The woman sits in an old straight-backed chair on the porch, a door to her right opening into a house already much too small for a family of four. She drops a peeled potato, white and wet, into a bowl worn smooth with use. The bowl threatens to tip and spill its bounty, but she catches it just in time, adjusting it to balance precariously in the ever decreasing space between her belly and the edge of her knees.

Taking another potato from the bag beside her, she holds it in a grip that turns her knuckles white. The short-bladed knife, held no less gently in her right hand, attacks the potato, carving away the crooked white spindles reaching outward. She pauses for a moment, knife at the base of the last spindle. The wrinkled skin of the dusty brown potato is a cruel mockery of the lighter brown and wrinkled skin of the hand that holds it.

Snick. She watches the spindle fly across the porch and drop into the sparse grass beyond it. Her hands drop to her lap and release their hold on both potato and knife, wrists draped over the rim of the wooden bowl, fingers still and empty. Her eyes lift to the horizon where the sunset is more than half-finished painting the sky vermillion and apricot and indigo. After a long moment, her right hand moves to rest on top of her belly, fingers spread wide apart as if to protect what’s inside—or hold it back.

She can smell the lavender by the fence, the honeysuckle winding up the oak beside the house. She closes her eyes and lets the fragrance transport her back to her home, the other home, where there was always plenty of food on the table and where there was laughter and dancing and music. Her shoulders relax and round, becoming those of a lady, not a potato farmer’s wife. Her face softens and the lines between her brows and around her mouth fade to nearly nothing. She can almost hear a waltz carried on the breeze that lifts a strand of dark blond hair from her face—one strand only, escaped from the tight knot that holds the rest in place. She can hear the lilt of the strings, the voice of the viola, the violin. She can hear the shuffling of feet upon the dance floor. And for a moment, she looks as young and as beautiful as her years say she should.

“Mamma?”

“Not now, Glory,” the woman says. Her eyes snap open. With barely a glance to notice that the last colors of the sunset have faded into gray and less than a glance for the girl of twelve, herself in miniature, standing in the doorway, the woman picks up her knife and another potato and starts to peel.