'Huh?' Ansel said. He looked up, bewildered. 'Joan, I ain't even seen your Aunt Lou yet -'
Simon came in, with his hair plastered down by water. 'It looks kind of like I expected it to,' he said.
'You don't like it?'
'Well, yes. It'll grow out.'
'I could trim it around the edges a little more,' Joan said.
'No, that's all right. Thank you anyway.'
'Or maybe tomorrow you could -'
'Hush!' Ansel said. He sat up straight, listening, and when the other two turned toward him he pointed at the ceiling. 'Footsteps,' he said.
It was the slow, clapping sound of Mrs Pike's mules, crossing the upstairs hallway. 'She's only going over to the bedroom,' Joan said, but then the sound continued to the stairs, and Ansel said, 'She's coming down.' He stood up, preparing to meet her. Joan reached out and touched his arm. 'Let her be,' she said. 'Why don't you go home?'
'I wanted to say hello.'
'Do it some other time.'
'No, I want-'
The footsteps descended slowly, like a child's – both feet meeting on the same step, then another hesitant step downwards. Joan left the kitchen, with a wave of her hand toward Ansel to show that he should stay there. He did, which surprised her a little. She crossed through the parlour alone and came to stand at the bottom of the stairs, looking up. Her aunt had just barely reached the halfway point. She was holding on to the railing and gazing steadily at Joan, her face blank without its makeup, her dark yellow hair straggly and uncurled, and her plump body wrapped in a chenille bathrobe. The greyness of her made her blend into the dark stairwell. She said, 'Joan,' and her voice came out blurred and grey also, without expression.
'What?' Joan said.
But her aunt didn't answer. She continued down the stairs laboriously, and when she reached the bottom she would have gone straight into the kitchen except that Joan took hold of her by one arm.
'Don't you want to sit in the parlour a while?' she asked. 'I'll bring coffee.'
'No.'
'Ansel's out there in the kitchen.'
'No.'
Mrs Pike went on walking, not pulling away from Joan but just walking off, so that Joan had to drop her arm or follow her. She dropped it. Her aunt said, 'No,' again, as if some new question had been raised, but Joan was trailing behind her now in silence, frowning at Mrs Pike's back. Her back was soft and shapeless, and folded in upon itself at the waist where her sash was tightened. When she walked the hem of her robe fluttered out and Joan could see the dinginess where it had dragged across the floor.
Ansel was standing, ready to greet her. He said, 'Mrs Pike, I been waiting to see you,' and Mrs Pike said, 'Ansel,' and crossed to one of the kitchen chairs. Over by the window Simon stood with his back to her, his hands jammed awkwardly in his pockets and his chopped-at, straggly head wearing a stiff and listening look.
'I only came to tell you how I feel,' Ansel said gently. Then I'll leave.'
'Where is Roy?' asked Mrs Pike.
'Out back. You want I should get him?'
'No.'
Mrs Pike was sitting craned forward a little, with her hands on her stomach as if it hurt her. After a minute Ansel sat down opposite her, but Joan remained standing and Simon stayed by the window. Mrs Pike didn't look at any of them. 'I thought I would come downstairs a little,' she said.
'That's the way,' said Ansel. 'You shouldn't sit alone.'
'I wasn't sitting.'
'What I actually came to say,' Ansel said, 'was how bad I feel about all this. That's all I wanted to tell you. I told James, I said, "It's like the tragedy has struck at our own lives. I know just how she feels," I said. I said -'
'No, 'said Mrs Pike.
'Ma'am?'
But Mrs Pike only looked away then, toward the screen door. Behind her, Simon picked up the cord of the paper window shade and began tying knots in it, small tight knots running up and down the length of the cord.
'What was you saying no for?' Ansel asked.
Mrs Pike didn't answer.
'Was you saying I don't know how you feel? Mrs Pike, I know how you feel better than you do yourself. I been through this before.'
'Ansel,' Joan said. 'You've offered your sympathy now. I think you'd better leave.'
'But I've got so much I want to say to her -'
'I came down to eat,' said Mrs Pike, 'but I don't think I will.'
Joan turned away from Ansel and looked down at Mrs Pike. She said, 'Why, Aunt Lou, there's all kinds of things to eat in the icebox. Everyone's been bringing things.'
'No,' her aunt said.
'I know that when my mother died,' said Ansel, 'everyone kept trying to snap me out of it. They said that mourning has never brought the dead back. But it's only right to mourn; it's only natural. People have their faults but when they're dead you mourn them, and you expect to be mourned yourself someday.'
'Janie Rose didn't have no faults,' said Mrs Pike.
'No, ma'am, of course she didn't. When my-'
'We don't know how it might have turned out. She was a little chubby but not, you know, really fat. She might have slimmed down some later on. I never said to her she was fat. I don't know what she thought I said but really I didn't. Never a word.'
'When my mother died,' said Ansel, 'I thought of all the bad things I ever said about her. I got in a real swivet about it. She was a fine woman, but scared of everything. Wouldn't stand up against my father for us. When some sort of crisis was going on she had a way of sort of humming underneath her breath, slow and steady with no tune, and sewing away at someone's overalls without looking up. My father was -'
Joan came over and stood between Ansel and Mrs Pike, bending down low so as to make her aunt look into her face. 'I want you to eat something, now,' she said. 'There's a stew. Would you like that?'
'No.'
'There's a whole icebox of things.'
'No.'
'My father was not what you'd call a man of heart,' said Ansel, placing his fingertips together. 'Very strict. We always kept two goats around the place, to eat off the underbrush -'
'Isn't it funny,' Mrs Pike said, 'that no one sent roses. Roses are a very normal flower, yet nobody sent them. Everything but, in fact.'
'It's a little hot for good roses,' Joan said.
'In the spring, when the goats had kids,' said Ansel, 'we would fatten them up for eating. Only by the time they were fat they'd be good pets, and we would beg for my father not to kill them. We would cry and make promises. But my mother sat humming (though she loved those goats the best of all and had names for every one of them) and my father always killed them. Only there was one thing that made up for that -'
'Ansel,' Joan said, 'Will you go home?'
'Wait a minute. When my mother brought a roasted kid in, or any part of it, holding it high on a wooden platter with potatoes around it, she always dropped it just in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room. It never failed. The meat on the floor, and the potatoes rolling about like marbles and leaving little buttery paths behind them. "Pick it up," my father always said, but she would begin talking about germs and never let us eat it. I haven't yet tasted a piece of roasted goat. I think about that often now; it makes up for that humming, almost. I'm sorry I ever -'