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cemetery in Michigan. She said nothing about my returning.
    Mother was indignant. Why hadn’t Verna mentioned my coming back? What was wrong that I was no longer welcome?
    â€œMother, just forget it,” I begged. “I had one happy year. Don’t spoil it.”
    But Mother would not forget. She wrote to both Verna and Lora. I did not know what she said and did not want to know. Whatever it was, she received tactful answers but no invitation for me. Mother despaired. Her cousins must not consider me the perfect daughter she had struggled to bring me up to be. What had I done wrong, she insisted on knowing. I wasn’t sure, I told her, but I supposed I hadn’t done enough housework.
    â€œHousework!” Mother was indignant as well asdesperate. “You weren’t invited to do housework. You were invited to bake cake.”
    â€œAnd I did bake cake,” I reminded her. I waited for Mother to calm down before I brought up my idea of asking Norma, if I could reach her, to share an apartment. At first Mother was horrified. I would do no such thing. Two girls in an apartment? It would never do.
    Once more Dad reminded Mother that if I didn’t have any sense by then, I never would have. Gradually she softened and asked the usual motherly questions. Just what sort of girl was this Norma? I described her as a picture of health, full of fun, a model student, a hard worker, a really lovely person. I was sure about the picture of health, and produced my yearbook to prove it, but I was not so sure about the rest of my fanciful description. With such different interests, we had not shared classes.
    Mother reluctantly allowed me to write to Norma and offer my suggestion. But how? I must have sent my letter in care of the Seattle Watershed. Somehow it reached her. In a few days I received an enthusiastic answer. She, too, had longed to go back to Chaffey, and her parents agreed to our sharing an apartment. Mother wrote to Verna, who volunteered to look for an apartment.
    Letters flew back and forth. My parents could let me have fifteen dollars a month, and my grandfather would continue to send my five. Norma would have about the same amount. I found remnants in a department store basement and made some dresses that weren’t too tight, wrote frequently to Paul, watched eagerly for his less frequent letters, knit swiftly around and around Verna’s skirt, finished it, started the jacket.
    Claudine invited me to spend a few days at Puddin’, an invitation I was overjoyed to accept, and I went, knitting all the way. I finished knitting the jacket and started the lace blouse on larger needles. Somehow, by the first of September, that, too, was finished. I had earned twenty dollars! Twenty whole dollars, the most I had ever earned.
    Verna wrote that she had found us a two-room, share-a-bath apartment next door to the public library, which made it, in Mother’s eyes, respectable. The rent was fifteen dollars a month. Joyfully I packed my trunk, this time including sheets, dish towels, and lavender bath towels with purple monograms (Meier & Frank had had a sale), which cushioned a sandwich toaster Mother had bought for us. I met smiling Norma at the Greyhound depot and brought her homeon a streetcar. Mother studied her, relaxed, and took me aside to whisper, “It’s going to be all right. She’s a nice girl.” I was relieved that Mother was relieved.
    Late the next afternoon, Norma and I took off on the bus for California. During the uncomfortable night, she confided that until my letter arrived she had been desolate with longing to return to Chaffey when she was not invited back, but because she had two older brothers in college, she had to wait her turn to continue her education until they graduated. Her parents could not afford three children in universities at the same time. They had been as relieved as Norma by my letter, and her mother apparently did not worry about “just