The Invention of Flight Read Online Free PDF

she runs downstairs like a girl.
    â€œLet’s go,” she says to Mrs. Lovelace, taking charge,and the woman, grateful, gets up from the table, her face red and splotchy, the brush roller hanging precariously. They go across the back yards and up the back stairs into the house. Mr. Lovelace’s clothes are already in a pile on the living room floor. Mrs. D. picks up a stack of things on hangers, Mrs. Lovelace picks up a drawer full of underwear and a pair of shoes, and they take them out through the front door onto the porch and dump them on a swing. They go back in and get the rest of the clothes in one more trip. All the while Mrs. Lovelace’s tongue has loosened. In her own home, she seems particularly superstitious. “Mind you don’t spill that salt,” she says each time Mrs. D. passes through the kitchen. “Oh, I spill whole canisters of the stuff,” Mrs. D. says, but Mrs. Lovelace acts like she doesn’t hear. “Do you have any masking tape?” Mrs. D. yells out to Mrs. Lovelace, who is in the bedroom pulling out a quilt that was Mr. Lovelace’s great-grandmother’s, and dragging it to the door. It has become obvious to Mrs. D. that everything in the house that has any connection to the woman’s husband at all, including wedding presents from his side of the family, are going out on the porch. “I want to be generous,” she says, “don’t want to argue about it later.”
    Mrs. Lovelace looks in her sewing box and brings out a roll of tape. “Just put a piece on things in the living room you want moved out,” Mrs. D. says, “so I don’t have to keep asking you; it’ll be quicker that way.” Mrs. Lovelace says that’s something she would never have thought of in a million years, and she falls to it with relish, putting bits of tape on half the furniture and knickknacks in the living room. “That’ll get me started,” Mrs. D. says, andshe asks the woman to help her with an old rolltop desk that’s too heavy for her to get by herself and then she helps Mrs. Lovelace with an overstuffed chair from the bedroom and then they both take out smaller chairs and little wooden figurines and whiskey bottles they find hidden and old pipes and belt buckles, and one or two books. When they finally get all his things moved out, Mrs. D. looks back around the house and realizes that half the objects left scattered around the rooms are either crocheted or made of nylon net, including a giant nylon net chicken in the kitchen that’s filled with soap. “It looks more the way I like it now anyway,” Mrs. Lovelace says, “without his stuff.”
    The locksmith comes and changes the front and back door locks, and the two women go out onto the front porch, Mrs. Lovelace locking the front door behind them. Looking around them, they giggle like children. “Well,” Mrs. D. says, still laughing, “I guess I’d better go on home.” She wipes her hands on her skirt and walks down the front steps, then looks back at Mrs. Lovelace, who has stopped laughing and is looking at her husband’s things. “What are you going to do now?” Mrs. D. asks her, and watches Mrs. Lovelace pull the clip out of the back of her hair and the roller out of the front and put them in her apron pocket. “Well, come on then,” Mrs. D. says aloud, “we’ll watch from my house,” and Mrs. Lovelace gratefully follows her home.
    â€œWe can watch from in here,” Mrs. D. says, and she leads Mrs. Lovelace out to her living room. Mrs. Lovelace sits down and bounces in Mrs. D.’s good needlepoint chair. Mrs. D. feels more energetic than she has in months and, leaving Mrs. Lovelace in the living roomslumped down and pale, she moves quickly through her house straightening, getting things right. Each room pleases her; she’s spent much of her adult life making this house. Not a single