Flora

superior coloring book, or at least I’m remembering it that way. The paper was smooth, not porous, the pages lay flat, and the pictures were from myths, fairy tales, and the Bible. The picture was on the right side and its story was on the left side. We always read the story first so we could get an idea of how the picture ought to be colored in. I don’t remember the picture we had finished before Nonie said, “Someone looks sleepy,” and walked me to my room, but I remember some of the pictures in the book. There was Cinderella and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Noah receiving the dove telling him the coast was clear, and Ruth and Naomi, and Joseph in his coat of many colors (but not what his brothers were going to do to him on the trip) and Aladdin and Pandora, and Psyche holding a candle over Cupid while he slept. The coloring book was called A Color Book of Old Stories. I still look for it sometimes online, but have never found anything remotely like it. For a while I had this fantasy that I would suddenly hit on it, A Color Book of Old Stories, and order it, and when it arrived I would get some crayons and turn to the page in question and redeem my lost colors.

When I woke up from my nap and went looking for Nonie, I found her sitting on the sofa with the closed coloring book on her lap. She looked guilty when she saw me.

“What did you do while I was asleep?” I demanded.

“Well, I colored another picture,” she said, an odd blush rising in her cheeks. “I don’t know what came over me.”

“Which one? Let me see.”

She turned to the one of Pandora opening the chest full of bad things, the entire picture colored in with her choice of colors. “Is that all right?” she asked rather sheepishly.

“That’s the one I was saving—to do BY MYSELF!”

“Then I have overstepped.”

I looked with disgust at the pink-cheeked figure in her blue gown. Pandora’s dress was supposed to be blackish purple, her face chalk white with dark shadows from what she realizes she has set loose on the world. And the sinister faces and writhing bodies of the plagues and sorrows floating out of the open chest that I had been planning to do one by one in devilish, jarring colors, Nonie had crayoned over so they all looked submerged in a watery green effluvium.

“I’m sorry, darling,” Nonie said. “But you’ve still got Aladdin, which has a similar story.”

“I wanted Pandora,” I said.

WHEN I WOKE up from my nap in Finn’s future room, I immediately had the feeling that something had not happened, but I did not begin to imagine all that had happened without me.

The light in the sky was too late for it to have been just an hour. I had drooled on the bedspread. It was very quiet outside. He didn’t come was my dismal thought. Then I heard a man’s voice in the living room below. Then a clink of a teacup in a saucer and Flora’s eager-to-be-impressed response, then the man again. His voice was deep and harsh, at the other end of the scale from Finn’s spun-glass tenor, and he spoke in blunt clumps, like someone who liked making his points more than he liked making friends.

I got up and checked my woozy self in the cheval glass, but that part of the room was in shadow, so I went across the hall to the mirror in the big bathroom. I looked for signs that Finn might have washed up in here, but the fresh hand towels were folded just as Mrs. Jones had hung them.

As I crept down the stairs it occurred to me that the man was probably Mr. Crump, returned for more of Flora’s corn bread—and probably with another unwelcome offer to buy Nonie’s car. But it was a much older man than Mr. Crump on the sofa beside Flora, having tea from a pot and pound cake.

“There you are!” cried Flora.

“Where is Finn?”

“Oh, honey, he had to go. He had his dinner engagement with Miss Adelaide.”

“He promised to come upstairs before he left.”

“He did, but you were sound asleep in your new office. He said he couldn’t bear to wake you.”

“It’s a study, not an office.” (It’s not going to be a study, either, but you won’t know that.)

“Sorry, honey, study.”

Holding his teacup and saucer aloft in front of his chest, the old man impertinently danced his beetle-black eyes on my distress.

“Helen, do you know who this is?” Flora asked.

“I’m… not sure.” He was an old man in a Sunday shirt and a stand-up tuft of wispy white hair and those rude little beetle-black eyes. I might have met him before, but I couldn’t think where.

“This is your grandmother’s half brother, Mr. Earl Quarles,” she announced as though she were presenting royalty.

It was the Old Mongrel himself, sitting on our sofa inside our house.

“Stepbrother, not half brother,” I corrected.

“The young lady’s right,” the Old Mongrel spoke up. “Honora and I were no relation. But I thought the world of her.”

I lingered resentfully against the archway separating the living room from the hallway. How had this happened? My father would be beside himself with disgust. If people did such a thing as turn over in their graves, Nonie would be doing that right now.

“How about a slice of pound cake, Helen?”

“I’m really not hungry.”

“Well, come in and keep Mr. Quarles company while I get more hot water.”

“Not for me,” said the Old Mongrel. “I reckon I ought to be getting along home.” But Flora was off to the kitchen with the teapot and he made no move to leave.

I walked sedately across to Nonie’s wing chair and sat facing him.

“I haven’t had a cup of pot-brewed tea since my wife died,” he said, with the return of the singsongy whine I recalled from the funeral home. “Now they just serve you up a bag with lukewarm water on the side and call that tea.”

Unwilling to make small talk about tea bags, I sat erect on the edge of the chair and stared at him.

He put down his cup and saucer. “You favor her,” he said.

“Who?” I was not going to help him.

“Honora. Your grandmother. You must miss her a heap.”

I certainly wasn’t going to respond to that, even if he started to think I was a cretin.

“She wasn’t much older than you when we met. Oh, me, it was a bad day for her.” He uttered a wheezy, almost soundless laugh. “Hated me on sight. Well, I don’t blame her. But after a while we made friends. She ever talk about me?”

I could barely shake my head. My lips felt pasted against my teeth.

“I was nine years older. So there was a period there when she was still a child and I was already a man, but then that changed and we were more like equals. But she was always smarter than me. I knew that right from the start. Smart and high-tempered.” Another wheezy chuckle. “Oh, me.”

Oh, God, Flora, where are you?

“What grade are you in school?” Even a slow-witted child could answer that.

“I’ll be going into sixth.”

“Your daddy’s the principal, isn’t he?”

“He’s principal of the high school.”

“That’s what I thought. I was looking at some acreage that’s about to go on sale at the top of your hill this afternoon and thought I’d drop by and pay my respects to him. But your cousin says he’s over in Oak Ridge doing some important war work. How old is your father now?”

Never ask a person’s age, I had been taught practically from infancy. “My father is the age of the century,” I said, which would show that I knew his age without actually saying it.

“Oh no, he couldn’t be.”

This was too much. “I guess I ought to know my own father’s age,” I said as coldly as I could.

“With all due respect, young lady, you must have got your figures wrong.”

“My grandfather wrote a poem on the day my father was born. ‘Midst our cloud-begirded peaks / on this