Shakespeares Christmas Page 0,57

Dill and his wife, Judy. And this baby, shown in a third picture cradled in the arms of the woman in the picture in Anna's room, was absolutely positively the original Anna Kingery.

The elation at finding something certain helped me through the pang of guilt I suffered as I extracted the key picture from the album. It, too, went in my purse, after I'd returned the photo album to its former position.

I finished my cleaning, surveyed the house, found it good. I put the garbage in the wheeled cans, swept the front and back steps. I was done. I went back in to put the broom away.

Dill was standing in the kitchen.

He had a pile of mail in his hands, was shuffling through it. When the broom hit the floor, Dill looked up sharply.

"Hi, Lily, this was mighty fine of you," he said. He smiled at me, his bland and forgettable face beaming nothing but goodwill. "Hey, did I scare you? I thought you heard me pull into the garage."

He must have come in the back door while I was sweeping at the front.

Still tense all over, I bent to retrieve the broom, glad my face was hidden for a moment while I recovered.

"I saw Varena downtown," he said, as I straightened and moved to the broom closet. "I can't believe after all this waiting, it's finally going to be our wedding day tomorrow."

I wrung out a dishrag I'd forgotten and draped it neatly over the sink divider.

"Lily, won't you turn to look at me?"

I turned to meet his eyes.

"Lily, I know you and I have never gotten close. But I don't have a sister, and I hope you'll be one to me."

I was repelled. Emotional appeals were not the way to make a relationship happen.

"You don't know how hard it's always been for Varena."

I raised my eyebrows. "Excuse me?"

"Being your sister."

I took a deep breath. I held my hand palm up. Explain?

"She would kill me if she knew I was saying this." He shook his head at his own daring. "She never felt as pretty as you, as smart as you."

That didn't matter now. It hadn't mattered for more than a decade.

"Varena," I began, and my voice sounded rusty, "is a grown woman. We haven't been teenagers for years."

"When you're a younger sister, apparently you have baggage you carry with you always. Varena thinks so, anyway. She always felt like an also-ran. With your parents. With your teachers. With your boyfriends."

What crap was this ? I gave Dill a cold stare.

"And when you got raped ..."

I'll give him that, he went right on and said the word.

"... and all the focus was on you, and all you wanted was to get rid of it, I think in some way it gave Varena some... satisfaction."

Which would have made her feel guilty.

"And of course, she began to feel guilty about that, about even feeling a particle of righteousness about your getting hurt."

"Your point being?"

"You don't seem happy to be here. At the wedding. In the town. You don't seem happy for your sister."

I couldn't quite see the connection between the two statements. Was I supposed to wag my tail since Varena was getting married... because she'd felt guilty when I got raped? I didn't have any active animosity toward Dill Kingery, so I tried to work through his thought.

I shook my head. I wasn't making any connections. "Since Varena wants to marry you, I'm glad she is," I said cautiously. I wasn't about to apologize for being who I was, what I had become.

Dill looked at me. He sighed. "Well, that's as good as it's gonna get, I guess," he said, with a tight little smile.

Guess so.

"What about you?" I asked. "You married one unstable wife. Your mother's not exactly predictable. I hope you see nothing like that in Varena."

He threw back his head and laughed.

"You take the cake, you really do, Lily," he said, shaking his head. He didn't seem to find that endearing. "You don't say much, but you go for the throat when you decide to talk. I think that's what your parents have been dying to ask me for the past two years."

I waited.

"No," he said, quite seriously now. "I see nothing like that in Varena. But that's why I dated her for so long. That's why our engagement went on forever. I had to be sure. For my sake, and especially for Anna's sake. I think Varena is the sanest woman I ever met."

"Did your wife