The first thing my sister did as owner was clean out the drawer by the register.

She kept the framed sash.

She said it belongs to the shop’s history and she’s not a vandal.

But she found the notepad shaped like the tiered wedding cake, with thirty years of my sister’s waist measurements in our mother’s handwriting on it, and she took it out to the dumpster on Main Street herself and stood there until she’d seen it hit the bottom.

Renee came at Christmas.

We drove to Madisonville together on the twenty-eighth, in my car, and my aunt was quiet for most of two hundred miles.