Miller's Valley by Anna Quindlen Read Free Book Online

chicken à la king, either, but she did seem to perk up at pork chops and ham. I guess she was a pig girl. Her parents had had some pigs, and a goat named Buster that got hit by a truck and died, but not before doing a good amount of damage to the truck. Whenever she talked about her childhood, my aunt talked about Buster and how he would follow her around like a dog, mouthing the skirt of her dress gently.
    “That goat smelled to high heaven,” my mother always said, but not in front of Aunt Ruth because the two of them were hardly ever in the same room. When they needed to communicate with one another, they did it through me. Get your mother to have new heels put on these shoes. Tell your aunt not to put the heat on so high. Tell your mother those beans were tough as rubber bands. Let your aunt know she can go hungry for all I care.
    My mother scarcely ever went to the little house behind ours where my aunt Ruth lived, and my aunt Ruth never left the house. I knew there had to have been a time when she did, because she’d gone to the high school and been sort of engaged, once, to a boy in her class who went to Italy during World War II and came back with a war bride. “Aunt Ruth’s heart was broken when her fiancé came home with a wife,” I said one night lying on the sofa after dinner, and my mother snorted loudly as though she’d never heard anything so foolish in her life. It was the way she’d snorted when my father had come home drunk one night from the Elks and recited a poem in the front yard. “Under a spreading chestnut tree the village smithy stands,” he shouted, and my mother stood in the doorway snorting.
    “Pop, you’re embarrassing yourself,” Eddie had said, standing behind her.
    There was a part about the smithy not owing anyone anything, and my father started to cry, and then he sat down in the dirt and Eddie brought him inside. “Leave him on the couch,” my mother had said. “I’m not sleeping with him in that condition.”
    I was the closest thing my aunt Ruth had to the outside world. I dropped off her movie magazines and before I ate my own dinner I brought hers back to the tiny house down the driveway, where it stopped being paved and turned into a gravel path. My father plowed all the way back to Ruth’s house on snowy days and shoveled out the narrow overgrown walkway to her front door, which always seemed like a waste of time because Ruth wasn’t going anywhere. For a long time, when I was young, I tried to dream up ways to get her to leave the house, but after seeing her up in the attic during the big flood I was pretty sure it would never happen.
    Donald used to visit her sometimes, too. He’d listen to her talk without starting to fidget or look at the door the way most people did. LaRhonda wouldn’t even go to her house. “She’s weird,” LaRhonda said. “She likes company,” Donald said. “He’s got nice manners, that boy,” Aunt Ruth said about Donald, “and I knew his mother so I can tell you they didn’t come from her.” She’d put out a glass of milk and two Oreos on a plate for each of us. Ruth’s rules, or one of them: she wouldn’t serve us tea, iced or hot, because she said it was a stimulant. She drank it all day long herself.
    I spent a lot of time at her house over the years. We must have done a hundred jigsaw puzzles, pictures that the box said were by Monet and Degas or photographs of gardens and houses and barns like ours but nicer. As I got older the puzzles had more and more pieces, so that now we were working on the cathedral of Chartres with pieces so small that we kept losing them and finding them again in the folds of our clothes.
    During the day when I was at school Aunt Ruth watched soap operas and read Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. She liked the ones by Mary Stewart and Taylor Caldwell. She said they were romantic. When I was in her house during the day, on weekends or if school was canceled because of snow, she turned off the TV