Miller's Valley by Anna Quindlen Read Free Book Online Page B

of one eye. Once I said that maybe Aunt Ruth didn’t like the outdoors because she was afraid she would burn—it was a night when I was sleeping with no pajama top and a back full of Bactine because I’d stayed by the pool at LaRhonda’s house too long—and my mother said, “Don’t be silly, the woman used to sit out at Pride’s Beach all day long in summer in a swimsuit.” There was a whole big story in the way she said it, like maybe she was off working or studying or helping her mother while her sister was lounging by the cool water, sunning herself. But it was hard for me to imagine—not the part about my mother, but the part about Ruth out in the wild. When I was younger Aunt Ruth and I had practiced having her leave the house; I would stand at the end of her little walkway with my arms open and a big artificial smile on my face, a school picture smile. One day she managed to take two steps through the door and onto the slate pavers, then said, “Oh, goodness, no,” and backed inside.
    When my mother said that about Pride’s Beach I wanted to ask why Aunt Ruth wouldn’t leave the house, but it would have been like sticking my finger into the blades of the fan sending cool air over my hot back. My mother talked about her girlhood as though Aunt Ruth had been her cross to bear from the beginning, making sure she got on the school bus, giving up her milk money when Ruth lost her own. When their mother died she left Ruth the house, but it turned out that with the taxes and the repairs all Ruth could do was sell it and move to the little place at the back of our farm. One of my earliest memories was of being four and going with my father and Ruth in his truck to pick up a few pieces of furniture, of Ruth drifting from room to room—which didn’t take long, it was a small house—saying, “Goodbye, stove. Goodbye, cellar,” until my father said, “Come on now, Ruth, we got to go.”
    “Where you going with that rocking chair, Buddy?” she said when we got back to our house.
    “Your sister wants that for the living room,” my father said.
    “She always gets what she wants,” Ruth said, which even at four I thought seemed mean and maybe even untrue.
    I could remember that day, but I couldn’t actually remember Aunt Ruth outside. I must have seen her do it, because it was a year or two after she moved in behind us that she started being balky about leaving the house, which turned into not leaving the house at all. It was one of those things you didn’t notice right away, maybe didn’t notice at all until one day when she was supposed to go to a party with my parents. “She hasn’t left that house for the better part of a month,” my mother said, putting a handkerchief in her one good purse, the patent leather one with a handle made to look like bamboo. My mother started to bait her: come with me to the market, let’s go to the diner for breakfast. She never wanted to do things with Ruth before, but now she was testing her, taunting her. Finally she said to my father, “You ask her, Bud. She’s always liked you better than me.”
    “Now don’t say that,” my father said.
    “She’s always liked you better than anyone, truth be told. Go on up there.”
    So my father went up the path and he stayed there for a long time. But he didn’t have any better luck moving Ruth than the rest of us.

W hen Tommy came home for a visit after basic training, he’d turned into a grown-up. I didn’t like it much. It took some of the old shine off him. His hair had been buzzed down so far that you could see the raw pink of his scalp between the bristles, so that it looked kind of like a baby’s head. I’d seen a picture of him in what my mother called his dress blues, although between the hat so low on his forehead and the serious expression it could have been any guy in a fancy uniform. So I was surprised that he came home wearing the old plaid shirt and tan work pants that he’d left in three months