens, and she went inside ahead of him to make their supper, he called after her.
"Don't listen to those old women. You have always done a fine job in our house. You remind me of your mother more and more."
That was three months ago, and over time she watched her father grow older, much older. Now, she stood in the doorway of the room where just a day before neither of them could go. She took a long look at her father then walked inside and tiptoed around the bed. She set her cleaning bucket on the small stool under the window. To bring in the morning sunshine that would show her the worst of the dust, she started to pull open the curtains but quickly remembered her father was asleep behind her. She quietly pulled them shut again and turned to make sure the brief infusion of light had not disturbed him. In the gray shade of the room he looked more dead than asleep, his skin ashen and his face twisted from some dream that had overtaken him in the deepest realms of his unconscious. Kara stared at his face until a slight movement under the sheet drew her attention down to his middle area. She blushed and turned away as soon as she knew what was happening to him. (She had seen her father walk about in his nightshirt, and her mother once had to explain that sometimes men wake up like the bull in the corral when a cow is nearby.) Quickly, she reached down and pulled a rag from the bucket and began to dust the furniture. Afterward she folded some clothes her father had left laying carelessly around the room. She carried them to the closet next to his bed.
With the closet door open, she saw all the things her mother had left in place when she died. The top shelf was full of hat boxes and scarves and gloves. The floor was covered with pairs of shoes. Her father's things occupied only a small shelf on the left and a short portion of the bar where all the clothes hung. Her mother's dresses and heavy wool sweaters dominated the rest of the space.
Kara breathed in her mother's smell as it came off the clothes. For three months she had kept away from this room, and the time had allowed her to take over the home. "You remind me of your mother more and more" her father kept telling her. And she, too, reminded herself of her mother, doing all the work her mother had done. But now, here, breathing in the old living scent of her mother reminded her of the woman who had for years lived in this room, cared for the man asleep behind her, and taught Kara to grow into a young woman. For the first time since just after her mother died, she had time to miss her. She grieved again and sobbed in careful silence. Then she put her father's folded clothes in the closet, closed it, and left the room to prepare lunch.
The next morning she returned to the bedroom to finish what she had been too upset to finish the day before. Her father again slept on the bed, and she again had to fold his discarded clothes and put them away in the closet. This time there were no tears. Instead of crying she pulled one of her mother's sweaters, a thick woolen one, off a hanger and held it to her nose. She inhaled the scent and embraced the garment. She thought of slipping it on over her head, but as soon as she imagined it she abandoned the idea. It was too much. She quickly hung the sweater where it had been and she closed the door. Again she left the room without finishing her cleaning.
This habit of staring into her mother's closet went on, day after day, until a week later when finally she stopped thinking and slipped an old sweater over her head. She pushed her arms through the sleeves and let the body of the thing fall over her. Then she closed the door and looked in the mirror that her father had nailed onto the outside.
She was not the stature of her mother. She had neither the height nor the breadth of body to fill out the sweater as her mother once had. Her hair did not fall over the shoulders and down the back as her mother's had. Standing there looking at herself she began to wonder what her father had meant when he told her she reminded him of her mother. Here it was plain to see that the two women were nothing alike. Except in the breasts, perhaps. Kara saw her two, growing, womanly mounds as they filled adequately the front of the sweater. It struck her just then that never before, not even when naked in the bath, had she noticed herself in this way, taken any appreciation at all for the change that had occurred. But here, looking at her reflection as she wore her mother's clothes, she did notice, and did appreciate. She wondered if it were a new change, a sudden one brought on by the death of her mother and the sudden duty to take over the home as a much older woman would have done. Or was it all an illusion? Was it the sweater itself that made her look older than she felt? She turned a little to the left, then centered herself, then turned a little to the right. They were large, sure enough, but so had her mother's been. Maybe it was this sweater after all that had given her mother such a fine womanly shape.
She opened the closet and tore off the sweater, dropping it at her feet. She pulled another one off a hanger and tried it on. Closing the door, she saw again in the mirror a woman's frame and the two large, firm, round breasts pushing to get out. If anything, this second shirt made them look even bigger – and better – than the other one had. She had to see if it was just a trick of the cloth and the mirror. These sweaters were for the deadest of winter and were made of stern, heavy wool, after all, and they must have added some shape and size to her reflection. She closed the closet again.
