Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [85]
Leon glanced up. Then he said, “Oh, Emily, not those marionettes again.”
“But look: see how easy?”
She pranced Red Riding Hood across the floor, up the couch, into Gina’s lap. Gina giggled. Then Red Riding Hood skipped away, swinging a small yellow basket that snapped cleverly over her arm. “What do you think?” Emily asked Leon.
“Very nice, but not for us,” Leon said. “Emily, our old puppets can do that, and more besides. They can set the basket down and pick it up again. They don’t have all those strings in the way.”
“Oh, it’s just like with my shadow puppets. You won’t try anything new,” she said. “I’m tired of the old ones.”
“So?” he asked her. “You can’t just switch the universe around, any time you’re tired of it.”
She packed the marionettes in their box. She went for a walk, though she ought to be starting supper. At the corner of Crosswell and Hartley she paused for a traffic light and Morgan Gower came up beside her. He was wearing a tall black suit, a high-collared shirt, and a bowler hat so ancient it looked rusty. He bowed and tipped his hat. She laughed. A grin spread behind his beard, but he seemed to guess her mood and he didn’t speak. In fact, when the light turned green he dropped back again, though she was conscious of his presence-keeping a measured distance behind, humming a little tune and watching over her.
3
In October, Emily’s second cousin Claire called to say that her great-aunt had died in her sleep. She’d donated her remains to the cause of medical science, Claire said (just like Aunt Mercer; she would put it in just those words), but still there’d be a service at the Meetinghouse. Emily thought she ought to attend it. She hadn’t seen Aunt Mercer in twelve years—not since before her marriage. They had only exchanged Christmas cards, with polite, fond notes beneath the signatures. Going now, of course, was pointless; but even so, Emily canceled a puppet show and left Gina with Leon and took the Volkswagen south.
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 animals 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