Dark and Deepest Red(5)

One of the women. Lala didn’t realize anyone else was awake.

Lala draws near enough to see the woman’s dress, the yellow apron over the black skirt. The delicate cloth of a worn but well-cared-for dikhle covers her head.

The woman is placing her hands on the bark of the crab apple tree.

“What are you doing?” Lala asks, and then gasps at her own rudeness. It is no better than interrupting a priest who kneels in prayer.

But the woman offers her a smile, shown by the growing light. Not a tolerating smile. One as true as the color in the sky.

“Lowering a fever,” she says simply, as though she assumes Lala will understand.

Something behind Lala catches the woman’s attention. She looks past Lala, into the growing light.

Lala turns around.

Halfway between the tree and the lane stand Geruscha and Henne, two girls in plain clothes and unadorned hair who live even farther outside the city walls than this house. They have taken to Lala and Alifair so easily, and seem to like them so beyond reason, that it unsettles Lala. Henne brings over vegetables from her mother’s garden. Geruscha endlessly admires the scraps of blue cloth Tante Dorenia sometimes gives her.

Geruscha and Henne pause, bread in their hands.

They know they have interrupted something.

Lala’s heart falls.

As though Lala and Tante did not have enough gadje watching them.

Now Geruscha and Henne have seen Lala with this woman, this woman in her dikhle, with skin the same brown as Lala’s, both of them standing at the crab apple tree as though it is a dear friend.

Geruscha and Henne leave the bread, and back toward the lane.

But it is already done. Lala knows that, even before they vanish against the brightening sky.

It doesn’t happen all at once, the way the families stop coming. But they do stop coming, judging the risk too great, either to Tante Dorenia or to themselves.

Lala never finds the nerve to tell Tante why. She leaves her aunt a thousand reasons she could assume—her being an unmarried woman, her taking in a gadjo boy, and raising him with Romanipen at that.

Lala knows it lessens their risk, no longer having families here, or women setting careful hands on their trees.

But Lala cannot help hating Geruscha and Henne for taking it from her.





Rosella


The first time I saw them, the most beautiful pair of red shoes my family ever made, began with a nightmare. It was the year the glimmer left blood on the rosebushes, and I dreamed of nothing but red staining the petals and twists of thorns.

I was still small enough that when I had nightmares, I went looking for someone else in the house. So I crept downstairs, avoiding all the spots that creaked.

That night, my mother and father had taken our rust-reddened car out of town, meeting with the shops that would carry the work of my family’s hands. They left me with my grandmother and grandfather, who let me have little sips from the coffee they drank as they worked.

I snuck toward the workroom, listening for the sound of my grandparents’ voices.

But there was another voice besides my abuela’s soft chatter and my abuelo’s low laugh. A man’s voice.

People came from all over for Oliva shoes, made by my parents or—if they were really willing to pay—the stiffened but skilled hands of my grandfather. They came to our corner of Briar Meadow, where the houses thinned out, the way my father said stars spread farther at the edges of the universe. Families brought daughters to be fitted for satin heels or velvet ballet flats. They thrilled at the shoes’ beauty, and the stories that they made girls hold themselves prouder and taller, or made their hearts lucky, or gave them grace that stayed even after they slipped them off.

I stopped at the cracked door.

A tall, blond man was talking to—no, not to, at—my grandfather.

“You expect my daughter to wear these?” He shook a pair of red shoes at my grandfather. They were as deep as cranberries, covered in vines of red-on-red embroidery.

Anyone who owned a pair of our red shoes handled them as gently as antique ballet slippers, each pair packed away into attic trunks and under-bed boxes, stuffed with paper to keep their shape.

But the man shook this pair so hard I worried the beads would tremble away. He wielded the red shoes, the workroom lamplight catching the glass beads.

The tight-woven satin looked adorned with tiny drops of blood, and I shivered with some echo of my dream.

“Red?” The man spat out the word. “For a debutante ball?”

My grandfather did not cower. But he didn’t meet the man’s eye either.

My grandmother stepped between them.

“Your daughter asked for red,” my abuela said, her face hard.

“She would never,” the man bellowed. “She would never ask for a color that made a mockery of the whole event.”

“Well,” my abuela said, turning through her receipt file and refusing to match the man’s volume, “it seems she would, and she did.”

The man ignored my grandmother, setting his eyes onto my grandfather. He stood half a head above my abuelo, lording every inch over him.

A hollow opened in my stomach.

The man slammed the shoes down.

The slight rattle of glass beads made me wince. I felt it on the back of my nightgown.

Then the man’s gaze shifted. He studied the shoes, the fine stitching and beading. He couldn’t even hide how he admired them.