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man, or at least Becky thought so. And now, a year later, he was going to be her husband.
    “Why aren’t you dressed?” Becky suddenly turned onher sister, standing barefoot in the blue gingham dress their mother had told her to put on. “You should be dressed by now!” It was seven o’clock in the morning, and they weren’t leaving for the church until ten-thirty.
    “Mama wants me to help Grandma in the kitchen.” She said it in a quiet voice, so unlike Olivia’s and Becky’s. It was a voice beneath which one could almost hear the husky sensuality of her singing. The songs were innocent, but the voice that sang them was filled with instinctive passion. Becky threw her own wet towel on the bed they had shared, still unmade because Crystal had fled to the fields to watch the sunrise. “How can I get dressed in here, in this mess?”
    “Crystal, make the bed,” Olivia said in a stern voice as she went to help Becky comb her hair. She herself had made the veil that Becky would wear, with a little crown of white satin sewn with tiny white pearls, and yards of the stiff white tulle she had bought in Santa Rosa.
    Crystal smoothed the sheets, and pulled up the heavy quilt their grandmother had made for them years before. Olivia had made a new one for Becky as a wedding gift. It had already been taken to the little cottage that was going to be their home, on the ranch, and their father was going to let Becky and Tom live there until they could afford a place of their own. Olivia liked the idea of having Becky close to her, and Tom had been relieved not to have to rent a place they couldn’t afford yet. To Crystal, it hardly seemed as though Becky was leaving at all. She was going to be less than a half a mile away, along the dirt track she herself often rode with her father on the tractor.
    Olivia was carefully brushing out Becky’s hair as the two women talked about Cliff Johnson and his French wife. He had brought her home as a war bride, and Beckyhad debated long and hard about inviting them to the wedding.
    “She’s not as bad as all that,” Olivia conceded for the first time in a year, as Crystal stood silently watching. She always felt like an outsider with them. They always left her out of their conversations. She wondered if now, with Becky gone, her mother would pay more attention to her, and listen to what she had to say, or if Olivia would only spend all of her spare time at Becky’s cottage. “She gave you a mighty fine piece of lace, said it was her grandmother’s in France. You can do something nice with it one day.” They were the first kind words anyone had said about Mireille since she’d arrived the year before. She wasn’t a pretty girl, but she was friendly, and she had tried desperately to fit in, despite the initial resistance of all of Cliff’s friends and neighbors. There were plenty of girls waiting for the boys at home, without bringing home foreign girls from the war. But at least she was white. Not like the girl Boyd Webster had brought home from Japan. That had been a disgrace his family would never live down. Never. And Becky had fought Tom not to invite Boyd and his wife to the wedding. She had cried, she had wailed, she had raged and even pleaded. But Tom had insisted that Boyd was his best friend, they had survived four years of the war side by side, and even if he had done a damn stupid thing marrying that girl, he was not going to keep him away from their wedding. In fact, he had asked Boyd to be his best man, which had made Becky even madder. But in the end, she had had to relent. Tom Parker was even more stubborn than she was. It was going to be an embarrassment having Hiroko there, and it wasn’t as though one could forget what she was, with her slant eyes and her shining black hair. Just seeing her reminded everyone of the boys they had lost in the Pacific. It was a disgrace,that’s what it was. Tom didn’t like her either, but Boyd was his buddy, his friend, and he