The Aunt Who Moved In

Eleven Months

Eleven months is not very long when you count it against a marriage of twenty-six years, but it is exactly how long my father waited before he told me my mother’s sister was moving into our house.

We live outside Sourwood Gap, Missouri, a town small enough that the water tower and the church steeple are the only two things taller than the ridge line behind them. My father, Linwood, runs the feed and seed store on the square, the kind of place where men still settle bills with a handshake and a promise to catch up on it after harvest. My mother ran our house and the Baptist church nursery and, as far as I could tell growing up, most of the county’s better opinions of both of us.

She died on a Wednesday in October, the cancer having already taken every good month it was going to leave us. I was twenty-one. I remember standing at the graveside in a black dress two sizes too big, borrowed from a cousin, thinking that grief was supposed to feel like something happening to me, and instead it felt like something I had to keep doing, over and over, every single morning I woke up and she still was not there.

My father did his grieving quietly, the way men in Sourwood Gap are raised to do it. He went to the store. He came home. He ate what I cooked and thanked me for it in a voice that had gone flat sometime around the funeral and never quite came back. I told myself that was just how he was built, and that time would loosen him up the way it does everybody eventually.

Eleven months after we buried her, he cleared his throat over his eggs on a Tuesday morning and said, “Bertha’s going to stay with us for a while.”

I did not put my fork down right away. “Stay how long?”

“Indefinitely,” he said, like it was a word he had practiced.

I laughed, because it seemed like the kind of thing you laugh at before you understand it is not a joke. “She’s got her own place above the hardware store. Why would she move all the way out here?”

“Because your aunt and I have gotten close this past while,” he said. “We understand each other. We’re both grieving the same person.”

“She’s Mom’s sister,” I said, like that settled something.

He finally looked up from his plate, and there was a tiredness in his face I had not let myself see until that second. “Life’s complicated, Myrtle. You’re twenty-two. You don’t have to understand everything about it yet.”

I understood plenty. I understood that my mother’s casseroles were still in the deep freezer on the back porch, dated in her own handwriting on strips of masking tape, and that her sister was about to sleep three doors down from where she used to sleep.