I was nearly out the door when Mother called me, still dressed in a blue- striped housecoat and leaning against a sturdy Electrolux power nozzle.  She’d been vacuuming the shag carpet that morning, starting and stopping in the den, and now it was  shoved aside, like a discarded dance partner. I  was hoping she hadn’t given up. I was hoping she wasn’t going to ask me to vacuum because John Hawkins and I had started on the best part of our military base yesterday morning – the soldier’s  hospital. The patients weren’t plastic soldiers but black carpenter ants. 

            John Hawkins had a magnifying glass and when he found an ant large enough, he’d place the glass over it and together we’d watch it sizzle. Most ants I’d put in the morgue, but others he stopped short of killing and these I’d put in the infirmary. They were my patients, ants with fried- off legs, exposed abdomens, surprised mandibles. I loved each one. If I were late, I knew John Hawkins would sizzle them.

            “Denise, sit down.” 

            Mother’s words stopped me in my tracks. A declarative sentence. Exclamatory, maybe. We’d learned about the four kinds of sentences before school let out but I’d known Mom’s tone all my life. She was jocular, light-spoken. Normally, she’d have said, “Hold your horses.” Or “Not so fast, kiddo.”

            She repeated herself.  

            I sat down in the floral chair to the left of the table and dug my big toes into the carpet. This was about Deborah Anne. I knew it was, and I’d never hated her more than I did then. It was her fault my mother was using this tone. Nothing but Deborah Anne was ever this serious. 

            “What is it?”

            My mother could have sat in the chair across from me, but she didn’t. She plopped down on the couch, flinging out one arm and cradling a brush attachment with the other. 

            “I’m going to have a baby,” she said. 

            Declarative statement. 

            My toes, buried in the carpet, were now bent, and when I tried to stand up, I fell forward onto the floor.  I picked myself up as though I were doing a push-up  and asked, 

“Why?”

            I already knew the reason. Earlier in the spring, Aunt Doris had brought Deborah Anne to Grandma’s where she’d been positioned on the sun porch. It was a good place to watch the Easter Egg hunt. Before it started, Mom or maybe Aunt Ava, had prodded me in the back. “Deborah Anne is resting on the sun porch. Why don’t you say hello?”

            I’d walked the long hall of Grandma’s house to the new addition, intending to be as nice as I knew how. I’d find a way avoid her adult eyes, and skirt the frowning presence in the room that I couldn’t see or rightly comprehend, though I knew it was there.   But when I’d stepped down into the sunroom, I couldn’t find her. In fact, I’d just separated her head from a pyramid of pillows when Aunt Doris had screamed, “Denise, what are you doing ?”

            “Mom told me—”

            “Oh, God, why are you here?” She began to wring her hands. “ You’ve been outside. You’ve got dirt under your nails! Get out before my daughter catches something.”

            I fled the way I’d come and then some, slamming the back-door.  Mom and Aunt Ava were aware of my flight but neither stopped me, and by the time I’d wiped the tears from my eyes, I’d set aside Aunt Doris’s venom. I’d seen it many times, and always got more than my share. My good health was an affront to her every unanswered prayer.

 Later that evening,  she called my mother to tell her that not only was I dirty, but I had a certain “odor” and “Ellen, it’s high time you talked to that girl about certain things.” I heard Mom mimic the conversation to Dad,  and I expected laughter. Instead, he’d groaned and said, “Not that. Not yet. She’s too young.” 

            “I know, but that’s Doris,” My mom answered. “Maybe when this thing with Deborah Anne is over, she’ll be herself again.”

            Dad said he couldn’t remember her being any other way than the way she was now. Mom told him to hush. 

            Now, I remembered that day and the hate inside me shifted.

            “I wish she’d die!”  I screamed.

            Mother had been leaning back against the couch but now she sat forward. She plucked at the skin on her throat. 

“You want the baby to die?” 

            “I want Aunt Doris to die!” I shouted. “She put you up to this.”

            “Put us up to—” she stopped.  “Denise, what are you talking about?”

            “She said I smelled. She said I had an odor and dirty fingernails. I heard you tell Dad.  Is that why you’re having another baby? Because you want a better girl?”