Flora A Novel

IV.


My one solace during the week at the Huffs’ had been planning the historical tour of the house I would give Flora the day she arrived. I had played it back and forth in my head, room by room, hearing my own narrating voice. First thing, we’d head straight up to settle her in her room. Flora had slept in this room on her two previous visits to this house, first when she stayed on after my mother’s funeral and then back in March, when she came up for Nonie’s funeral. She had already been told we called this upstairs front room, which opened out on the west porch, the Willow Fanning room, after a Recoverer who had stayed in it a year and a half while convalescing from a nervous breakdown. But there were other layers to reveal, the sort you wouldn’t tell a regular guest, not even a cousin visiting for family funerals. I had planned to drop a few hints about my father’s attachment to Willow Fanning when he was sixteen, maybe even going so far as to foreshadow their ill-fated elopement. My father shouldn’t mind, he was “an old guy” now, as he kept saying, and if he did mind, well, too bad. It was he who had chosen to make Flora an intimate of our family for the summer. I would tell just enough to make her feel she was being inducted into a private family story, and if she proved a worthy listener I would dole out more details. I might also allude to other noteworthy Recoverers on Flora’s first day. The point was to draw her into the ways of Old One Thousand and make her my ally in keeping things going the way they had always been. And what better start than Flora’s having just reread Nonie’s letters on the train!

But Flora completely derailed my plans by making us stop first in the kitchen, where she proceeded to unpack her luggage. Out of an old carpetbag, whose threadbare state had embarrassed me when Lorena Huff was lifting it into the back of her station wagon, came a sack of flour, filled mason jars, and an entire ham. And then from her suitcase Flora parted a meager layer of personal garments and lifted out a sack of cornmeal, which she held in one arm like a baby while she plucked out tea bags, a tin cake box, and some wax paper parcels of what looked like dead grass. With a sigh of fulfillment she deposited these items on the counter.

“You didn’t need to bring tea bags,” I said. “And we already have flour and cornmeal.”

“Well, I wasn’t sure. And I never go anywhere anymore without my self-rising flour. In a pinch, you can make biscuits with it and mayonnaise. I baked them for my teacher-training group last winter and they came out perfect every time. And this cornmeal is stone-ground at a mill near where we live. Now, Helen, you’ll have to show me where everything goes.”

“What are those dried-up old things in the wax paper?”

“These are Juliet’s famous herbs. For spaghetti sauce and to enhance our everyday dishes.”

“Juliet who?”

“Juliet Parker. Don’t you know her name? She raised your mother and me.”

“You mean that old Negro who lived with you?”

“There’s a lot more to Juliet than that. And she’s not old. Now this apple-cured ham is from your uncle Sam. He picked it out especially for you.”

“Uncle Sam owns the meat market and has been separated from his wife for ages and ages,” I said.

Flora needed to know that I was familiar with the names that mattered in my mother’s past.

“Well, he’s the part owner with his friend Ben Timms. Ben and your uncle Sam and my daddy worked in the iron mines together when they were young. Uncle Sam is getting remarried. I mean he and Aunt Garnet are going to get remarried. They were never divorced, but they want to renew their vows and make a fresh beginning. Isn’t that sweet?”

I stared at Flora, still wearing her little hat with the demure veil, so proudly unloading all this foreign food and all these people with their complications into our house.

“Is everything all right?” she asked. Something in my face must have sapped the confidence she had brought with her on the train. Already I was learning how effectively she could be managed by a simple look of disdain.

“I was just thinking where all this stuff should go,” I said.

“Juliet and I wanted to be sure I brought enough to give you wholesome meals over the weekend. We’ll order whatever else we need from the grocery store on Monday.”

“Why do we have to order? We can go and get whatever we need in Nonie’s car.”

“Oh dear, I thought your father would have explained. I don’t drive.”

“Do you mean you can’t, or what?”

“I never learned. None of us did. We didn’t have a car, so there was no need.”

“But how are we going to get anywhere?”

“Your father has set up an account for us at the store. They make lots of deliveries because of the gas rationing. All we have to do is make a list and call up. We don’t even have to pay when they bring it. It’s all been arranged by your father, isn’t that nice?”

“But how will we get to church?”

“I thought maybe we could go down that shortcut your grandfather built for his patients, so they could walk to the village. Your father said you’d show me.”

“That’s impossible! That shortcut is completely grown over, it’s dangerous!”

What had my father been thinking? In its heyday the steep path down through the woods to the bottom of the road had dispensed with a mile’s worth of Sunset Drive’s hairpin curves. My grandfather had had the stepping-stones brought in from a quarry at his own expense; the residents on lower loops of the road, who would also profit from the shortcut, had granted him rights-of-way for his project. But that was almost thirty years ago, when my sixteen-year-old father and Willow Fanning had used it for their getaway. Surely he was not still remembering the path as it was then. Many of the stones were now upended or missing and the pine railings rotted out. Where had I been when my father was dispensing his obsolete information to Flora?

After we got the Alabama foodstuffs put away (Flora was thrilled to discover some empty cocktail olive jars in the pantry, just the right size for “Juliet’s famous herbs”), we climbed the stairs and went down the hall to her room at the front of the house. I had lost all enthusiasm for my tour. It occurred to me now that it would be wiser to keep our family stories separate from Flora’s. I lolled in the doorway of the Willow Fanning room and let Flora prattle on as she hung up her few garments and deposited the rest of her things in the freshly papered drawers that Mrs. Jones, who cleaned on Tuesdays, had prepared. Next to her underwear, Flora slid in some hand-sewn satin envelopes.

“What’s in there, handkerchiefs?” I asked.

“Sanitary napkins. You know what those are, don’t you?”

“Good grief, yes,” I said, offended. “My grandmother told me about all that stuff years ago.”

Presently I saw Nonie’s pile of letters go in the top drawer and determined to have a secret look at them as soon as an opportunity arose.

“Are those all the clothes you brought for the whole summer?”

“Oh, no, honey, Juliet is mailing me the rest. We decided it was more important for you to have the right meals for the weekend.”

When the phone rang in the hallway, I was sure it was my father calling from Oak Ridge to see how we were getting on. Adopting Nonie’s ironic deadpan, I would be able to tell him about all the food in the luggage without Flora knowing we were making fun of her. But it was Lorena Huff.

“Helen! Guess what Rachel just found under your bed in her room. Your new blue Keds!”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

“Not at all, sweetie. Don’t you know when you leave something behind, it means you want to come back? I’ll bring them over. Do you need them today?”

“Not really.”

“Oh.”

“I’m helping Flora get settled in.”

A pause. “Everything’s going okay, then?”

“Yes, ma’am, we’re doing just fine.”

“In that case”—a shade more formal—“I’ll drop them off tomorrow.”

“We might not be home. Tomorrow’s church.”

“Well, look, Helen.” Now there was a chilliness, a touch of hurt. “I’ll drop them by when I’m over that way next. No need for anyone to be home. I’ll just leave them inside the screen door, okay?”

“Okay.” Then, realizing I had forgotten to say the proper things when she and Rachel had brought us home, I burbled out my thanks for the week at their house. “Everything was just wonderful, Mrs. Huff. Thank you for having me.”

“You’re welcome, Helen.” She sounded tired. “If you need us, you know where we are.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Please give my best to your father next time you talk to him.”

“Yes, ma’am, I will.”





V.


When I returned to Flora, she had changed out of her traveling outfit into some wrinkled pedal pushers and a sleeveless blouse that showed where her tan stopped just above the elbows. “You know what, Helen?” she said, wriggling her bare feet into scuffed brown loafers with pennies in them. “After I give you a light lunch, why don’t you show me that shortcut of your grandfather’s anyway? Maybe it’s not completely out of the question. When was the last time anyone used it?”

“I have no idea. I’m not supposed to mess around down there by myself. But we can walk down and look at it now if you want. I’m really not hungry. Just remember I said it’s dangerous.”

As we tottered down our horrible driveway, she acted pleased each time I grabbed for her hand, but I did this to keep my balance. (“Everyone still on board?” Lorena Huff had cried as her new Oldsmobile bucked a nasty rut today.) I had grown used to hearing Nonie complain about the ruts (“Goddamn sinkholes,” my father called them), but I was in the car at those times. After several of Flora’s apologetic little yips when she stumbled, I did a pretty fair imitation of Nonie’s voice reassuring her that we were going to get this road seen to as soon as the war was over.

At last we reached the paved road. Then you had to walk down Sunset Drive until you reached the big curve, which doubled back on itself and was so dangerous that the town had put up hairpin curve signs in both directions and a streetlight, which unfortunately got shot out at least once a month by ruffians. They came from the other side of town to shoot out this streetlight, Nonie said. When I asked her why they didn’t shoot out the streetlights on their own side of town, she said wryly, “They already have, darling.”

Just before that curve, in the woods sloping off to the right, began the shortcut that my grandfather had made to take his Recoverers down to the next paved loop of Sunset Drive, and then down a continuation of the path through more woods to the final loop, which opened onto the street of neighborhood shops if you turned south, and toward our church if you turned north.

“This is it?” asked Flora, when we reached the shortcut. “But I don’t see any path at all.”

“I told you, it’s grown over.”

“How odd. Your father made it sound—”

“Well we’re here now,” I said irritably, “so we might as well look for where it used to be.” I plunged ahead into the overgrowth, exulting in every clawing bramble and slapping branch that came my way, a yipping Flora following close behind. Something ripped at my arm, but I crashed on, hoping it would bleed. At last I found a few of my grandfather’s descending steps, which ended abruptly at a crater deep as an open grave, bristling with roots and wild vegetation. The crater looked perfectly terrifying, and I was elated.

“Well, there’s our shortcut to church,” I said.

“Oh dear,” said Flora, coming up beside me. She was breathing hard, and I could smell her underarm perspiration. “My church shoes certainly wouldn’t make it down that. But, I mean, when did your father last use this path?”

I was on the verge of relenting about Willow Fanning when Flora wailed, “Oh, no! Your arm is bleeding!” First she tried to doctor it with a leaf and some of her spit, and then she went into what I would come to recognize as a typical Flora flagellation. It was all her fault, she should never have suggested this outing, what a fool she was—“and on the very first day of my taking care of you!”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “It’s just a little blood. It’s good we saw it up close. I needed to see it, too, instead of just driving past it. My father was probably thinking of how it was a while ago.” Though it was gratifying to hear my voice reassuring her, I was feeling less reassured myself. Beyond my resentment at the idea of her “taking care” of me rose an unsettling thought: what if there were ways I was going to have to take care of Flora?

As we walked back to the house she asked what kinds of things I had done while staying with the Huffs.

“Oh, they had all their activities. Rachel had her tennis and her riding and her piano lessons and Mrs. Huff had her sunbathing and her magazines and her spiked lemonade.” Nonie or my father would have picked up on my sarcasm at once and joined the game, but Flora went earnestly on.

“But what did you do, Helen?”

“Oh, I swam with Rachel and things, but mostly I just thought about being back home.”

We walked uphill some more. I could feel her working up to her next question. “And, what things were you wanting to do back home?”

While I was at the Huffs’, the life of our house was going on without me. I needed to be there to register it. I felt the longer I wasn’t there, the more of myself I would lose.

Of course I didn’t say this. While I was still concocting a normal-sounding reply that would satisfy her, Flora jumped in with “Helen, I know everything has changed for you since your grandmother passed away, but it would help if I knew what in particular you like to do.”

She had interrupted my concocting process. I couldn’t come up with a single thing to say I liked to do.

When we got back to the house, Flora observed almost regretfully that it was still too early to start supper. “What did you usually do on Saturday afternoons, Helen?”

Well, if Nonie hadn’t “passed away” she would be taking her nap on her three pillows about now and I would be upstairs on the Recoverers’ west porch, reading a book or gazing at the non-view of hectic branches. But now, for the whole summer, Flora’s room opened onto this porch and so it was off-limits to me.

“Sometimes I just read in my room.” It was time to squash this dogged inquisition. “I know what,” I said, calling on Nonie’s voice again. “Why don’t we each go to our own room and replenish ourselves?”

Flora seemed tempted. “Would you like anything first? A glass of milk or a sandwich?”

“No, thank you. We ate at the Huffs’ before we went to the train station.”

“Well, you have only to ask, Helen. That’s what I’m here for. And don’t worry about church tomorrow. We’ll go in a taxi. I’ve got the money for that.”

The angle of light in my room was different from when I was usually in it. Nonie often remarked that every one of us needed to get away from other people and replenish our personal reserves. I felt my room’s resentment at my untimely entrance. To disrupt its personal replenishment as little as possible, I crept quietly onto my bed with the library book I had taken to the Huffs’ and never opened.

This author produced a continuing string of novels, all featuring a girl and a house and a mystery. There was always a historical angle as well. The librarian had told Nonie and me they were “like Nancy Drews for the more sophisticated reader.”

This novel opened in a place where it had rained heavily all day, but now at the sunset hour the clouds parted and a breath of spring air wafted through the window of a muddy little sedan car just entering the town. The driver was a girl of sixteen, and her alert Irish setter sat beside her. Piled into the rear of the car was a mound of baggage.

A girl in her own car arriving at her destination with her alert and faithful dog, her luggage, and her plan—this author’s girls always had plans, usually involving historical or family research and requiring dangerous snooping. It was the kind of story I craved, but something nagged at my peripheries. Outside the window beside my bed the sun was highlighting an unsightly row of weeds that had sprung up against the closed doors of the garage. Inside the garage was Nonie’s car. To keep the battery charged, my father had alternated driving it with driving his own, but what would happen now? Not only had he been shockingly out of date about the shortcut we were to take to church but he had gone off without making arrangements to keep Nonie’s battery alive.




FLORA, I WOULD learn, went into a kind of trance when she prepared our meals. She would never come right out and tell me to hush, but if I talked she would simply hum or nod, remaining inside her bubble of chopping or stirring or turning meat in the pan. Could she not do two things at once, or did she need to tune out all distractions to remember how she’d been taught to cook?

The first evening I was all set to be sociable, as I had been with Nonie and more recently my father when they were making our meals, but I soon saw that it didn’t matter much to Flora whether I kept up a running commentary or stayed quiet. I wondered whether she might be the slightest bit slow-witted, and even anticipated with a superior thrill how I would have to get us through the summer without outsiders suspecting.

We ate in the dining room. At the last minute my father had removed the papers that were piled there. We had answered all of the condolence notes that had come in so far. Except, of course, the one from the old mongrel, which my father had crushed in his pocket. On Monday the postman would bump up our driveway with more mail, and maybe a letter from my father. Already I was fast forgetting his unsavory side.

It would soon be the longest day, and with the sun pouring through the dining room’s west windows, we didn’t light the candles, though Flora recalled how Nonie had always done it with such gracious ceremony.

“Didn’t you have candles at home?” I asked.

“No,” said Flora, “but I remember when I was little how Daddy and Uncle Sam ate their breakfast by the light of a candle in a mustard jar.”

“You mean in the winter when the mornings were dark?”

“Oh, no, all year round. Even in summer, they left the shades down. They got in the habit of eating breakfast in the dark when they were younger and worked in the iron mines.”

“Why would anyone want to eat breakfast in the dark when they’re going to spend the whole day down in a dark mine?”

“That’s what I thought when I was little. But Daddy said miners prefer it. Later, Juliet told me Daddy and Uncle Sam also liked it because it reminded them of before they had electricity and their mother still made their breakfast.”

“That was my other grandmother?”

“No, she was your mother’s grandmother. That would make her your great-grandmother.”

“Did you ever know her?”

“No, but your mother remembered her. When she was a little girl she had to help take care of her and it wasn’t pleasant. The old lady was bedridden and couldn’t even go to the bathroom. She should have gone to a nursing home but back then families didn’t do that and also our family was too poor.”

“It’s just as well, then,” I said, cutting Flora off before she said any more about going to the bathroom at the table.

“What is, honey?”

“That I had just the one grandmother, who was wonderful.”

“Yes, she was. I don’t know where I would have been without your grandmother’s support. You were so lucky to have her, though it’s a shame you couldn’t have had Lisbeth, too. I was thinking on the train coming up, I had more time with your mother than you did. Lisbeth was a little mother to me.” Predictably the tear ducts opened. What would it be like to produce such easy evidence of your feelings? Yet I also felt superior to Flora in my habit of restraint.

“Could I ever read those letters?”

“Well, honey, they were private, you know.”

“You read them aloud to everybody after the funeral.”

“That probably wasn’t such a good idea. At least your father didn’t think so. But I meant it as a kind of tribute. And I didn’t read any of the really personal parts.”





VI.


Sunday began badly with the taxi driver and would get a lot worse.

“Y’all better get your dad-blamed driveway fixed before somebody busts an axle and prosecutes.”

“Oh!” yipped the adult-in-charge to whom this rebuke had been addressed.

“We are having it seen to, now that the war is over,” I piped up in my grandmother’s voice.

“Oh, seen to!” he imitated in falsetto, jolting us sideways to avoid a rut.

We were driven in hostile silence down Sunset Drive. It was a sultry, overcast day. I got an uneasy sensation as we passed the spot where my grandfather’s shortcut lay in ruins. There was a familiar smell in the taxi that reminded me of my father. At least he was spending the summer in a place where sobriety was enforced.

“We will need a taxi to take us home after church,” Flora humbly ventured as she clumsily selected coins with her gloves on to pay the driver.

“I’m off duty now, lady. Just call the number.”

“We can get a ride home with Mrs. Beale and Brian,” I said as we headed up the sidewalk to the church.

“You go first, Helen.” Flora nudged me ahead of her into the nave.

I led us to our family’s usual place in front on the pulpit side. Nonie liked to be up close so she could do without her glasses. Too late I realized that whatever Flora did wrong would be seen by everybody behind us.

“Are the Beales here yet?” she was anxiously whispering before I could sink to the cushion for silent prayer.

“They will be. You better kneel down.”

I didn’t remember how Flora had comported herself here during Nonie’s funeral, but it wouldn’t have been so noticeable that day, with so many people from other churches bobbing up and down at the wrong times. Today she dutifully mimed my actions. When it came time to follow in the prayer book, she kept leaning over to see what page I was on. During Father McFall’s sermon she turned red trying to suppress a cough until an imperious hand from behind tapped her shoulder and shoved a lozenge at her.

I made her go up for communion, because by that time I was so distressed it mattered very little to me whether she was eligible to take the sacrament or not. At the conclusion of his sermon, Father McFall had asked us from the pulpit to join him in saying the Prayer for a Sick Child. Brian Beale, he announced, had come down with polio over the weekend.

Father McFall himself drove us home. “When I saw you from the pulpit, Helen, I realized you hadn’t heard about Brian.”

Flora sat in front with the rector, who was diplomatically grilling her. He began by saying that he had been among the listeners when she was reading Mrs. Anstruther’s letters. Next came cordial inquiries about her Alabama life, her plans for the future, and her summer plans for the two of us. (“Though some activities may have to be forfeited, with this polio outbreak.”)

Brian had gone swimming at the municipal lake, which was now closed; one other child, a little girl, had been stricken and was in an iron lung.

“But his mother never lets him go to the municipal lake,” I protested from the backseat. “Mrs. Beale is scared silly of diseases.”

“Well, this time, rightly so. But it was a hot day and Brian was lonely and bored, so she gave in and took him and even went in the lake herself. She has scarcely left his bedside at the hospital.”

“Does this mean Brian is going to be crippled?”

“We’re taking it a step at a time, Helen.”

Though it gave his old Ford sedan a severe shaking, Father McFall allowed himself no comment on our driveway. I remembered to say, “Won’t you come in?” as Nonie always did when people brought me home, but he said he had hospital visits to make.

“Will you see Brian?”

“I’m headed straight there. Do you have a message for him?”

“Tell him I said please get better soon.”

Tell him I’m sorry. It was my fault.

“I’d like to visit you two during the week, if that’s all right. I’ll phone first,” Father McFall said in parting.

Inside the screen door, we found my Keds tied together with a ribbon. There was no note.

It was a hot day and Brian was lonely and bored.

If I had been there, he wouldn’t have been either of those things. We would have been in our outdoor sanctuary under the trees in his fenced-in backyard, which was visible enough from an upstairs window for his mother to spy on us. We would have drunk her iced apple juice and played Brian’s favorite game, in which he was either auditioning before a hard-to-please New York director (me) for a lead role or being coached by the director in his role.

If I had stayed at Brian’s last week rather than languishing in luxury at the Huffs’, he would have been in church this morning. As I passed his pew, his princely little profile would have swiveled just enough to beam me a possessive greeting: didn’t we have fun this past week? After church, the Beales would have driven Flora and me back to Old One Thousand and maybe Mrs. Beale would have let him stay overnight. Flora would have made hot biscuits to go with the ham, and for dessert there would have been more of the pound cake she had brought in the suitcase from Alabama. After supper, Brian would have sat down at our out-of-tune piano and picked out some show tunes, and Flora would have praised him and remarked happily on what a nice evening we were having, and then she would have excused herself and retired to the Willow Fanning room. And Brian and I, as we had done since we became spend-the-night friends back in first grade, would have separated to undress and then reconvened in either my room or his, which was my grandfather’s old consulting room. We would have snuggled hip to hip in our pajamas on top of the spread, covering our knees with a quilt, and taken turns reading aloud. I was the faster sight reader, but Brian liked to practice his delivery and his English accent. Sometimes we read from the books we had outgrown for the sake of doing the parts. He was always Eeyore and Piglet and I was always Pooh.

All Sunday afternoon Flora kept watching me mournfully as though another member of my family had died and she was expecting me to fall to pieces any minute. “Let me know if I can do anything, honey,” she kept saying.

“Don’t you have anything you need to do?” I was finally driven to ask.

She looked hurt, then recovered herself and said she had been hoping to use her time off to prepare sample lesson plans for whichever job came through. She had interviewed for three: one for sixth grade and two for fifth.

“Then why don’t you go and do that?” I said.

But as I prowled around downstairs after getting rid of Flora, I felt the house ignoring my existence. I kicked open the kitchen screen door, noticing for the first time that the bottom board, where my foot always landed, had split.

I decided to walk completely around the house and force it to acknowledge me. The day was still under that stubborn haze that withholds either rain or sunshine.

When was the last time I had walked all the way around this house? It seemed that for years we had climbed into our cars and gone somewhere and come back and gone into the house. When was the last time anyone had walked around this house? This made me think of Brian, who might never be able to walk around his house again. Other thoughts came. I pushed them away until all that was left was the forlorn scene I was walking through. Everywhere things were falling apart. Peeling paint, missing roof tiles, an unattached downspout swinging tipsily out from a roof gutter. The former “front lawn” had become a weedy slope ending in unkempt woods, where two broken old trees had collapsed against each other and were rotting together. Did I really remember a lawn green and smooth enough for me to roll down, over and over again? Who had been with me? A woman dressed to go somewhere else, looking off into the distance. There was discontent in the air. Was it mine, or hers, or just the day in general? Was I remembering my mother or was my memory as unreliable as my father’s memory of my grandfather’s shortcut to town? It seemed hard to believe that when the Recoverers took their constitutionals on this lawn they could have looked out through healthy, upright trees and seen the mountains. Yet a charming recovering drunk, Starling Peake, had painted a small canvas that hung on our living room wall, testifying to this lost view. “Poor Starling,” Nonie would say. “He let us down, but he was happy the day he painted that picture.”

What had my mother seen when my father brought her to Old One Thousand for the first time? “It must be wonderful to live in a house like this”: those were her first words to my grandmother. Could the house have disintegrated that much in twelve years, or had my mother been being polite, or had she been more worried about the impression she made and not really noticing what was in front of her? Or had it seemed like a grand house, compared to what she had been used to? The way Flora talked, the Alabama house seemed far from grand.

At last I reached the garage, where yesterday, from the window of my room, I had spotted the unsightly new weeds blocking the entrance. Now, as I wrenched open the garage doors, I imagined those weeds shrieking as I crushed them flat. With a heavy sigh I climbed into the driver’s seat of Nonie’s car and laid my face down on the steering wheel. The dull heat pressed in. Spit trickled out of my mouth onto the hot leather. I began to feel funny, but something told me that I would have to endure it if I wanted anything to change. I had never fainted before, but Nonie had often described what it felt like. Then I must have lost consciousness for a second or two. The next thing I knew, I was sliding down from the seat and leaving the car.

That’s right, darling. Now close the garage doors. You’ll come back later when it’s cooler and shear those nasty old weeds flat to the ground with the kitchen scissors. We can’t fix everything at once, but this will be a gesture in the right direction. And I want you to move into my room. It was my place and now it will be yours. When Mrs. Jones comes on Tuesday, ask her to prepare the room for you. Tell her I came to you in a dream and said to do this. Mrs. Jones respects dreams and is partial to the supernatural. Remember how provoked I was when I found out she was telling you those stories about her little dead daughter, Rosemary, and that uncle who kept speaking to her through a crow. But then you and I had a little talk, you couldn’t have been more than five at the time, and you said, “Don’t worry, Nonie, I don’t believe in her ghosts, but I do like the stories.” And I said, “All right, then, as long as you know the difference.”