“Ancora sa qui?”
         Emma nods, “Yes, I'm here again. “
        “She is gone.”
        Emma's stomach flips with the terrifying thought that Maria has left for good, gone off to Detroit to find the man who abandoned her long ago.
        “Dove?”
        The old man shrugs, looks over to the wash lines beside the house. “It is wash day. Maybe she goes to the pump.”
        In all these years, Emma has never imagined her once-beautiful aunt doing laundry, but there are men's briefs and work clothes and socks draped over four militant rows of laundry lines, a single, white bed sheet snapped flat and pinned against the house. The sight of her aunt's loneliness fills Emma with such disappointment that she stands quickly, flees back to her mother's house.
        
        At home, Emma's Mother glances over her dirty dress, the water pails filled with more laundry. She looks at the sun, measuring the time left before dusk.
        “Those spraggers threw grease balls at me on my way to the pump. It wasn't safe to pass,” Emma explains feebly. “I went to fetch the priest's laundry. I know how hard it is for you to climb those steps to the church.”
        Her mother nods, takes the laundry from the pails. “The men will be home soon. Wash your face before you go to the pump.”
        Standing at the end of the water line, Emma sets the buckets at her feet. She recalls how her mother always claims that many girls meet their husbands at the water pump. She studies the worn faces of the women standing before her in line, the front of her own sodden dress. She can't imagine a man coming to this pump for anything but water. She looks for her aunt, thinks of how Maria once hung her clean nightgown on the line, calling her lover to her on a Friday night, but she can't remember a time when any part of her clothing was clean or bright enough to call a man to her day or night.
        When she gets home, her father and brothers are in the backyard, pealing off their dirty clothes outside the house. Standing naked, they take turns hunching over the tin tub, their pale shoulders and tired arms polished by moonlight. Emma helps them wash their backs with torn pieces of old underwear, listening to them discuss a roof fall in their shaft. Though it happened over a week ago, her father's voice remains hoarse from calling out to her brothers, and the fear remains inside of them as they try to talk it out over their bath.

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