Free Into Thin Air by Caroline Leavitt

days.”
    â€œI have hair like my mother,” Lee said.
    In the heavy silence Janet cleared her throat. “I bet I’m going to love Philadelphia,” she said.
    Lee was mute the rest of the way home. She climbed from the car and went to her room, shutting the door. She could hear them talking downstairs. “She’ll come around,” Frank said. “It’s hard for her.”
    â€œIt’s to be expected,” Janet said. “It doesn’t hurt me.”
    â€œWhat about this?” Frank said, laughing. Something rustled and knocked along the wall. “Does this hurt?”
    â€œYou stop that.” Janet giggled.
    Lee picked up one of her mother’s silver forks; she thought of Claire carefully polishing each piece the day the letter had come. “Dear heart.” Janet wrote that. She must have been the one Frank called late nights when Claire was sleeping fitfully. She pronged the fork into the lace doily on her dresser. She heard the voices climbing the stairs, the soft, sipping kisses, just outside her door.
    â€œGood night,” Frank called, and Lee reached up and with one hand roughly wrenched the silver locket from her neck.
    Frank, telling the police, glossed over details. He said only that Lee had been furious, that she had waited until the next morning, while he was shaving, to accuse him. “ Janel wrote that letter to Claire, didn’t she?” Lee cried. “I know she did.”
    â€œNo, she didn’t,” Frank said.
    â€œShe did too. Why are you lying?” Defiant, she edged in front of him. Exasperated, he put down his shaving brush.
    â€œThe letter was to me,” Frank finally said. A bud of foam from his shaving brush settled on the white porcelain. “Look, she made a mistake.”
    â€œNo, yo u made the mistake,” Lee said. “Claire knew about Janet,” she cried, “and it killed her.”
    â€œIt did not kill her,” he told her. “Cancer did.”
    â€œHow could you have done that to her?” Lee shouted. “How could you do it to me?”
    The spigot splashed open. He doused water on his face, then, dripping, turned to face Lee. Droplets sprinkled his face, shimmering. “Baby.” he said gently, “no one plans anything. How come you don’t know that by now?”
    Janet appeared suddenly, blue towels folded across one arm. She was already dressed in a tailored black wool suit. “Why don’t you speak a little louder,” she said quietly. “I don’t think all the neighbors can quite hear yet.”
    â€œIt’s none of your business,” Lee cried.
    â€œIt is my business,” Janet said, but Lee shoved past her, past Frank, to the stairs.
    Frank and Janet were married by a justice of the peace in a private ceremony Lee refused to acknowledge or attend. There wasn’t a honeymoon, not then, but there was a new move, to a larger colonial in a better suburb, with a whole separate attic for Lee, “Starting fresh,” was how Frank described it. “Ruining,” was what Lee said.
    Lee felt banished. Suspiciously she watched the house unfold. Janet’s taste, she decided, was trashy. Janet favored framed watercolors of ocean scenes, Black gulls like check marks in the sky. Glazed porcelain cats and gazelles crouched on the washed blue shag carpeting, The furniture was clumsy beige leather that Janet claimed was cool even in the hottest Texan summer. Lee examined the rooms. Playing house, this time solely on her own, she decided the house was dangerously sweet, as calamitous as too much candy.
    Lee tried to keep her room exactly the way it had always been. She hung her framed poster of Nike running shoes. She unfolded the silverware she had inherited from Claire and carefully laid a few pieces on the top of her dresser. “Why, isn’t that darling,” Janet said doubtfully.
    â€œThey were my mother’s,” said