“Sometimes I just read in my room.” It was time to squash this dogged inquisition. “I know what,” I said, calling on Nonie’s voice again. “Why don’t we each go to our own room and replenish ourselves?”
Flora seemed tempted. “Would you like anything first? A glass of milk or a sandwich?”
“No, thank you. We ate at the Huffs’ before we went to the train station.”
“Well, you have only to ask, Helen. That’s what I’m here for. And don’t worry about church tomorrow. We’ll go in a taxi. I’ve got the money for that.”
The angle of light in my room was different from when I was usually in it. Nonie often remarked that every one of us needed to get away from other people and replenish our personal reserves. I felt my room’s resentment at my untimely entrance. To disrupt its personal replenishment as little as possible, I crept quietly onto my bed with the library book I had taken to the Huffs’ and never opened.
This author produced a continuing string of novels, all featuring a girl and a house and a mystery. There was always a historical angle as well. The librarian had told Nonie and me they were “like Nancy Drews for the more sophisticated reader.”
This novel opened in a place where it had rained heavily all day, but now at the sunset hour the clouds parted and a breath of spring air wafted through the window of a muddy little sedan car just entering the town. The driver was a girl of sixteen, and her alert Irish setter sat beside her. Piled into the rear of the car was a mound of baggage.
A girl in her own car arriving at her destination with her alert and faithful dog, her luggage, and her plan—this author’s girls always had plans, usually involving historical or family research and requiring dangerous snooping. It was the kind of story I craved, but something nagged at my peripheries. Outside the window beside my bed the sun was highlighting an unsightly row of weeds that had sprung up against the closed doors of the garage. Inside the garage was Nonie’s car. To keep the battery charged, my father had alternated driving it with driving his own, but what would happen now? Not only had he been shockingly out of date about the shortcut we were to take to church but he had gone off without making arrangements to keep Nonie’s battery alive.
FLORA, I WOULD learn, went into a kind of trance when she prepared our meals. She would never come right out and tell me to hush, but if I talked she would simply hum or nod, remaining inside her bubble of chopping or stirring or turning meat in the pan. Could she not do two things at once, or did she need to tune out all distractions to remember how she’d been taught to cook?
The first evening I was all set to be sociable, as I had been with Nonie and more recently my father when they were making our meals, but I soon saw that it didn’t matter much to Flora whether I kept up a running commentary or stayed quiet. I wondered whether she might be the slightest bit slow-witted, and even anticipated with a superior thrill how I would have to get us through the summer without outsiders suspecting.
We ate in the dining room. At the last minute my father had removed the papers that were piled there. We had answered all of the condolence notes that had come in so far. Except, of course, the one from the old mongrel, which my father had crushed in his pocket. On Monday the postman would bump up our driveway with more mail, and maybe a letter from my father. Already I was fast forgetting his unsavory side.
It would soon be the longest day, and with the sun pouring through the dining room’s west windows, we didn’t light the candles, though Flora recalled how Nonie had always done it with such gracious ceremony.
“Didn’t you have candles at home?” I asked.
“No,” said Flora, “but I remember when I was little how Daddy and Uncle Sam ate their breakfast by the light of a candle in a mustard jar.”
“You mean in the winter when the mornings were dark?”
“Oh, no, all year round. Even in summer, they left the shades down. They got in the habit of eating breakfast in the dark when they were younger and worked in the iron mines.”
“Why would anyone want to eat breakfast in the dark when they’re going to spend the whole day down in a dark mine?”
“That’s what I thought when I was little. But Daddy said miners prefer it. Later, Juliet told me Daddy and Uncle Sam also liked it because it reminded them of before they had electricity and their mother still made their breakfast.”
“That was my other grandmother?”
“No, she was your mother’s grandmother. That would make her your great-grandmother.”
“Did you ever know her?”
“No, but your mother remembered her. When she was a little girl she had to help take care of her and it wasn’t pleasant. The old lady was bedridden and couldn’t even go to the bathroom. She should have gone to a nursing home but back then families didn’t do that and also our family was too poor.”
“It’s just as well, then,” I said, cutting Flora off before she said any more about going to the bathroom at the table.
“What is, honey?”
“That I had just the one grandmother, who was wonderful.”
“Yes, she was. I don’t know where I would have been without your grandmother’s support. You were so lucky to have her, though it’s a shame you couldn’t have had Lisbeth, too. I was thinking on the train coming up, I had more time with your mother than you did. Lisbeth was a little mother to me.” Predictably the tear ducts opened. What would it be like to produce such easy evidence of your feelings? Yet I also felt superior to Flora in my habit of restraint.
“Could I ever read those letters?”
“Well, honey, they were private, you know.”
“You read them aloud to everybody after the funeral.”
“That probably wasn’t such a good idea. At least your father didn’t think so. But I meant it as a kind of tribute. And I didn’t read any of the really personal parts.”
VI.
Sunday began badly with the taxi driver and would get a lot worse.
“Y’all better get your dad-blamed driveway fixed before somebody busts an axle and prosecutes.”
“Oh!” yipped the adult-in-charge to whom this rebuke had been addressed.
“We are having it seen to, now that the war is over,” I piped up in my grandmother’s voice.
“Oh,
We were driven in hostile silence down Sunset Drive. It was a sultry, overcast day. I got an uneasy sensation as we passed the spot where my grandfather’s shortcut lay in ruins. There was a familiar smell in the taxi that reminded me of my father. At least he was spending the summer in a place where sobriety was enforced.
“We will need a taxi to take us home after church,” Flora humbly ventured as she clumsily selected coins with her gloves on to pay the driver.
“I’m off duty now, lady. Just call the number.”
“We can get a ride home with Mrs. Beale and Brian,” I said as we headed up the sidewalk to the church.
“You go first, Helen.” Flora nudged me ahead of her into the nave.
I led us to our family’s usual place in front on the pulpit side. Nonie liked to be up close so she could do without her glasses. Too late I realized that whatever Flora did wrong would be seen by everybody behind us.
“Are the Beales here yet?” she was anxiously whispering before I could sink to the cushion for silent prayer.
“They will be. You better kneel down.”
I didn’t remember how Flora had comported herself here during Nonie’s funeral, but it wouldn’t have been so noticeable that day, with so many people from other churches bobbing up and down at the wrong times. Today she dutifully mimed my actions. When it came time to follow in the prayer book, she kept leaning over to see what page I was on. During Father McFall’s sermon she turned red trying to suppress a cough until an imperious hand from behind tapped her shoulder and shoved a lozenge at her.
I made her go up for communion, because by that time I was so distressed it mattered very little to me
