Free Dyeing Wishes by Molly MacRae

me the kind of wave that indicated they were happy browsing and they started leafing through the pattern binders near the sales counter. I would have been happier helping them leaf, but I turned back to the Spiveys.
    To my surprise, the twins weren’t togged out in identical outfits. They also weren’t wearing their usual sweat suits. Taking a chance on making a snap psychobabble fashion judgment, I decided that could be a good sign. They both wore pressed khakis, but one’s blazer was lemon yellow and the other more of an orange sherbet.The upgrade from garage-sale casual was almost encouraging and certainly interesting.
    What wasn’t surprising was the fact that I’d never met Mercy’s daughter, Angela. True, the twins were Granny’s cousins, but they were a dozen or so years younger than Granny, and they’d never been close. Patchy images of Shirley and Mercy appeared throughout memories from my childhood. But whenever I tried to envision a girl with either of the twins or even trailing behind them, probably looking agonized or embarrassed, I got nothing. Any memories or awareness of Angela’s existence, if they’d ever been there, were gone as though eaten away by a moth.
    Vanity made me want to say that Angela was in her early forties rather than her late thirties. The only evidence I was going on for that assumption, though, was her mother’s estimated age, the lines creasing Angela’s low forehead, and her cheeks, which were probably once round and rosy but were heading toward jowly. According to Ardis, Angela had a tattoo. That wasn’t so unusual, but the only detail Ardis revealed was that the tattoo was on a part of Angela’s anatomy she didn’t ever want to see any closer. That didn’t really tell me much. I could think of a lot of places on a lot of people I didn’t want to see any closer.
    As I approached them, Angela gave me a halfhearted smile and then broke eye contact. She looked profoundly unhappy, but I couldn’t tell if her unhappiness stemmed from being in the shop or being dragged there by her mother and aunt. She looked cowed and uncomfortable, like a teenager under duress to attend and perform. From the way she pulled at the cuffs of her blouse and tugged her skirt, she wasn’t in her normal comfort zone of dress, either. She was tugging on a herringbone pencil skirt.
    “Maybe the two of you are twins, too,” Geneva said in my ear, “separated at birth.”
    My herringbone pencil skirt was no longer my favorite.
    “Hers is not as tight across the beam as yours,” Geneva said, continuing to study Angela. “Although hers required more yardage in the first place. She also has a tiny runner in her left stocking.”
    The Spiveys et fille stopped in front of Debbie.
    “What’s wrong with her?” the twin in the lemon yellow jacket asked. She pointed at Debbie but looked at me. Debbie and the cat continued sleeping soundly.
    “Just a little bit of exhaustion,” I said.
    “You’re either exhausted or you’re not,” the lemon yellow twin said. “It’s like being pregnant. You can’t be just a little bit. She isn’t pregnant, is she? That can account for a lot of exhaustion, let me tell you.”
    Angela had started inching back from between the twins, but she stopped and gave the yellow twin a scathing look. “Ma, her husband died three years ago. Of course she’s not pregnant. Be decent.”
    Talk about being decent, it was only then that I remembered that poor Angela had been widowed a few months earlier. I’d never met her husband, either, but that shouldn’t stop me from offering my condolences. Even though I’d had a bone to pick with him before he died. Before he was killed.
    My goodness, what a lot of sad and unpleasant things had happened in this town recently. I dropped into the chair next to Debbie’s, wondering if I’d made the right decision in packing up my apartment in central Illinois, where the only real disruptions in the flat cornfield of my life had been