The months, the years, seemed to dissolve. It felt like I’d seen them yesterday.

“Where’s Dad?” I asked.

“He’s gone down to the church to get another table,” Varena explained, trying not to smile too broadly. My mother suppressed the curve of her own lips.

“Is he rolling in this wedding stuff?”

“You know it,” Varena said. “He just loves it. He’s been waiting for this for years.”

“This’ll be the wedding of the decade in Bartley,” I said.

“Well,” Varena began, as we all started down the hall to my old room, “if Mrs. Kingery can get here, it may be.” Her voice sounded a little whiny, a bit flat, as though this worry or complaint were so long-standing she’d worn out the emotion behind it.

“Dill’s mother may not come?” I asked, incredulous. “So, she’s really old and sick… or what?”

My mother sighed. “We can’t quite decide what the problem is,” she explained. She stared off into the distance for a moment, as if the clue to Varena’s future mother-in-law’s behavior was written on the lawn outside the window.

Varena had taken my hanging bag and opened the closet to hook the hangers over the rod. I put my suitcase on the triple dresser that had been my pride and joy at age sixteen. Varena looked back at me over her shoulder.

“I think,” she said, “that maybe Mrs. Kingery was just so crazy about Dill’s first wife that she hates to see her replaced. You know, with Anna being their child, and all.”

“Seems to me like she’d be glad that Anna’s going to have such a good stepmother,” I said, though in truth, I’d never thought what kind of stepmother Varena would make.

“That would be the sensible attitude.” My mother sighed. “I just don’t know, and you can’t ask point-blank.”