The mail was late the next afternoon. The damned mail, always late.

Elise sat in the front room, picking the basting out of a skirt with a pair of scissors. She jabbed her finger, then almost started to cry from pure frustration—she got up from her chair and moved across the room to the screen door, then stood staring out with her arms crossed before her chest, breathing deeply to try to regain her composure.

Every day was like this now. Every day was nothing but hours to endure waiting for the mail. Every day was weeks long and interminable for the postman to come, and then only minutes until it was time for bed, minutes until she would have to lay alone to make it through the endless hours of a night. It did no good to tell herself that she would have been notified if something had happened to Janson. It did no good to know she would have gotten a telegram. It did no good.

She started to turn away from the door, but caught sight of the postman, Mr. Worth, instead as he made his way up the street, and she stopped, gripping the frame of the door in her hands so hard that her knuckles turned white. She forced herself to stand there, not to run out onto the street, not to behave like a madwoman.

Mr. Worth came abreast of the house and saw her standing in the doorway, then waved at her before passing on down the street. Elise stood with her hand raised in greeting for a long moment, a dull emptiness settling over her again that she had known throughout the past days. She turned at last and made her way back to her chair, picked up the skirt, and began again to pick out the basting.

Another day, and no word. Another day, and no letter from Janson.

She had never felt so empty before in her life.

Too empty even to cry.

She worked at the skirt that afternoon until she finished with it, then resumed work on a wedding dress for Dorrie’s niece, Rosie. She worked at the sewing machine until her neck and shoulders hurt, until her eyes felt strained, until the calf of her right leg ached from operating the foot treadle, and still she did not stop. Late afternoon came, and Elise busied herself fixing supper, preparing a meal of Janson’s favorite foods even without thought, then she sat, staring at the table as Henry, Catherine, and Judith ate, unable to eat anything herself for the very fact that Janson was there.

Later, she left the girls washing the supper dishes, though Catherine was complaining through every moment of it, and went back to her sewing, resuming work on the wedding dress, a dress that would bring them needed money. She had saved for weeks to buy new shoes for Judith, so badly tempted to go into their savings for the purchase—it was getting harder and harder to make it without Janson’s wages from the mill and all the doubles he had worked in the months before he left for the war. She wondered now how they had ever made it during the height of the Depression, when Janson and Stan had both been without a job, and especially in the years they sharecropped. Money was so important, so very important, and there never seemed to be enough of it. Never.

But, she could not touch the savings. They had lost it twice before—once when her oldest brother had stolen it, once when the bank collapsed—they would not lose it again, and she would not eat it up slowly in the time Janson was gone. It would be there when he came back, and they would then buy his land, the home he had dreamed of for so long, the home he had promised her. She thought about it so often in the long nights, about that white house that seemed so big to her now with its six rooms, compared to their three in the mill village—what had her family ever done with all those rooms in her father’s big house in Georgia? That seemed a world away, a lifetime away, those more-than-seventeen years before.

As the hour grew late, Elise stopped work at the sewing machine so the noise would not keep the girls and Henry awake. She moved about the house quietly, straightening up, tidying the kitchen again, although that had been another of the tasks she had given Catherine and Judith to do after supper. Half of the room was only partially done, with crumbs under the table along with an unwashed fork and a small portion of a biscuit, telling Elise which portion of the room had been Catherine’s responsibility. Her eldest daughter never did anything more than half way, apparently having come to the conclusion that to prove herself capable of doing anything in a complete manner would only mean that she would be expected to to do more often.

Catherine was fourteen now, and sometimes reminded Elise so much of herself at that age that she was sorely tempted to slap her. Elise had only been two years older than Catherine was now when she ran away with Janson, and she found herself watching her daughter at times now wondering how she could ever have been so young.

She sat down at the kitchen table after she finished straightening up, taking out a paper and a fountain pen to began another letter to Janson, though she had mailed one to him only that morning—she just needed to talk to him, to be near him for a moment. Line after line was filled with senseless chatter, Elise writing so rapidly that it was barely readable, then she stopped, stared at the paper for a moment, and wrote:

“Janson, where are you? Are you okay? I miss you so much. Oh, please—”

Then she stopped again and stared at the words before her. After a moment she crumpled the paper up, then left it on the table as she rose to pull on the drawstring hanging in the middle of the room to shut the light out.

She moved through the middle room, careful not to wake the children, then entered the front room and closed the door after herself. She sat down in her rocker and stared around the room for a moment, looking at the big, empty bed before she took up her knitting—but it was too easy to think as she stared at the stitches made, so she set the work aside and reached for a book instead, knowing it could occupy her mind.

She had wanted to read Gone With The Wind for years now, but had not come across it in at the library until the day before. Everyone had talked about it back in ’36 when it was first published, and there had been even more talk when the movie came out in ’39—Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett Butler, she knew all about them already, as if they were real people she had heard gossiped about, and not just characters in a book or in on a movie screen.

Elise opened to the first page and began to read, then almost closed it when she saw the first mention of the word “war”—but by then she was already caught in the story. She read until late in the night, delaying going to that empty bed until she had to. She read until her eyes hurt and she could barely hold the book, then she marked her place and laid it aside. After changing into her nightgown, she sat down on the side of the bed to look at the photograph of Janson on the night stand. The bundle of letters she had received from him lay alongside the photograph, and she took the top one out, pulling it from beneath the blue ribbon. She touched it, running her fingers over the familiar, uneven script, flattening it out on her lap to read it for the thousandth time:

“Dear Elise, first off I love you tell the kids pa sais high. . . .”

The last—most recent, she corrected herself—letter from him. He always began them the same, and she longed to receive a new one, to read that line again, written in a fresh hand and not worn from re-reading upon re-reading:

“Dear Elise, first off I love you tell the kids pa sais high. . . .”

She gently put the letter away and looked at the photograph again, touched a finger to her lips then to the image of his face, then shut off the light and laid back to stare at the dark ceiling.

She had been wrong, the woman who had written that book. She should have told how bad it hurt to be alone, how bad it hurt to worry if your husband would ever come home. She should have told—but who would want to read about loneliness, about an empty bed and long nights and—

Sleep would not come and she lay staring at the darkness. She tried for a moment to remember what it felt like for Janson to hold her—then she tried to forget, tried not to think about it at all. There were footsteps on the back porch, the sound of the rear door opening and closing, Stan coming in long hours after his shift in the mill ended, coming home to his bed in one corner of the kitchen. His shoes hit the floor and then there was silence.

Elise lay and listened to the darkness, to her own breathing, to the sounds of loneliness and worry, until sometime in the early morning hours just before dawn, when sleep came at last.