Even before she stepped into the kitchen, Francie could smell the stew her mother had left simmering on the stove. The rich odor of beef and potatoes made her mouth water.
“Please set the table,” Francie’s mother said, tying her apron on over her skirt.
“Yes, ma’am,” Francie answered. She went to the cupboard and brought plates and silver to the table, but after one look at her father’s grim face as he sat waiting for the meal, her eagerness for supper faded. She laid the places in silence and was careful not to meet her father’s eyes.
Francie helped her mother carry the steaming dishes into the dining room, and at her mother’s signal, took her chair. She watched as her mother ladled potatoes, carrots, and chunks of tender beef onto her plate, but worry sat like a stone in her stomach, and she knew she would not be able to eat.
“For what we are about to receive,” her father prayed, bowing his head and folding his hands, “may the Lord make us truly grateful.”
“Amen,” murmured Francie and her mother. Francie kept her head bowed and watched out of the corner of her eye. After her mother took the first bite, Francie and her father could begin to eat. For too many long minutes, the only sound at the table was the gentle clink as silver touched china. Francie picked up a roll, broke it into pieces, and began nibbling on one corner.
She jumped as her father put down his fork and cleared his throat. “Frances,” he began, “please explain to me why it was so important for you to visit the basin today against our wishes.”
Francie put the roll down on her plate. “I’d promised Mr. Court, Father. He’s writing an article on the sequoias for his paper.” She met her father’s eyes. “I couldn’t break my promise.”
Francie’s father frowned. “So instead you broke our rules.”
“But, Father,” Francie said, “this is important.”
Her father’s frown grew darker. “And our rules are not?”
Francie bit her lip. “That’s not what I meant,” she said. She took a breath. “What I meant is that Mr. Court is going to write an article for his newspaper. He wants to stop the logging of the sequoias. He thinks it’s a waste.” She leaned forward, her eyes on his face. “It is a waste, Father. You know it is.”
Her father picked up his napkin and placed it beside his plate. “What I know is that the logging has kept us in business,” her father said, his voice turning hard.
Francie saw her mother’s warning look, but she couldn’t stop. “Mr. Court says they could log the other trees that don’t take so long to grow and leave the sequoias,” she persisted.
“Each one of those big trees can supply enough wood to build forty, five-room houses, Frances! They’re our economic future!” He shook his head. “I will hear no more talk about it. And you may not go to Connor’s Basin anymore,” he added. “It’s entirely too dangerous for a young girl.”
“You let Carrie go anywhere she wanted to,” Francie burst out before she could stop herself. Even hearing that name caused her parents such pain that her sister was rarely mentioned in the household.
Her father’s face turned pale. I’ve gone too far this time, Francie thought. But she couldn’t go back now.
“That was entirely different,” her father said. His voice had sunk almost to a whisper. “Carrie was capable . . .”
Francie dug her fingernails into her palms under the table, and the prick of pain reminded her to hold her tongue. She took a deep breath. “Father, I’m careful,” she said, trying to keep her voice low. “That’s what I’ve learned since the landslide. I don’t take risks.”
She looked up at his blank face—his eyes were dull and without emotion. She knew it wasn’t any use. She pushed back her chair and stood up, the anger boiling up inside her like a volcano. “I’ll never be as perfect as your wonderful Carrie, will I, Father?” Hot tears sprang to her eyes, but she ignored them and kept staring at his flat, expressionless face. She wondered suddenly what it would take to bring some feeling back to him. How far would she have to go?
When she heard her mother’s soft whimper, remorse washed over her. How could she be so cruel? She hung her head, but the words of apology didn’t come.
There was a long silence. Then finally her father spoke. Even his voice sounded flat. “I don’t think we need to continue this conversation any longer,” he said. Carefully he folded his napkin and stood up. “My rule still stands. You may not go to Connor’s Basin. Do you understand?” He glanced once at Francie’s mother, as if making sure she, too, understood the rule. Then he straightened his waistcoat and left the room.
Francie stood with her head bowed, listening to her father’s footsteps, hoping he’d come back. She heard the creak of the kitchen door as he opened it. There was a pause, as if he were standing in the doorway waiting, and her heart seemed to jump into her throat. But then the door slammed. She heard him go down the porch steps. He must be going back to his work at the hotel, she thought. He wasn’t going to change his mind.
Her mother was leaning her head into her hands, and her shoulders were shaking. “Mama?” Francie knelt beside her mother’s chair and put her hand on her arm. “Mama, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to cause you pain.” She sighed. “It’s just . . .”
Her mother raised her head and wiped away her tears with her fingers. “Why do you anger him so?” she asked, touching her daughter’s cheek. “If you just wouldn’t provoke him, he wouldn’t feel like he had to punish you.”
Francie pulled her own chair next to her mother’s and sat down. She clasped her hands in her lap. “He’s angry that I’m helping Mr. Court,” she whispered.
“He’s worried about you,” her mother said. “Can’t you see that?”
“He’s punishing me for Carrie’s mistake,” Francie retorted. “He can’t hear a word said against her.”
Her mother looked at Francie. “If you only knew how much you’re growing to look like Carrie,” she said, and her voice was soft. “How much you sound like her. Even when you argue with your father, you sound like her.” Her mother looked away and a small smile came to her lips. She looked back at Francie. “Especially when you argue with your father,” she added. “Don’t you remember?”
Francie swallowed. “I remember,” she whispered. She closed her eyes. Every time she looked in the mirror she remembered. It was why she’d cut her front hair in bangs and wore her back hair loose. It would have been so much more convenient to put it up in a bun like Carrie had worn her hair. But she couldn’t stand the startled glances of her neighbors or the pain that crossed her father’s face when he looked at her. She wiped away her tears with a corner of her napkin. Would she be forever in Carrie’s shadow? In death as well as in life?
Her mother touched her cheek. “You would have been quite a pair, you know,” she said. The words hung in the air for a long moment. Then Francie’s mother pushed back her chair and stood up. “Josie?” she called to the young woman they’d hired to help around the house and the hotel. “Is the water hot?” She began collecting plates and cups and stacking them on the tray.
“Yes, ma’am,” said Josie, appearing in the kitchen doorway with a towel in her hand. Francie’s mother handed her the tray, and the two of them went into the kitchen.
It was Francie’s job to put the rest of the tableware back on the sideboard and fold the napkins into their rings for the next meal. She did it absently, thinking about her mother’s words. “Quite a pair,” she’d said. Somehow Francie had never imagined herself and her sister as a “pair.” How could they have ever been a pair, she thought. Carrie had been so much older—fifteen when she died, and Francie only nine. If Carrie had lived she’d be . . . Francie figured it out. Carrie would have been twenty-one. A woman grown. And Francie herself was only just fifteen now. How could she ever have caught up?
She threw the napkins into the basket with the others on the sideboard. She arranged the everyday salt and pepper shakers on the shelf with the ones for formal occasions and banged the cupboard door shut with more force than was necessary. “No,” she said aloud. “I’ll always be running behind her. Even now when she’s dead.”
She stomped up the stairs and plopped down in the chair by her vanity, carefully avoiding the oval mirror on the wall beside her. Her eyes fell instead on the framed photograph of the family, taken perhaps a year before the landslide. Father, sitting in the leather armchair in the parlor with the women gathered around him. Mother, in a dark dress with white buttons down the front and with an unfamiliar formal look on her face, her hand on her husband’s shoulder. Francie, leaning against her father’s knee. And Carrie, her long chestnut hair wound about her head in a complicated twist, was standing on Father’s other side looking as if she wanted to laugh out loud.
Francie stared at the photograph, realizing again that anyone who didn’t know the family might have taken Carrie for Francie. There was her sister, caught forever inside the little frame. And quietly, without thinking about it, the scrawny eight-year-old who had been leaning against her father’s leg was, indeed, catching up. “In fact,” she said aloud, finally looking at herself in the mirror, “I have caught up. I’m fifteen now, older than Carrie was then. She gathered her hair, twisted it, and wound it around her head, but immediately let it go. It was uncanny how much she looked like her sister.
“I wonder what it would have been like,” she asked aloud, “if we’d been the same age.” She picked up the deep blue cologne bottle on her vanity that used to be Carrie’s and ran her fingers over the bumpy surface. She pulled the glass stopper out of the top and sniffed—the bottle had been empty for years. Carrie had given it to her long before the landslide. But the spicy smell of the cologne still lingered. “Would you have been my friend, Carrie?” she asked the picture. Carrie seemed to be looking out of the frame right into Francie’s eyes. Her mouth held its almost smile. But the only answer was silence.