I woke in my bed late in the morning, though I couldn’t remember having left the parlor. I sat up and called out Tiff’s name, hoping she wouldn’t answer, hoping she’d had the sense to go to school without prompting. If I let her stay home a second day in a row, I feared there’d likely be some kind of intervention. I would appear indulgent and slovenly. “Tiff!” I called again, and I heard her feet fast on the stairs.
“What is it!” she said, running up to the footboard. “Are you okay?”
“Am I okay?” I said. “No. No, not at all. I’m not okay. I’m in deep trouble. It’s ten in the morning and you’re not in school, are you?”
“Don’t scare me like that, Essie,” she said.
“You should be scared,” I said.
Tiff crawled into bed with me, beneath my quilts. “I haven’t slept a wink,” she said, smiling and fluttering her eyelashes. “I finished the book. Did you hear me fall around 2 in the morning? I had to go to the bathroom but didn’t want to stop reading, and I fell up the stairs. I wasn’t watching where I was going.” She tossed the quilts aside and lifted her kimono above her knee to show me a nasty patch of black and blue on the back of her leg.
“Oh, Tiffany,” I said. I went to my vanity in an effort to wrestle my hair into something presentable. “Go get dressed. I’m giving you back to your mother.”
Tiff ignored me, preoccupied as she was by invading my privacy, riffling through the drawer of my nightstand. She pinched the bulb of a perfume atomizer to douse her neck and chest with a lavender scent. She slipped on my black sleeping mask, which I hadn’t worn since a bout of sleeplessness in the 1950s. “Turns out that Coffin is the family name,” Tiff said, her eyes hidden by the mask. “Miranda and Desiree Coffin. Their family lives in a village called Little Hope, which is a tiny community just outside the town of Big Hope.” She shrugged, unimpressed with Muscatine’s wordplay. In Daisy’s version, the coffins of the title had been means of escape, Miranda and Desiree tucked into a pair of pine boxes and liberated from the asylum in a horse-drawn hearse by a sympathetic undertaker’s apprentice.
Tiff took off the mask and pinned to her sleeve a paper corsage, a true relic, from my first dance. I’d thought I’d lost it the night I’d first worn it, when some other girls and I, and some boys, had sneaked into a cornfield next to the dance hall to get liquored up. I’d returned to the field the next morning to find the corsage caught, abloom, in the crook of a stalk.
After stepping from the closet in a dress I pulled on, I sat on the edge of the bed and unpinned the flower from Tiff’s sleeve. I placed it atop my nightstand and turned my back to Tiff to indicate she should zip me up.
“I’m not going anywhere with you,” Tiff said, zipping.
“Don’t you want to be the better person?”
“No,” Tiff said. “What good would that do me?”
“Well, you are the better person, whether you like it or not. I’ve raised you right.” I turned to face her, to take her hands in mine. “Your mother needs you maybe a little more than you need her. We have to be protective of her. Now, get dressed. I’m abandoning you.” I returned to the vanity to situate my dragonfly hairpin.
“I like it here. You don’t make me sleep, and you don’t make me go to school.” I caught Tiff’s reflection as she stretched out in the bed, and she seemed to age a year or two in the murk of my unpolished mirror, her gangly limbs and laziness suggesting the young lady she’d be much too soon.
“You have to turn out better than all the rest of us, Tiffany,” I said. “How can I die happy if you’re just going to let everything fall apart?”
“Don’t be morbid,” she said.
I returned to the nightstand for the paper corsage and pinned it to the front of my dress. “I’m not morbid,” I said, offended, touching at the delicate curl of the edge of the faded rose petal, causing the thinnest vein of a crack. “I’m not.”