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.
It was a look I’d seen before, when someone wanted a pair my grandfather was making for someone else, the moment of admiring turning into wanting.
But there was something sharp in this man’s eyes. Possessive.
“We’ll expect white ones by the end of the week,” the man said.
My grandfather nodded, showing neither fear nor defiance.
The hollow in my stomach turned hot. A week? For a pair from scratch? With my grandfather’s other commissions, he’d be up every night until his fingers bled.
“And we’ll accept these”—the man plucked the shoes off the table and stuffed them back into their tissue-lined box—“as an apology for the delay.”
Anger roiled in my stomach and rose up into my chest.
The man would take those red shoes, those beautiful red shoes, and demand white ones (how would my grandfather make full-beaded white shoes in a week without his fingers bleeding on the pale satin?) and he wouldn’t even pay for them.
My grandmother took a step forward. “Oh, no, we would never ask you to do that.” Even from behind the door I could catch the mocking in her voice. “We would never expect you to bear the sight of something so offensive to you. Here.” She snatched the shoes from the box. “I’ll save you the bother of carrying them home.”
She slipped a pair of scissors off a work table and, quick as a magic trick, cut the red shoes into pieces.
I had to bite my own hand to keep from gasping.
The pieces fell like confetti between the man’s horrified face and my abuela’s proud glare.
My eyes flicked from the gleam of my grandmother’s scissors to my grandfather’s face. I braced for the pain that would twist his expression. Every cut, every whine of the scissors’ hinges, must have put a crack in his heart.
But wonder opened my grandfather’s eyes as wide as I’d ever seen them. No pain. Only awe, like he’d just fallen deeper in love with my grandmother.
At the sound of the blond man shifting his weight, I ran back upstairs, dodging the creaky places in the wood.
I breathed hard in the dark, and I waited.
After the man was gone, after I heard the shuffling-around noises of my grandparents shutting off lights and going to bed, I snuck back down to the workroom.
I had spent whole afternoons in this room, watching my grandfather’s dark, weathered hands shape the heel of a shoe, or my father guide cloth through the sewing machine. I studied my mother’s calloused fingers stitching patterns and constellations, and my grandmother hunching over her desk, making careful accounts in heavy books that seemed a hundred years old.
I had wanted to be part of my family’s craft since I first filled my palms with glass beads and felt like I was holding the stars. My parents could keep me busy with hours of threading needles and sewing tiny stitches, the things my father said were the first skills he learned.
Even without turning on a light, the workroom seemed stuffed with magic. Dyed satin and velvet spilled from the shelves. Tiny buttons sparkled in their glass jars. The length of beads my mother left on stretches of silver cord glittered like salt crystals. Every-color thread confettied the surfaces. When my mother asked me to help clean up, I pretended I was a bird, gathering up scraps to build a bright nest.