She was nervous about making the four-hour trip alone, but as soon as she'd merged on the interstate she felt wonderful. It seemed that the air here was thinner and lighter. She was even pleased by all the traffic she encountered-so many people skimming along! No doubt they were out here day and night, endlessly circling the planet, and now at last she had joined them. She smiled at every driver she passed. She was fascinated by the private, cluttered worlds she glimpsed — maps and stuffed annuals on window ledges; a passenger sleeping, open-mouthed; a pair of children combing out their dog.
She turned off the interstate and traveled smaller and smaller roads, winding through rich farm country and then poor country, passing unpainted shacks bristling with TV antennas, their yards full of trucks on blocks and the hulls of cars, then speeding through coppery woodlands laced with underbrush and discarded furniture. She reached Taney in the early afternoon. The town was still so small that several of the men hunkering before the Shell station were familiar to her-not even any older, it seemed; just painted there, dreamily holding their hand-rolled cigarettes. (Their names swam back to her: Shufords and Grindstaffs and Haithcocks. She'd had them stored in her memory all these years without knowing it.) Autumn leaves scuttled down Main Street. She turned up Erin Street and parked in front of the squat little house that she and her mother had shared with Aunt Mercer.
The yard was shadowed by great old trees. No real grass grew there-just patchy bits of plantain in the caked orange dirt, weeds trailing out of a concrete urn, and a leaf-littered boxwood hedge giving off its dusky, pungent smell. Where were Aunt Mercer's flowerbeds? She would generally have something blooming, even this late in the year, Emily climbed the front-porch steps and paused, uncertain whether to knock or to walk on in. Then the door swung open and Claire said, "Emily, honey!" She hadn't changed. She was plump and kind-faced, with little gray curls in a pom-pom over her forehead and another pom-pom at the back of her neck. She wore a stiff, wide, navy-blue dress that barely bent to accommodate her, and heavy black shoes with open toes. "Honey, don't just stand there. Where's your little family?"
"I left them home," Emily said.
"Left them! Came all this way by yourself? Oh, and we were counting on seeing your sweet daughter…" Emily couldn't imagine Gina in this house. It wouldn't work; the two wouldn't meet in her mind. She followed Claire through the hall, with its smell of old newspapers, and into the parlor. The furniture was dark and ungainly. It so completely filled the room that Emily almost failed to notice the two people sitting on the puny brown sofa-Claire's husband, Claude, and Aunt Junie, Claire's mother, the mountainous old woman who also lived here. Neither one was a blood relation, but Emily bent to kiss their cheeks. She'd last seen them when she came home after her mother's death, and they'd been sitting on this very sofa. They might have remained here ever since-abandoned, sagging, like large cloth dolls. When Claude reached up to pat her shoulder, the rest of him stayed sunk in the cushions; his arm seemed disproportionately long and distant from his body. Aunt Junie said, "Oh, Emily, look at you, so grown up…" Emily sat on the sofa between them. Claire settled in a rocker. "Did you eat?" she asked Emily. "You want to wash up? Have a Coke? Some buttermilk?"
"I'm fine," Emily said. She felt sinfully fine, larger and stronger and less needy than all three of them put together. She folded her hands across her purse. There was a silence. "It's good to be back," she said.
"Wouldn't Aunt Mercer be pleased?" asked Claire.
There was a little bustle of motion; they'd found their subject. "Oh, wouldn't she just love to see you sitting here," Aunt Junie said.
"I wish she could have known," said Claire. "I wish you could have come before she passed."
"But it was painless," Claude said.
"Oh, yes. It's the way she'd have wanted to go."
"If she had to go, well, that's the way." Claire said, "All those troubles with her joints, Emily; you never saw. Arthritis swelled her up so, she got extra knobs and knuckles. Times she had a job just fixing her meals, but you know how she was: she wouldn't give in. Times she couldn't button her buttons or dial on the telephone, and Mama with that elbow of hers… I would say, 'Aunt Mercer, let me come over and stay a while, but she said, 'No,' said, 'I can do it.' She just had to do it her way. She always liked to feed that cat of hers herself, said it wouldn't eat from anyone else, which was only what she liked to believe; and she was bound and determined to write her own letters. At Christmas-remember, Emily? How she always wrote you, longhand? And sent a little something for the baby. And Easter, why, that was her day to have us all over, and do every bit herself. Polished the silver, set the table… but she had to see to it some time ahead, in case the arthritis, you know… I stopped by on Good Friday and there was the cloth on the table and the very best china laid out. I said, 'Aunt Mercer, what's all this in aid of?'
'I just want to be sure it's ready,' she said, "for your mama can't manage a thing with that elbow and I do like to get organized." See, she would never even mention her arthritis. Doctor had to tell us what was what; said, 'She is in more pain than she lets on.' She hated to put us out, never cared to lean on others. In some ways, it was best that she was taken when she was."
"Oh, it was all for the best," Aunt Junie said.
Claude said, "It was a mercy."
"I should have come before," Emily said. "I never knew. She never mentioned it in her letters."
"Yes, well, that was how she was."
"But she'd be proud that you came now," Aunt Junie said.
"And you'll want to go through her things, surely- so many of her nice things that I know she would want you to keep," Claire said.
"I don't have room in the car," said Emily. But suddenly she felt she would like this whole house-the wallpaper patterned with wasp-waisted baskets of flowers, the carpet always rubbed the wrong way, the china high-heeled slipper filled with chalky china roses. She imagined moving in. She pictured resuming her life where she'd left off, drinking her morning cocoa from the celery-green glass mug she'd found in a cereal box when she was eight. And when Claire said, "But her jade bar phi, Emily, that wouldn't need any space," she instantly pictured the bar pin, streaked with a kind of wood grain and twined at one end with blackened gold leaves. She was amazed at how much was still lodged in her mind. Like the Shufords, the Grindstaffs, and the Haithcocks, Aunt Mercer's house lived on in Emily, every warped shingle and small-paned window, whether she took it out to examine it or not. She would let the bar pin go to Aunt Junie, who wore such things, but in a sense she would continue, owning it forever, and she might catch an accidental glimpse of it, barely noticed, some moment while waking or failing asleep fifty years from now.
"I don't have room even for that," she said, Then she spread her hands and looked down at them-the parched white backs of them, the gold wedding ring as thin as wire.
At four o'clock they got to their feet and prepared to' walk over to the Meetinghouse. Everyone seemed to have a great many coats and scarves, although it was a warm day. They helped each other, like handicapped people. Claire smoothed Claude's collar for him and straightened his lapels. "Don't you have a wrap, dear?" Aunt Junie asked Emily. "Your… what is that skirt and top; it's so thin. Won't you borrow a sweater?
You don't want to take a chill." But Emily shook her head.