The top of the dressing table held an empty perfume bottle from Love's Baby Soft, and a framed photograph of Judy with two of her high school girlfriends; a pink glass dish containing a pearl button, a small ring, a cloth-covered ponytail holder and some dust. Dented into the top of the table, painted over in the years since, was the name Elvis,

pressed there in ballpoint pen by Tess in 1977, the year he died and she graduated from high school. She'd grown up listening to Elvis and he had been her idol: if he could do it, she could do it. She brushed the word with her fingertips, as if it were a headstone, then switched on the familiar little lamp with the cheap flared plastic shade. She switched it off again and opened the single dressing-table drawer. Something went rolling and she reached inside and pulled it out: a tube of Bonne Bell root-beer-flavored Lip Smackers. She removed the cap and sniffed it. Nostalgia came rumbling like a tidal wave-being thirteen again and getting her first pair of panty hose; being fourteen and wearing these adolescent perfumes; being fifteen and going out on her first official dates with boys. She rubbed the Bonne Bell on her lips. It had turned sticky with age and she swiped it off with the side of one hand and dropped the tube back where it had been.

Bracing her palms on the tabletop she put her face near the window and glanced down at the street where she had watched for cars when her dates had come to pick her up. The trees in the front yard had grown. From up here she could see even more clearly the cracks in the sidewalk, the thin spots in the grass, the weeds. The sun was hovering just above the houses across the street where she used to babysit. On the lawn the dandelions were closing up as the afternoon waned.

And down below, her mother was calling, "Tess? Should I put the hot dish in now?"

She murmured to herself, "Yes, Momma, because the world will fall off its axis if it's not on the table at the crack of six." She pushed off the dressing table and called, "I'll do it, Momma! Just let me hang up some clothes first, okay?"