“Now, if you’ll just step into my father’s office for a few more minutes, Mrs. Underwood, I’ll discuss our financial arrangements. Semantha, would you please start preparing the salad? Remember, your daddy and I hate seeing brown stains on the lettuce. Right this way, Mrs. Underwood.”
Mrs. Underwood nodded at me and followed her.
“Your daddy and I hate seeing brown stains on the lettuce?” I don’t like that, either. Whether she was doing it deliberately or not, she was making me feel not only a lot younger but almost like a stranger, some hired servant. Even her voice sounded different to me. It made me a little angry, until I thought that perhaps this was all just her way of coping with our great tragedy and new difficulties. It wouldn’t help things much if I started to complain, anyway, I decided, and went to the kitchen to begin preparations for dinner.
While I was working, I heard Cassie and Mrs. Underwood come out of Daddy’s office. I couldn’t believe Cassie wouldn’t know I could hear her, but maybe she was just not thinking clearly. I heard her tell Mrs. Underwood, “My sister is a little spoiled. Our mother spoiled her, but don’t put up with any back talk or any snide remarks about the work you prescribe. If she gives you even the slightest trouble, please come see me immediately.”
“I think we’ll be fine,” Mrs. Underwood said. “She seems like a very nice young girl.”
“We don’t put blinders on our eyes in this house,” Cassie said. “It’s a Heavenstone trait to be objective and, if necessary, brutally honest. It’s part of what has made us successful.”
“I’m sure,” Mrs. Underwood said.
They walked on to the front door, and Cassie let her out and said good-bye.
My heart was thumping, and I could feel the heat in my face. I had to say something when she entered.
“I’m not spoiled, Cassie. Why did you tell her that?”
“Psychology. Of course, she believes you’re spoiled, that we’re both spoiled. She lives in a two-by-four low-income apartment and walks into this mansion where she sees all we have. It’s only natural, expected, that she would think we would be spoiled, rich young women. When will you learn that people beneath you, with so much less than you, instantly harbor a resentment?”
“But why make her feel that she’s right?”
Cassie smiled. “Simple. When she sees how we really are, she’ll hate herself for having had such thoughts, and we’ll get along much more easily.” She paused and stared at me so long I didn’t know what to do. “I would think that by now, Semantha,” she continued, her eyes now those Cassie narrow, angry eyes, “you would have confidence and faith in what I say and do, especially for you and for our family, and you wouldn’t challenge me or be critical.”
“I wasn’t being critical. I was just wondering why you would tell her such a thing.”
“Well, now you know, so forget it. We have too many other things far more important to do. I’m going to do the meat loaf Daddy loves. Why don’t you go upstairs and put on something nicer for dinner tonight? I laid out something for you on your bed.”
“You did?”
She smirked at me as if I had asked something very stupid, but putting out something special for me to wear was often something Mother would do.
“Go on. Don’t dilly-dally. I want tonight’s dinner to be a little more special. We’ll use the better dishware. Go on!” she snapped when I didn’t move quickly enough for her.
I turned and hurried up the stairs. Everything had suddenly become even more complicated to me. I felt as if bees were buzzing in both my ears. No more going to school, a tutor, Cassie behaving as if she had suddenly aged twenty years, while treating me as if I had become younger. How much of this was the result of our family tragedy? It seemed I couldn’t even ask a question now. Maybe when Daddy came home, things would be different and not as tense and even frightening.
As I turned to enter my room, I gazed through Cassie’s open bedroom door and stopped so fast anyone would have thought I had walked into a wall. The furniture looked rearranged. What was going on? Slowly, I stepped through her bedroom doorway and looked around. It was shocking. Cassie had moved Mother’s vanity table into her room, and it was covered not with Cassie’s things but with Mother’s. Even the gilded oval vanity mirror that had hung above Mother’s table was now hanging on Cassie’s wall. I could see Mother’s bathrobe hanging on the door of Cassie’s bathroom. By the bed were Mother’s pearl-colored fur slippers, the ones with the light pink ribbons. Cassie’s own vanity table was gone, as were many of her other things, including the pictures she had had hanging on her walls. I even recognized that the bedding had been changed, replaced with a set of Mother and Daddy’s. How strange.
I turned and hurried to Mother and Daddy’s bedroom. Without Mother’s things—her vanity table, mirror, pictures—and with her closet stripped, the room looked half-naked. I couldn’t help it. I started to cry. I didn’t even realize I was crying until I felt the tears on my cheeks. Now my own temper started to pound. I turned and hurried down the corridor and the stairs. Cassie was absorbed in her meat loaf when I stepped back into the kitchen. She didn’t hear me at all. I was taken aback by the happy tune she was humming. A week hadn’t even passed since our mother died, and she was humming a happy tune?
“Cassie!” I cried.
She turned, a look of confusion on her face. “What’s wrong? Someone idiotic call you, one of those stupid girls from school? I didn’t hear any phones ringing.”
“No, no one called me. How could you … how could you take all of Mother’s things like that and put them in your room, even her wall mirror?”
She stared for a moment and then wiped her hands with a dish towel. “Ordinarily, I would be very angry at you for constantly questioning everything I say and do, Semantha, but I understand what you’re going through,” she said calmly. “You see all this only from your own pain. It’s typical of an adolescent to think, feel, and act as if the whole world revolves around her, but it doesn’t.”
She sat at the kitchenette. I thought she wasn’t going to say anything more, but she nodded and continued.
“Can you stop thinking about yourself for one moment and think about Daddy? Can you shove your personal worries and thoughts out of your mind and imagine, try to imagine, what it must be like for him to go into that bedroom and look at Mother’s things and know she is gone forever? Can you even feel a little of that pain for him?
“Do you know what he told me last night? He told me he turned and for a moment thought he saw Mother at her vanity table brushing her hair, and it filled him with a rush of hope that everything had been a bad dream. Of course, that image popped, and there was no one sitting at the table, but the table haunted him. Why, her perfumes, colognes, everything that has a scent was still in the air of that bedroom. He smelled it every night when he went to bed. He told me he still smelled the scent of her hair spray on her pillow beside him, and he told me he took her hairbrush and took some hairs from it and put them in his wallet, the wallet he carries in the inside pocket of his sports coat, the pocket closest to his heart. You mention the mirror. Do you know he told me he thought he saw her face in the mirror?”
“But … we’re not getting rid of those things. You put them in your room,” I said in defense of myself, even though her words had taken the air out of my anger.
She smiled. “Exactly. Soon, he’ll see them as my things and not Mother’s, and besides, Semantha, we’re not out to rid this house of every reminder of Mother, are we? Should we?”