The Closet Door

Sunday didn't start out well. The newspaper was missing the comic strip pages, and a call to the Austin American Statesman elicited the information that Fiorella that she lived in a non-redelivery area. Then came Daughter's visit. After dinner, which Daughter generously provoided, everything seemed to go well, but then it didn't, and Fio became very upset. She'd tried so hard to do the right thing, to make everyone happy, and it had blown up in her face. After Daughter left, she sat on the couch and thought everything through, then brooded over similar instances in her past.

But after a while, she went upstairs to finish off the  closet in her office, pulling out item after item that she'd stowed away in the closet when she and husband first moved in fifteen years ago. Her heart grew heavy again as she discovered canvases, craft paper, sketches for paintings never realized, family pictures, a shoe box stuffed with heredity research, and her doll.

Her doll. Victoria.

A golden-haired beauty who had been advertised on the back of a comic book, she was wrapped for storage in the crocheted snowsuit top and and the velvert lined coat Fio's mother had made for Nannette, Fiorella's previous doll. Fiorella remembered how she herself had spent hours designing and sewing a beautiful dress for Nannette to wear for her fourth grade classroom doll contest, which, of course, a Madame Alexander doll won.

All of a sudden Fiorella's childhood dreams swept over her and she grabbed Victoria, cradled her to her bosom and cried and cried and cried.

Narnia is cruel.