Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [86]
She hadn’t changed. She was plump and kind-faced, with little gray curls in a pom-pom over her forehead and another pom-pom at the back of her neck. She wore a stiff, wide, navy-blue dress that barely bent to accommodate her, and heavy black shoes with open toes. “Honey, don’t just stand there. Where’s your little family?”
“I left them home,” Emily said.
“Left them! Came all this way by yourself? Oh, and we were counting on seeing your sweet daughter …”
Emily couldn’t imagine Gina in this house. It wouldn’t work; the two wouldn’t meet in her mind. She followed Claire through the hall, with its smell of old newspapers, and into the parlor. The furniture was dark and ungainly. It so completely filled the room that Emily almost failed to notice the two people sitting on the puffy brown sofa—Claire’s husband, Claude, and Aunt Junie, Claire’s mother, the mountainous old woman who also lived here. Neither one was a blood relation, but Emily bent to kiss their cheeks. She’d last seen them when she came home after her mother’s death, and they’d been sitting on this very sofa. They might have remained here ever since—abandoned, sagging, like large cloth dolls. When Claude reached up to pat her shoulder, the rest of him stayed sunk in the cushions; his arm seemed disproportionately long and distant from his body. Aunt Junie said, “Oh, Emily, look at you, so grown up …”
Emily sat on the sofa between them. Claire settled in a rocker. “Did you eat?” she asked Emily. “You want to wash up? Have a Coke? Some buttermilk?”
“I’m fine,” Emily said. She felt sinfully fine, larger and stronger and less needy than all three of them put together. She folded her hands across her purse. There was a silence. “It’s good to be back,” she said.
“Wouldn’t Aunt Mercer be pleased?” asked Claire.
There was a little bustle of motion; they’d found their subject. “Oh, wouldn’t she just love to see you sitting here,” Aunt Junie said.
“I wish she could have known,” said Claire. “I wish you could have come before she passed.”
“But it was painless,” Claude said.
“Oh, yes. It’s the way she’d have wanted to go.”
“If she had to go, well, that’s the way.”
Claire said, “All those troubles with her joints, Emily; you never saw. Arthritis swolled her up so, she got extra knobs and knuckles. Times she had a job just fixing her meals, but you know how she was: she wouldn’t give in. Times she couldn’t button her buttons or dial on the telephone, and Mama with that elbow of hers … I would say, ‘Aunt Mercer, let me come over and stay a while,’ but she said, ‘No,’ said, ‘I can do it.’ She just had to do it her way. She always liked to feed that cat of hers herself, said it wouldn’t eat from anyone else, which was only what she liked to believe; and she was bound and determined to write her own letters. At Christmas—remember, Emily? How she always wrote you, longhand? And sent a little something for the baby. And Easter, why, that was her day to have us all over, and do every bit herself. Polished the silver, set the table … but she had to see to it some time ahead, in case the arthritis, you know … I stopped by on Good Friday and there was the cloth on the table and the very best china laid out. I said, ‘Aunt Mercer, what’s all this in aid of?’ ‘I just want to be sure it’s ready,’ she said, ‘for your mama can’t manage a thing with that elbow and I do like to get organized.’ See, she would never even mention her arthritis. Doctor had to tell us what was what; said, ‘She is in more pain than she lets on.’ She hated to put us out, never cared to lean on others. In some ways, it was best that she was taken when she was.”
“Oh, it was all for the best,” Aunt Junie said.
Claude said, “It was a mercy.”
“I should have come before,” Emily said. “I never knew. She never mentioned it in her letters.”
“Yes, well, that was how she was.”
“But she’d be proud