After church, they would drive home in the Ford, the thick Sunday newspaper resting on the back seat, hiding among its folds the red and yellow pie-stealing Katzenjammer Kids and Maggie and Jiggs and Snuffy Smith and the hideous, chinless Gump family, and later, lying on her back after having consumed the “funnies” in a gulp, she would stare up at the lion, one paw outstretched toward but never touching the mouse. Near that table stood the radio, a big box with rodent features, two knobs for eyes and a dial for a mouth. After supper, she and Uncle Greg listened to Amos ‘n’ Andy, and before bedtime, she could look at the latest National Geographic on the bottom shelf of the bookcase. Above the bookcase was a framed picture of Edwin Markham which, as evening came on, faded into the dark pussy-willow-patterned wallpaper her grandmother had loved so. Bedtime! A church bell rang. In memory, she went slowly upstairs, reluctant to leave the day—pausing to press her face against the stained-glass panes of a narrow window which, during the morning, bathed the oak stairs in a reddish glow, then up to the top, past the pier glass in the hall, down a passageway that smelled of the dried flower petals Uncle Greg stored in jars, to her own room. It had been her mother’s room too.

She dropped the book into her suitcase; how awful everything was! Walter and Samuel and May and that stupid little Elmira! Grimacing and gabbing, caught like flies on flypaper in their own opinions about the world, about her, about fate.

Yet those days with Uncle Greg had been shadowed with sadness—she could feel it now, rainy summer twilights coming across the cemetery like a slow tide, rising to the windows of the old house her grandfather had built, subduing the souls of the small girl and middle-aged man as they sat over their supper of canned salmon and boiled potatoes.

Poor Uncle Gregory! After all that education—he’d actually gone to the University of Heidelberg—he’d ended up a gardener. He was often silent. Yet every gesture, every word had been informed by a quality of kindness, of long patience. And he had fits, always unexpected, of pure playfulness; they played hide-and-seek together sometimes, the old house livened up with racing footsteps and bursts of laughter. She’d spent many years with him. She’d gone to school in a red brick schoolhouse down the road; in the summers, in spring and fall, she’d gone the rounds with Uncle Greg, who worked on some of the estates down by the river where the rich people lived.

“Uncle Sugared-Tomato” Annie’s father had called him because of the old man’s fondness for putting sugar on nearly everything, and Annie had laughed, if reluctantly, susceptible always to her father’s sense of the ridiculous even while she sensed its danger.