“And then the dresser and the rest of the furniture. Mama hated spiders, so we’ll be sure there’s not even a teensy one hiding anywhere in her room.” Connie went to work cleaning off every flat surface. “Ginger, you can clean off the top of her dresser. Just lay whatever is there in the drawers. It’s on casters, so it won’t be hard for Sloan to push out of the room,” Connie said.

While Sloan took all the covers from the bed and tossed them into a pile out in the hallway, then started tearing down the four-poster bed, Ginger opened a drawer to find nightgowns and underwear still folded neatly in it. Pictures of all sizes, some in black and white, a few in color, gave testimony that Belle’s girls had been her life. Ginger had already put her ultrasound picture of the baby into her album, but someday she was going to have pictures of her family scattered about like this—and like what she’d seen in Sloan’s house. History was something a child could hang on to, could talk about. Sloan could say that his granny told him this or that. The Carson sisters knew all about their mother and their grandparents and could remember their sayings. Ginger had none of that, but by golly, her child was going to at least have a mother who’d provide her with memories.

She looked down at the neatly folded white silk underpants in the drawer where she’d laid several framed photos. “How long has your mother been gone, Connie?”

“Well, let’s see.” Connie held up her fingers. “I guess it must be sixty years this summer. Kate was twenty the year she died and she’s eighty now.” She carried knickknacks from the nightstands and the table beside the rocking chair out into the hallway and lined them up against the far wall. “We had good intentions of giving all her things away when she’d been gone a year, but we just couldn’t do it. Then one year turned into two and then it was ten years, and we decided having her room as it was when she was with us brought us comfort. We had a little family meeting and decided that we’d probably never use the room anyway, so I just clean it every year and we leave it alone.” She raised her voice as she carried another armload of things out into the hallway. “Besides, when I clean, it brings back good times.”

“Such as?” Sloan carried out the rocking chair.

“I bought her this little ceramic bunny for Mother’s Day the year before she died. Since Easter was her favorite holiday, we often bought her little gifts that would remind her of that day. I can still see her face when she opened her present.” Connie smiled.

“Granny liked Thanksgiving, so there’s still a whole collection of little turkeys in her bedroom,” Sloan said.

“Your grandmother’s name was Martha Jane, right?” Ginger remembered the tombstone he’d been sitting in front of that evening.

“Yep.” He nodded.

Martha Belle, she thought. That would be a good solid name for my daughter.

Sloan’s muscles strained the sleeves of his T-shirt as he moved the dresser from the room. The old wooden casters hardly worked at all anymore, so finally he just picked it up and carried it out of the room. Lucas had needed the help of all three of his friends just to move a flat-screen television up two flights of stairs. Granted, all four of them combined wouldn’t have a single bulging muscle like Sloan.

You shouldn’t compare people. Everyone has weaknesses and strengths. A school lesson on judging came back to haunt her as she stood in the middle of a totally empty room.

“All right, now we wash the walls,” Connie said. “Sloan, will you go in the bathroom and fill the bucket with warm water? Well, rats! I forgot to get the bucket and the spray to take the dark spots off the walls. I’ll be right back.” She headed out the door.

“I can get those for you,” Sloan said.

“It’d take more time to tell you what I want than to just go get it myself. I’ll pick up three bottles of water while I’m in the kitchen,” Connie said.

“Are you really okay with washing ceilings and doin’ this kind of work?” Ginger asked him when Connie was out of hearing distance.

“It all pays the same, but I’d do it for free,” he answered. “And besides, none of the sisters should be on a ladder at their age. If they fall, they could break a hip or an arm. They’ve been so good to me my whole life that it would break my heart if one of them got hurt doing something that I could’ve done for them.”

Lucas had never helped with one thing in the apartment. His theory was that men didn’t do housework of any kind. They didn’t even pick up their dirty dishes and cups and take them to the kitchen sink. He wouldn’t even have understood why a person might wash walls.

Stop comparing, that pesky voice in her head reminded her again.

She couldn’t help it. Lucas was the male in her past life. Sloan was the one in her present. They held different roles. Lucas had been her escape from the shelter. Sloan was her friend. Maybe what she was experiencing was what she’d heard called pregnancy brain, but lately it seemed like she was analyzing every little emotion and event that came into her life.

“Here’s what we need.” Connie brought a blue plastic bucket into the room and began to unload it. “Water and some cookies in case we need a snack, cleaner to put in the water, and some stronger stuff to spray on the walls.”

“What do I do?” Ginger pulled a rubber band from the pocket of her jeans and twisted her hair up into a ponytail.

“You are going to wash the middle third of the walls. I’ll do the bottom third, and Sloan will do what we couldn’t get when he gets finished.” Connie tied a bandanna around her head and knotted it in the middle of her forehead. If she’d put on the same red lipstick she’d worn to the hairdresser, she’d have looked a lot like Lucille Ball.

“Your walls are papered instead of painted,” Ginger commented. “How do you wash them?”

“I have them repapered every fifth year and dust them well every spring in the years in between,” Connie said. “This little job will be done in an hour. We probably wouldn’t need to do them every year, but I like to keep Mama’s room all fresh and pretty.”

Sloan set up the ladder, finished the ceiling and the fan, and then got down and started helping the ladies with the walls. “Was that fan put in before y’all had the air conditioners installed?”

“Yes, it was,” Connie said. “Mama still had girls when she had the fans put in each room. It could get pretty warm in the summer without them. We didn’t get air-conditioning until several years after Mama died, so she never got to see how wonderful it is.”

Just as they finished putting the room back to rights that evening, Betsy yelled that supper would be on the table in fifteen minutes. Connie stopped at the dresser and eyed the pictures that Ginger had set up again on the top, and then she took an old Polaroid picture from her pocket and cocked her head to one side. Then she switched two of the small frames and moved one on the end slightly to the left.

“You did good remembering which ones went where, but . . .” Connie patted Ginger on the shoulder. “Now it’s just like Mama had it fixed.” She picked up the bucket and headed downstairs, leaving Sloan and Ginger alone.

“No spiders, no dust, and everything in its right place.” Sloan turned out the light and ushered Ginger out with a hand on her lower back. There were those same sparks that she’d felt when he kissed her forehead.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a clean house,” Ginger said.

“‘Cleanliness is next to godliness,’” Sloan quoted Scripture. “That’s what Granny always quoted on cleaning day.”

“Speaking of that, why don’t you go to church with us tomorrow?”

“I told you that me and God got some things to sort out before . . . ,” he started, but she put her finger over his lips.

“God might meet you in the middle if you show Him you’re serious about doin’ that heart cleanin’. Maybe He don’t like spiders and dust, either. And all you’re doin’ is lettin’ your heart gather up dirt and varmints,” Ginger said.

“So you are religious?” Sloan said.

“As I told you before, I’m not religious, but I have faith,” she replied. “I think there’s a difference, but I haven’t quite got it put into words yet. I like going to church, even though my mind wanders from the sermon sometimes. I love the singing, so when I go, I pay attention to the words of the hymns. It didn’t matter which church I went to when I was off work on Sunday, just so long as I could hear the songs.”

“Did you ever sing all by yourself in the empty church?” he asked.

“Nah, I don’t have much of a voice for singin’,” she said when they reached the bottom of the steps. “We should’ve washed up for supper while we were upstairs.”

Betsy poked her head around the dining room door. “It’s all right if you wash up in the kitchen sink. Ain’t no need to make another trip up the steps.”

“So?” Ginger looked up into his face.

“So what?” Betsy asked.