Kit felt bitter. She didn’t pity Eleanor right now, she resented her.
“You know, I could tell you everything and you wouldn’t sleep for a week knowing what I’ve seen and who looked after me. I’m making light of it because it’s too ugly to just talk about. Maybe you’re right, and I should be shooting straight with you, but I can’t fill you in on years of nothing good over a glass of iced tea. It hurts me to talk about it. I don’t want to. I start with one story and the whole mess slides out of me.”
Eleanor stomped her foot, sending the hen fluttering off her lap.
“For God’s sakes would you come down off that roof! You’re too far away, I can’t talk to you like this.” Kit was startled by her anger and said nothing. Eleanor took a breath and let it out. “Listen, I told you I can take it. Whatever it is, you can tell me. But I can respect your need for privacy. If it ever— If you think it would be helpful to you, I hope you’ll come and tell me in your own time.” She emptied her pockets of chicken scratch and turned them inside out, shaking out the dust. She walked to the front door, head hung low, pensive. Then she stopped and turned up toward Kit. “You know, that stuff will not go away. It will make you sickly and turn to rot. If not me, somebody. You have got to tell somebody.”
Both women worked off the stress of their conversation in their own realms. Kit patched the roof until dusk. Eleanor holed up in the kitchen and cooked, and from the smells that wafted up from the open windows, Kit guessed they were having pork chops, grits, and greens, a meal Eleanor knew she loved. She didn’t want to be cross with her aunt. If only these things came easy to her, sharing and close conversation. She swatted a late-season mosquito on her neck and wiped it on her shirt. She wasn’t ready to detail the cruelties she had suffered, and she couldn’t imagine feeling otherwise. Eleanor, she hoped, would forgive her that. She gathered the sandy, rubbery shards of roof and wheeled them to the pickup to dump in the morning. She washed her face and hands at the spigot on the side of the house and tidied the short strands of her hair, something she had begun to do as a small gesture of respect to her aunt, and went inside for dinner.
Chapter Twenty
Kit awoke one morning in January, disturbed by the silence. The creaks underfoot echoed as she pressed cautiously down the stairs. When she saw that the kitchen, which had always been lit and full of sounds and smells by 6:00 a.m., was cold and empty, she readied herself for nothing good. As she turned in to the living room, she saw Eleanor slumped unnaturally into the wing of her high back chair with the Weekly Holler spread across her lap like a caftan. Kit cried out, turned, and gagged on an odor, sharp and musty. “No, no, no,” she said as if she could undo what she was seeing. She knelt and held Eleanor’s frigid hand and stroked it, pressed it between her own, which were warm from sleep and rough as bark. But this cold would not lift.
Alone again, she thought with a familiar pang and cried into Eleanor’s hand. Nothing good can last, nothing good belongs to me. She was ashamed of the selfishness of these thoughts here next to Eleanor, who had been so decent to her. It’s not fair, she thought. Eleanor would never get a chance to see the baby. Her aunt had so looked forward to the birth, had filled the drawers of the little chest with soft gowns, socks and hats, diapers, and plush animals she had gone all the way to Houston to buy. It would have been a great gift to have help raising her child; but the thing that she mourned was the way it felt to be around her aunt. Eleanor had paid such close attention, had always known when to move in and when to leave a wide perimeter. Wrapped up in the security of her aunt’s home and good care, Kit had let down her guard. And now she was back where she had started.
The numbness began to bloom in her middle, pulsing outward, promising to shield her from the pain, so old and deep it was a part of her.
Alone, alone, alone. Wretched and broken and all alone.
Then, as if in reply, she felt a nudge against her bottom rib. Not for long, it seemed to say.
Pregnant as she was, it took Kit ten minutes to get Eleanor up the stairs. She squatted with her back to her aunt and held her wrists in front of her neck, then stood up. Eleanor’s body moved strangely, unnaturally loose in places, stiff in others. She took each step deliberately, managing the balance between the load on her front and the one on her back, until she reached the landing. She shuffled down the hall, laid her aunt gently on the bed, sponged and dried her, and dressed her in a coral knit suit. Though Kit had never worn panty hose herself, she knew Eleanor never went anywhere without them. After struggling to stuff her aunt’s rigid legs into a gauzy pair of beige stockings, she finally found a pair of knee-highs balled up in the back of the drawer and snaked them on, making sure the snags were facing down.
There was a little makeup still on Eleanor’s soft, powdered face, the shadows of her eyebrows, peach liner marking the vague edges of her lips. With a damp rag, Kit dabbed away the colors from hairline to collarbone, and thought her aunt looked beautiful just so. She attempted to wrap a bun on top of her head, but it wouldn’t hold, so she brushed the rusty gray hair smooth over her aunt’s shoulders. When she was satisfied that Eleanor would be happy enough with how she looked, Kit lay down next to her aunt and rested, surrounded by the flowers on the wall and the plastic tick of the clock, dosing the moments one by one.
The coroner showed up in a white van with a raised roof and pulled out a gurney. He was large and fit for his age, late fifties, and nearly bald. He had a cigarette in his mouth, said he had to make sure the doorways and stairs were wide enough. Kit pointed him upstairs and stayed by the front door. She wasn’t sure she wanted to see Eleanor again.