I opened the last letter, and my mother's neat, graceful handwriting quietly surfaced:
【Penny, you've always been at the top of your class. You should be getting into college this year, shouldn't you? Mom is so sorry. I won't be there to pin a big red flower on you myself, to set off the firecrackers for you.】
Tears blurred a damp patch across the page. I folded the letter and put it back in the box.
Mom, don't worry.
This year's red flowers and firecrackers,
I'll prepare two sets.
My father didn't come home all night.
Early the next morning.
I was still cooking the pig feed when Edwina unlocked the door that had kept me shut in.
She had on a brand-new floral blouse,
the kind of fine fabric you could tell at a glance came from the county department store,
and she drifted over to the front of the stove, half-casual, half on purpose.
"Penny, up this early cooking pig feed?"
"You know, isn't heaven just so unfair? How is it that you of all people failed to get in, and I'm the one who made it instead?"
Edwina stood beside me, all smiles, raising a hand to fuss with her hair so the designer wristwatch on her wrist showed.
"Oh, right. Uncle gave me all the family's ration coupons and cloth coupons to keep yesterday. I took them into town and traded them for some money, bought myself a few new things."
She made a show of smoothing the floral blouse, smug all over her face.
"Penny, guess what? Those ration and cloth coupons aren't worth much at all. They only came to a few hundred dollars."
"Uncle said we might as well sell that plot of land on the hillside behind town too, to scrape together a thousand for my tuition."
I lifted a stick of firewood with the tongs and fed it into the stove, answering flatly, "Oh."
Edwina looked like she'd swallowed a fly. The smile thinned on her face. She took a sip of water and tipped her chin up on purpose to keep going.
"Can't be helped. Uncle says the village is too poor. If I stayed, all I could do is marry off early to some bachelor and pop out a litter of broke nobodies, and there'd be nothing to me for the rest of my life. So Uncle says he'd sell everything down to the pots and pans to put me through school in the city. He told me not to worry about the money. He said he's got it all arranged."
My heart felt like it was being roasted over a flame, burning until it ached.
A small place too poor, no future in it. And yet he had me sitting at a factory line.
And he had me earning the money to put Edwina through college, telling her not to worry about her living expenses?
In that dizzy moment,
I even started to doubt which of us was really his own daughter.
I gripped the tongs tighter, the iron faces rubbing my palm raw,
but my face gave nothing away as I set the firewood steadily into the stove.
Watching the crackling, popping flames, I answered softly,
"That really is wonderful."
Edwina was about to say more when footsteps came from outside.
My father stepped over the threshold, gave Edwina a warm, smiling look, and praised how nice she looked in those clothes.
Then his face went cold and he told me to stop feeding wood so often, that I was wasting it all, before he went on:
"I'm planning to take Edwina on as my daughter. Until school starts, she'll be staying here with us, and as her older sister you can help her get familiar with the material on the entrance test."
The state university wasn't like other schools. Before enrollment, there was an exam for incoming students.
A kind of placement test, really. It had no effect on your spot at the university.
My father had even arranged a small thing like this for Edwina.
Get familiar with the entrance test?
It sounded fine,
but what it meant was that I'd be teaching her, with my own hands, how to impersonate me.
Edwina agreed brightly, said she'd go home and pack her bags, and left.
My father was about to go too. Stirring the feed in the pot, I asked him, like it was nothing,
"Dad, Mom's grades were so good back then. Why did she fail to get in?"
The step he'd taken out the door stopped on the threshold.
He was silent a long while before he said,
"Plenty of candidates fail to get in. Maybe she just didn't want to go to college herself. What are you asking about all this old business for?"
