It was strange remembering Marvin Linquist, seeing him so clearly. A sense of being in Marvin’s presence seemed to swim around him, and he realized suddenly, with surprise, why Taylor Bowers had appeared familiar at their meeting: Taylor Bowers could have been the twin of Marvin Linquist—the way they looked, the way they talked. And that, too, was a sign, a good one.

He took his pocket watch from his pocket and looked at it. Twenty minutes after seven. He could be at Taylor Bowers’s store by eight, he reasoned, and if the offer to paint the store still stood, he would take it.

SEVEN

Each morning, when she looked into the bedroom occupied by Beatrice Cunningham, Eleanor half expected to find the old woman dead, yet she was always awake, her head resting on her pillow, her open eyes gazing at the ceiling as though mesmerized by something only she could see.

Death would be better than the kind of living the old woman had, Eleanor believed. What the old woman had was not living. It was only an act of remaining, of holding on, of being there.

Still, Eleanor was always privately relieved to find the old woman alive. She did not want the guilt of wondering if she secretly wished for the surprise of death, and the wish carried enough power to make it real.

Yet, it was not a wish. Not a conscious wish. Maybe only a dream, but that, too, was bothersome. In one of her books she had read that dreams were wishes too secret to admit without sleep, and she believed there was truth in the thought. She had had many dreams that would seem foolish to anyone who knew her.

On some days, the old woman was alert and would roll her face to Eleanor on the morning peek-in. Would say she had slept well, or that she was hungry. On mornings of hunger, she always wanted pancakes with corn syrup, and as she ate—slowly, absorbing the food more than chewing it—she would tell Eleanor stories that lingered fresh and real in some lobe of her brain, memories passing over her mind like the sun passing over Earth—bright and clear, then fading into night. The stories intrigued Eleanor, and she had found it easy to make pictures of Beatrice Cunningham as a young woman, a wife, a mother. Could hear Beatrice Cunningham singing in the stories she told of singing. Could see her at quilt-making, at cooking, at field work. With each of the stories, the old woman offered smiles that held some gladness.

She did not talk of hard times. It was as though she had willed the hard times to die off, yet Eleanor knew of them from stories told by Boyd. One was of the death of Beatrice’s husband, who had been found shot in the barn on the farm they owned. Like Boyd’s death, it had been determined a suicide, yet there were those who believed the shooting had been done by someone else, that it was murder, or a rightful killing.