At Weddings and Wakes Read Online Free PDF

in wide arms, folded edge to edge, moved together, lifted, snapped, together again, smoothing, one more fold, just as Momma had shown them in their childhood, just as they had been doing since then.
    â€œDon’t they smell wonderful?” Aunt May said, putting her face to the neat, square pile of sheets.
    â€œI’m not having the kind of life I wanted,” their mother said.
    Aunt May told her, “Just smell these.”
    And then the door to Momma’s bedroom opened, and hearing the shuffle of feet against the bare floor between the bedroom and the living room, the children raised their heads.
    Oblivious to both the hour and the season, Aunt Veronica stood in the doorway of the dining room in a brown velvet robe and black velvet slippers, a black band holding back her thick auburn hair. “Hello, all,” she said. (So she had been in there, the youngest child thought, there in the room just beyond Momma’s, and so thinking began to learn a lifelong lesson in anticipation and longing.) Aunt Veronica’s face was as pale as putty; her skin, like a putty that had been pressed and re-formed again and again, was pockmarked and dimpled, with white scars the size of thumbnails and a puffiness that even the children saw was somehow the result of her own mishandling.
    She might have been beautiful; at least her hair and dark
eyes, her slim waist and the lovely slope of her neck and her wide shoulders promised a somehow unachieved beauty. She stood in the doorway, the fingers of one hand on the delicate silver edge of the cocktail cart that was placed between the two rooms, the other, fingers and flat palm, bearing her weight on the doorframe. She smiled at them, surveying the room but not quite—even the children noticed—bringing it into focus.
    One by one the children put down their pens and got up to kiss her—she held the cart even as she bent to each—and then she said she would just have a quick bath before dinner and stepped carefully around the cart and into the bathroom, which was just the other side of the hallway.
    Now the afternoon began to move, nudged, it seemed, by the sound of the running water in the bath, by the quick glances their mother and Aunt May exchanged, the wafting odor of bath soaps.
    Momma reappeared just as Aunt Veronica, in a burst of steam and roses, opened the bathroom door and with her pale skin further pitted by water beads and wet strands of hair, walked, no longer shuffling, through the living room and back through Momma’s bedroom.
    The two hadn’t exchanged a word when they crossed in the living room but as she headed for the kitchen Momma was nodding as if Aunt Veronica had just confirmed something for her. Momma now wore a thin net over her hair and if she had slept at all during her nap there was no sign of it in her face or her step. She didn’t shuffle but passed quickly through the dining room and into the kitchen, where she took a white apron from the handle of the refrigerator door and slipped it over her head. Their mother and Aunt May, like acolytes following a cardinal, moved into the small room behind her, bending beside her to reach the potatoes in the bin by the sink, bowing into the refrigerator for the pork chops and the
green beans. Momma tossed flour like holy water, kneading the biscuit dough, dredging the meat.
    At the small tin table the children snapped the ends of the green beans and tossed them into a steel colander. The curtain at the window stirred but the breeze that moved it was a hot city breeze as unnatural, as unrefreshing as the wind that coursed through the subway tunnels. They were all perspiring. Before they could finish with the beans, Momma turned, lifted the colander, shook it, chin raised, took assessment, and then set it down again and told them to break all the beans in half as well. She put the pot of dirty potatoes on the table and sat with them. She peeled expertly, dropping the tan peel onto