before the fire. Ana had worn it every year on the feast day since she was sixteen, and every year some woman in town would stop her and say how fine the color was, and every year Ana would say thank you and change the subject, because she did not know what else to say about a mother she could not remember. She remembered nothing of the fire itself — only a warmth, and a smell of smoke, and a man's arms, strong and shaking, carrying her through a darkness that roared. She had been a baby. The memories she had were not memories at all, but the shape of a story other people had told her, worn smooth by retelling.
The feast was held in the yard behind the church, where long tables had been set up under the cottonwoods and the women of the town had laid out bread and stew and pies made from the last of the summer fruit. The children ran between the tables in their best clothes, and the men stood in groups talking about cattle prices and the railroad and the dry year, and the air smelled of woodsmoke and roasting meat. Ana moved among the tables with a plate she did not eat from, greeting parents, answering questions about lessons, and trying, as she always did at town gatherings, to be easy in a crowd that had known her since she was a foundling child and that still, in some quiet corner of its mind, thought of her as such.
That was when she saw Rosalind Carmichael.
The cattle baroness of Bar Seven did not often come to town feasts. She came to the bank, and to the depot, and to the church on Sundays, where she sat in the front pew with her back straight and her hands folded, but the feast was a different kind of gathering, and Rosalind Carmichael had never seemed to belong to it. Today she stood at the edge of the yard, beside the cottonwoods, watching. She wore a dark dress, as she always did, and a hat with a narrow brim, and she looked, Ana thought, like a woman who had come to a place on business and was trying to remember what the business was.
And then Rosalind Carmichael looked at Ana, and did not look away.
Ana had been looked at before. She had been looked at by mothers deciding whether a shepherd's niece was fit to teach their children, by ranch hands deciding whether a schoolteacher was worth courting, by strangers on the train who heard her accent and tried to place it. This was different. This was the look of a woman who has seen a ghost and is too disciplined to flinch. Rosalind's eyes went first to the shawl, and then to Ana's face, and then back to the shawl, and Ana felt, with a sudden and inexplicable heat in her cheeks, that she was being measured against something she could not see.
"Mrs. Carmichael," Ana said, when the woman came toward her across the yard. "It is good to see you at the feast."
"Miss Zubizarreta," Rosalind said. Her voice was steady, but there was something underneath it, a tightness, as if she were holding a cup full to the brim and did not dare to spill it. "That shawl. It is a remarkable color."
Ana touched the fringe at her shoulder, self-conscious now. "It was my mother's," she said. "She made it before — before I was old enough to remember her. My aunt kept it for me."
"Your mother," Rosalind repeated, and the words seemed to cost her something. "Was she a knitter, then? A woman who worked in wool?"
"She was a shepherd's wife," Ana said. "All the women in my family worked in wool. The yellow — my aunt says it is dyed with goldenrod and weld, the way the Basque women have always dyed it. The color holds. It does not fade, even after years."
Rosalind nodded slowly, as if Ana had told her something she had already suspected and had not wanted to believe. She asked, carefully, about the pattern — the small, repeating diamonds at the border — and Ana told her that the pattern was her family's, that every Basque household had its own border pattern, like a signature, and that her mother had knitted the diamonds into everything she made, so that anyone who knew wool would know whose work it was. Rosalind listened with an attention that made Ana uneasy, because it was not the attention of a woman making conversation at a feast. It was the attention of a woman committing something to memory.