Walking up Erin Street, they did meet a few young people, wearing boot-cut jeans and those velvet blazers that were popular in Baltimore too. This town was not so isolated as Emily had imagined, But the Meetinghouse-the only Friends Meeting in Taney County- was as small and poor as ever, a gray frame cubicle huddled in the back yard of the Savior Baptist Church; and everyone approaching it was old. They mumbled and clung to each other's arms, climbing the front steps. Emily hoped to see the friends she'd gone to First Day School with-never more than three or four of them in the best of times-but they must have moved away. There was no one under fifty. She took her seat on a straight-backed bench, between Aunt Junie and Claude. She looked around the little room and counted fourteen people. The fifteenth entered and closed the door behind him. A hush fell like the hush on a boat when the engine is cut off and the sails are raised.
In this quiet Emily had grown up-not a total silence but a ticking, breathing quiet, with the occasional sound of cloth rubbing cloth, little stirrings, throats cleared, people rustling coughdrop packets or fumbling through their purses. She expected nothing from it. (She had never been religious.) She wondered, for the hundredth time, what that dusty red glass was on the ledge above the east window. It was nearly overflowing with something that looked like wax. Maybe it was a candle. She always came to that conclusion. (But first she thought of something brewing-a culture, yogurt, dough, something concocting itself out of nothing.) She tried to name all the states in the Union. There were four beginning with A, two with C… but the M's were hard; there were so many: Montana, Missouri, Mississippi…
An old man with cottony hair rose and stood leaning on his cane. "Mercer Dulaney," he said, "once walked two and one-half miles in rheumatism weather to feed my dogs while I was off visiting my sister in Fairfax County. I reckon now I'll take that cat of hers and tend it, if it don't get on too bad with my dogs." He sat down, groped for a handkerchief, and wiped his lips. "Ah, ah" he said. It made her think of Morgan Gower; he sometimes said that. She was surprised to remember her other life-its speed, its modernness, the great rush of noisy people she knew She thought of Morgan hurtling down the street behind her; her daughter (daughter!) hailing a city bus; Leon tossing coins on the bureau before he undressed. She remembered the first time she ever saw Leon. He had walked in the door of the library reading room, wearing that corduroy jacket of his. He had stood there looking around him, hunting someone, and had not found whoever it was and turned to go; but in turning, he caught sight of Emily and paused and looked at her again, and then frowned and went on out. She had not actually been introduced to him for another week. But now it seemed to her that at his entrance-swinging through the library door, carrying a single book in his hand (his fingers fine-textured and brown, his shirtcuffs so perfectly white)-her life had suddenly been set in motion. Everything had started up, as if complicated wheels and gears had finally connected, and had raced along in a blur from then on. It was only now, in this slowed-down room, that she had a chance to examine what had happened. Why! Her mother had died! Her mother, and she'd never truly mourned her. She thought of the last time they'd spoken, on the long-distance phone in the dormitory lobby. ("It's raining here," her mother had said. "But 1 don't want to waste our three minutes on the weather. Did you get that skirt I mailed you? But I don't want to waste this time on clothes, my goodness…") She thought about her dormitory room with its two narrow iron bedsteads and the stuffed white unicorn on her pillow. She had once collected unicorns; she'd loved them. What had happened to her unicorn collection? Her roommate must have got it, or Goodwill had come, or it had simply been discarded. And think what else was gone: her favorite books she'd brought with her to college, her diary, her locket with her only picture of her father in it-a young man, laughing. She ached for all of them. She felt they had just this minute been ripped away from her. She thought of Aunt Mercer with her long-chinned, sharp, witty face, her pale, etched mouth always fighting back a smile. It was such a loss; she was so lost without Aunt Mercer.
"When she and I were girls," Aunt Junie said, dragging herself to her feet, plunking. her purse in Emily's lap, "we used to walk to school together. We were the only two girls from the Meeting and we kept to ourselves. Little did I guess I would be marrying her "brother, in those days! I thought he was just a pest. We had these plans for leaving here, getting clean away. We were going to join the gypsies. In those days there were gypsies everywhere. Mercer sent off for a book on how to read the cards, but we couldn't make head nor tail of it. Oh, but I still have the cards someplace, and the string puppets from when we planned to put on shows in a painted wagon, and the elocution book from when we wanted to take up acting… and of course we had thoughts of becoming reporters. Lady news reporters. But it never came to anything. What if we'd known then how it would turn out? What if someone had told us what we'd really do-grow old in Taney, Virginia, and die?" She sat down then, and retrieved her purse from Emily, and closed her eyes and went back to wailing.
That evening they had supper at Claire's-casseroles brought over by other members of the Meeting, fruit pies with people's last names adhesive-taped to the tins. No one ate much. Claude chewed a toothpick and watched a small TV on the kitchen counter. He was an educated man, a dentist, but there was something raw-boned and countrified about him, Emily thought, when he gave his startled barks of laughter at a re-run of "The Brady Bunch." Claire toyed with a piece of pie. Aunt Junie studied her plate and chewed the inside of her lip. Later, when the dishes were done, they moved to the larger TV in the living room. At nine o'clock Aunt Junie said she was tired, and Emily helped her next door to Aunt Mercer's, where both of them planned to sleep.
"I suppose we'll have to sell this place," Aunt Junie said, moving laboriously along the sidewalk. "There isn't much point in keeping up two houses now."
"But where will you live, Aunt Junie?"
"Oh, I'd move in with Claire and Claude," she said.
Emily thought of something dark, like an eye, contracting and getting darker. There once had been three houses, long ago when Emily's father was still alive.
Aunt Junie shuffled ahead of Emily through the front door. A lamp glowed in the hall, casting a circle of yellow light. "You ought to pick out what you want here," Aunt Junie said. "Why, some of it's antiques. Pick out what you'd like to take home." She leaned on Emily's arm, and they made their way to the living room. Emily turned a light on. Furniture sprang into view, each piece with its sharp shadow-a drop-leaf table with its rear leaf raised against the wall; a wing chair; a desk with slender, curved legs that used to remind Emily of a skinny lady in high-heeled shoes. She could have taken all of this, heaven knows. Offered, in general terms, a desk or a sofa, she would have said, "Oh, thank you. Our apartment does seem bare." A little itch of greed might have started up, in fact. But when she stood in this room and saw the actual objects, she didn't want them. They were too solid, too thickly coated by past events, maybe; she couldn't explain it. She said, "Aunt Junie, sell it. You could surely find some use for the money."
"Take something small, at least," Aunt Junie said. "Emily, honey, you're our only young person. You and your little daughter: you're all we've got to pass things on to." Emily pictured Gina reading in the wing chair, twining a curl at her temple the way she always did when she was absorbed, (Was she in bed yet? Had she brushed her teeth? Did Leon know she still liked a nightlight even if she wouldn't say so?) She missed Gina's watchful eyes and her delicate, colorless, chipped-1ooking mouth-Aunt Mercers mouth. Emily had never realized. She stopped dead, struck by the thought.