“No, I don’t think so.”
“Because she lives in town and goes to the second grade with me. Well, we’re going to stay up past midnight and have a party and everything. On account of it’s New Year’s. That’s tomorrow.”
“I know. And it sounds like a wonderful idea.”
“Oh, it is,” Mavis said. “It’s strictly a big deal. Definitely groovy.”
“Mom,” Rena said. “We don’t say groovy anymore. We say stud.”
So Edith hugged my daughter close to her that afternoon, and then she whipped up the new cream from the store and the three of them sat down and ate at least a third of Lyman’s pumpkin pie. They had a fine time for a while, visiting and chatting, talking about nothing as if there was nothing particular to talk about—and all that time, you understand, Edith still had in mind what she was going to do later. When they left, having wished the season’s greetings to Lyman and listened in turn to his mumbled confusion about postcards, Edith thought it was for the last time. According to her plan she wouldn’t see them again. But, in the iron manner in which she had done everything else in her life, she pushed that thought away from her—or accepted it—and just put her coat on.
Now I think I told you when I first started talking, telling you this story, I believe I mentioned that business about the chicken feed and the tied-up dog. Well, I haven’t forgotten. And not just because it was after my wife and daughter left her that Friday afternoon that those things happened, but because they seemed to clinch the matter, to finish it. What I’m saying is, she took the dog outside again. It didn’t want to go; she had to force it, to take the dog by the collar and lead it, its back legs dragging in weak objection while she talked to it, coaxingly, out to the garage. There she tied it to the latch in the open doorway with a length of rope, with enough food and water to last it a day or two. Then, ignoring that pitiful whimpering and complaint behind her, she went on to the chicken house, to leave food for the half-dozen red chickens. I mean she lifted or dragged—don’t ask me how—a fifty-pound bag of chicken feed into the center of the dirt floor and cut it open so that they too would survive until somebody happened to remember them afterwards. And that clinched it. It was then, while walking back to the house under that late purpling sky, that she understood for the first time that what she was doing was a real thing, a certainty. Up to that point it hadn’t been real, even to herself.
“But I knew it then,” she said. “Nancy was crying at me from the end of the rope. I kept hearing her all evening—or thought I did. And I wanted to release her, I wanted to let her go, Sandy. But I didn’t. I went back to the house and shut the door.”