“Ah, ah,” he said. It made her think of Morgan Gower; he sometimes said that. She was surprised to remember her other life—its speed, its modernness, the great rush of noisy people she knew. She thought of Morgan hurtling down the street behind her, her daughter (daughter!) hailing a city bus; Leon tossing coins on the bureau before he undressed. She remembered the first time she ever saw Leon. He had walked in the door of the library reading room, wearing that corduroy jacket of his. He had stood there looking around him, hunting someone, and had not found whoever it was and turned to go; but in turning, he caught sight of Emily and paused and looked at her again, and then frowned and went on out. She had not actually been introduced to him for another week. But now it seemed to her that at his entrance—swinging through the library door, carrying a single book in his hand (his fingers fine-textured and brown, his shirtcuffs so perfectly white)—her life had suddenly been set in motion. Everything had started up, as if complicated wheels and gears had finally connected, and had raced along in a blur from then on. It was only now, in this slowed-down room, that she had a chance to examine what had happened. Why! Her mother had died! Her mother, and she’d never truly mourned her. She thought of the last time they’d spoken, on the long-distance phone in the dormitory lobby. (“It’s raining here,” her mother had said. “But I don’t want to waste our three minutes on the weather. Did you get that skirt I mailed you? But I don’t want to waste this time on clothes, my goodness …”) She thought about her dormitory room with its two narrow iron bedsteads and the stuffed white unicorn on her pillow. She had once collected unicorns; she’d loved them. What had happened to her unicorn collection? Her roommate must have got it, or Goodwill had come, or it had simply been discarded. And think what else was gone: her favorite books she’d brought with her to college, her diary, her locket with her only picture of her father in it—a young man, laughing. She ached for all of them. She felt they had just this minute been ripped away from her. She thought of Aunt Mercer with her long-chinned, sharp, witty face, her pale, etched mouth always fighting back a smile. It was such a loss; she was so lost without Aunt Mercer.
“When she and I were girls,” Aunt Junie said, dragging herself to her feet, plunking her purse in Emily’s lap, “we used to walk to school together. We were the only two girls from the Meeting and we kept to ourselves. Little did I guess I would be marrying her brother, in those days! I thought he was just a pest. We had these plans for leaving here, getting clean away. We were going to join the gypsies. In those days there were gypsies everywhere. Mercer sent off for a book on how to read the cards, but we couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Oh, but I still have the cards someplace, and the string puppets from when we planned to put on shows in a painted wagon, and the elocution book from when we wanted to take up acting … and of course we had thoughts of becoming reporters. Lady news reporters. But it never came to anything. What if we’d known then how it would turn out? What if someone had told us what we’d really do—grow old in Taney, Virginia, and die?”
She sat down then, and retrieved her purse from Emily, and closed her eyes and went back to waiting.
4
That evening they had supper at Claire’s—casseroles brought over by other members of the Meeting, fruit pies with people’s last names adhesive-taped to the tins. No one ate much. Claude chewed a toothpick and watched a small TV on the kitchen counter. He was an educated man, a dentist, but there was something raw-boned and countrified about him, Emily thought, when he gave his startled barks of laughter at a re-run of “The Brady Bunch.” Claire toyed with a piece of pie. Aunt Junie studied her plate and chewed the inside of her lip. Later, when the dishes were done, they moved to the larger TV in the living room. At nine o’clock Aunt Junie said she was tired, and Emily