“When Dora came she took my mother's clothes . . .”

When Dora came she took my mother's clothes out of the closet and packed them in a carton from Kroger's that said Clorox in big letters on the side.    

I wasn’t supposed to say “my mother” that way and didn’t say it and never would say it again.  Leila told us to call Dora that and so we did, though it stuck in my throat and I had to have something crossed, like my fingers behind my back, at least I meant them to be.

I watched her.  I watched as she went into the closet, which was in the back right-hand corner of their bedroom, past the double bed, which took up most of the room, and the high dark-wood dresser.  She reached in and pulled them out, not one by one, but in a bunch as big as she could carry in her arms.  I saw the housecoat with the little pink flowers, the yellow sundress, a brown nubby wool that came from England.  There were the blue jeans from Colorado, when we went to visit my grandparents, and the pale blue dress with the velvet sash she put on, adjusting the bow, when people came over.   Dora tossed them on the bed.

I watched as she loaded them up and flung them down.  Dora was lean, with honey-blond hair waved carefully behind the ears.  She dressed in tailored, creased pants and sharply pressed blouses.

I didn’t stop her.  I let Dora take the clothes out of the closet, the dresses my mother had worn.  They had been washed a hundred times, until the colors faded and the cloth wore thin. 

Dora opened a box and took each dress off its hanger and laid it neatly on the bed and folded it, two sides to the middle and then in thirds, and put it in the box. . . . She pulled open the drawers and took out piles of my mother’s underwear and slips and nightgowns, the silk one patterned in Oriental blossoms she packed in the train case and the flannels she wore even in the spring when she could not feel the warmth, when she was shivering.

The dresses mocked me, they had turned away.  I was glad Dora was packing them.  I never wanted to see them again.

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“By the next summer when I went down the back stairs . . .”