The customer’s skirt lay across Marion’s knees, its lining turned out like a pocket emptied onto a table. She had promised it for Friday. There was nothing difficult about the work: shorten the hem, preserve the pleat, replace a hook that had begun to pull loose. Yet she had threaded the same needle twice without putting it through the cloth. Upstairs, inside the folder, the folded paper seemed to have acquired a place in the household as definite as an unpaid bill.
She set the skirt on the ironing board and went to get it. This time she read the account before looking at the picture. Westfield, New Jersey. November 1971. Five members of Edwin Vale’s family had been killed: his mother, Agnes; his wife, Helen; their children, Caroline, David, and Michael. Marion read the names again. Until then, the article had been chiefly a face and the impossible suggestion attached to it. Now there were five people whom she had reduced, without intending to, to the reason someone wanted a man found.
She put her finger below each name, not touching the print itself. Agnes Vale. Helen Vale. Caroline Vale. David Vale. Michael Vale. The names told her nothing about their voices, their favorite meals, the ways they irritated and forgave one another. She had no right to supply those things. Still, the family relationships were enough to make her lower the paper. Mother, wife, children: words she used every day, generally while thinking about something else. Here they identified people whose lives had ended, not positions waiting to be filled.
The account described routines interrupted, deliveries and expected appearances that had ceased to fit the pattern people knew. Four weeks passed before concern from friends and neighbors led to entry and discovery. Marion paused over that interval. These were Westfield people, people who had known the household there, not anyone from the Denver neighborhood she remembered. Their concern belonged to an earlier place and an earlier time. She knew only a man called Thomas Reed, and knowing him did not give her access to what those other neighbors had seen.
Downstairs, the refrigerator motor stopped. In the quiet she became aware of how much she expected without noticing: Frank’s key before supper, Ruth’s voice on certain afternoons, the small stack of garments collected when she said they would be ready. Such expectations were not evidence of anything terrible when they failed. Buses ran late. People forgot. She herself had recently failed one. But the article made ordinary absence difficult to dismiss as a small blank in the day. She folded the paper, then opened it once more to read the five names.
At the sewing table she tried to imagine explaining her uneasiness to a stranger. I knew this man. No, she knew someone who resembled the picture. He lived near us. That was true, but it did not make the first sentence true. She took a scrap of tissue used for patterns and wrote, Thomas Reed looks like the picture. Even that looked too certain. She crossed out looks and substituted reminds me of. The weaker wording was closer to what she could honestly say, though it offered no relief.
If she spoke, she decided, she would speak privately. No customer would hear it while standing on the fitting stool. No acquaintance would carry it from her kitchen to somebody else’s. And she would not say that Thomas Reed was Edwin Vale. The printed face had been made to suggest how an older fugitive might look; it was not a photograph of the neighbor at her door. She could describe a resemblance. She could admit being troubled by it. Anything beyond that would require knowledge she did not possess.
By the time Frank came home, the skirt was still unfinished. He looked at the cold iron and asked whether she wanted to take a walk after supper. She had meant to; they had talked about getting out before the evenings grew colder. Instead she told him about the Friday deadline and put potatoes into a saucepan. He accepted the explanation without asking why an ordinary hem had consumed an afternoon. His acceptance made her feel less excused. After they ate, she washed the plates quickly and carried her tea back to the machine.
She worked past the hour when Frank turned off the downstairs radio. The hook needed a firmer backing; the pleat had to be pressed again. These were useful problems, with visible answers, and she attended to them carefully. Beside the lamp lay the little tissue scrap, her corrected sentence showing through from the other side. She put it away before it could catch beneath the fabric. Then she lowered the presser foot. The machine resumed its familiar knocking, but the ordinary sound no longer settled her.