I flush in embarrassment, he slides the butter dish over to within my reach so he won’t have to hand me anything anymore.
“Did you hear about Miriam?” he asks quietly.
My face still burning from his subtle rejection, I nod. “I saw her in Mrs. Yost’s office. She found the hospital? It’s wonderful news.”
But Josef is shaking his head, his expression dark. No, he’s saying. No, that’s not what happened.
“Josef, what about Miriam? She didn’t find her sister?”
He swallows. “She found her sister. But it was too late.”
The fabric falters in my hand. “What do you mean, it was too late? Her sister is… dead?”
“She heard this afternoon.”
“But this afternoon is when I saw her. She was about to make a call.” I cut myself off, realizing. When I saw her, she was about to call the right hospital. She was minutes away from receiving the worst news of her life.
Yellow silk swims in front of my eyes, blurry and nonsensical. Miriam and her letters. Her hundreds and hundreds of letters. Miriam and the hope on her face when she peered into Mrs. Yost’s office a few hours ago. Should I have offered to stay with her when she made the call? Instead, she had to receive the news alone.
“But her sister was alive,” I protest. “She was alive after the war. She was taken to a hospital.”
“She was too sick,” Josef says. “It happened just a few weeks after liberation. She couldn’t get better.”
“But still, Miriam could have had a few weeks. A few extra weeks with a person is a lifetime.”
“I know.”
“And the only reason she didn’t get it was because of some, some clerical error that told her the wrong hospital.”
“I know,” Josef repeats.
I’m filled with fury and anguish. She survived the war. Miriam’s sister survived torture, she was alive, she was rescued, and she died anyway. Meanwhile, Miriam sat in our cottage and wrote hundreds of letters.
“Anyway, I didn’t know if anyone had told you,” Josef says. “And I thought you’d want to know. She won’t be back in your cottage for a few days; she asked administrators if she could have a private room in the infirmary so she could grieve alone.”
I nod, unable to find the right words. Instead, I focus on making the pins and then the needle go through the fabric, one stitch at a time. One thing that I know how to fix, one broken thing I can repair. Tiny, even, incremental. I focus on my work and hold my brain in place, something I’ve gotten better at doing these past few weeks, something that sewing helps me do. It’s easier to stay in reality when I’m anchored by the tangibleness of fabric.
“You’re very good at your work,” Josef whispers finally, rising from the table.
“You don’t have to go.”
“I don’t want to disturb you.”
“But I just invited you to stay,” I protest.
“I know you have only until tomorrow to finish Breine’s dress.”
“Josef, that’s bullshit.” Now I lay down my work and glare up at him, fueled by my anger over what happened to Miriam’s sister and the injustices we’re all still feeling every day. “If you want to leave, you should leave. Fine. But you can’t tell me that I need you to leave when I just told you to stay. You can’t hold my hand in the wagon and tell me about your family and then ignore me. It’s not fair. I can’t tell whether you like me at all, or don’t like me, or want to be my friend, or want to be something—I can’t tell how you feel at all.”
He’s standing very still. “It’s not that simple.”
“It’s not that complicated, either.” The back of my neck is sore from bending over the table. I forgot that Baba Rose made everyone stand up and stretch every fifteen minutes. I rub it, irritated.
“Zofia,” he says, pleading.
“Josef.”
My voice has an edge to it, but I can’t even tell what I’m asking, what I want from him. If he said right now that he did like me, would I want that? And what would it mean? Would I want something like what Breine had—a marriage proposal from a person I barely know?
I wouldn’t; I know that. I wouldn’t want a wedding dress, I wouldn’t want to arrive back in Sosnowiec with another strange man the way I did with Dima. But then, touching Dima’s hand always felt more like gratefulness than desire. I never wanted to raise my face to Dima, to linger