Everyone Loved Her Replacement

How it begins

My family sent the actress flowers.

They sent me the receipt.

This was not deliberate cruelty. Deliberate cruelty would have required them to remember which of us had organized the delivery account.

I had hired Nina for one evening.

A joke, I said.

A birthday experiment.

Everyone knew.

She would sit in my chair, wear the green dress I never found an occasion for and answer questions as an exaggerated version of me while I stayed upstairs with a book.

I wanted to hear my family laugh.

I had not expected relief to sound so similar.

At nine, Nina knocked on the bedroom door.

"They've asked me to come on Sunday."

"For what?"

"Lunch."

"Did you tell them you're not available?"

"I asked why they needed me."

I put down the book.

"What did they say?"

"Your brother said you always arrange it."

Nina sat on the edge of the chair, carefully keeping the dress away from the cup on my bedside table. She had worked in theaters where costumes lasted longer than employment. She treated borrowed things with respect.

"Then your mother said perhaps I could do the arrangements this time."

I laughed.

It came out wrong.

Downstairs, someone was loading the dishwasher. I had been asking for that to happen without instruction for seventeen years.

"Did you tell them to do that?"

"I said I was tired."

"That's all?"

"That's all."

I looked at the ceiling.

I had said I was tired many times.

Usually while standing up to fetch something.

Nina touched the sleeve of the dress.

"They like you."

"They like you better."

"They like not being needed. I think they've confused that with being helpful."

The doorbell rang.

Flowers.

A card thanking her for such a wonderful evening.

My name appeared nowhere on it.

For the first time all day, I did not go downstairs to find a vase.