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How does that make her so worldly wise? But there she was just rattling on, handing down her pronouncements. Was it me they were discussing?
    Laura used to pull Jeremy around the block in a little red wooden wagon when he was just a baby. He didn’t learn to walk until he was nearly two; that’s how well she took care of him. He had no
need
to walk. After the ride she would hoist him up by the underarms and lug him into the house, the two of them grunting and red in the face. Then Mother mashed up a little banana for him or peeled some grapes—peeled them!—and set them into his mouth one by one. “You love Jeremy more than you do me,” I told her once. I said it straight out. She didn’t deny it. “Well, honey,” she said, “you have to remember that Jeremy is a boy.” I thought I knew what she meant, but now I’m not sure. I
thought
she meant that boys were more lovable, but maybe she was just saying that they took more care. That they were weaker, or more accident-prone, or more likely to make mistakes. Who knows? It doesn’t matter what she meant; the fact is she did love him more. And next to him, Laura. The pretty one, who in those days was only slightly plump and had hair that was really and truly golden. Me last of all. Well, I couldn’t care less about that
now
, of course. I never even think about it. But I did at one time.
    I hung armloads of Mother’s clothes in her closet, beside other clothes cram-packed in any old way with their sleeves inside out and their hems half unstitched. They had a used smell, sweet and sickish. Some she had saved for forty years in the hope that they would come back into fashion; she imagined that the rest of the world was as stagnant as she was. “And see?” she would say, draped in some filmy frayed prewar dress, slumped before the full-length mirror, “people
are
wearing these again, I saw the same hemline in the park only yesterday.” The only thing she bought new were shoes, racks and racks of them, top quality. She believed in changing her shoe wardrobe often to safeguard the shape of her foot. As if she pictured herself still soft-boned and malleable, still a child. Which she was, in a way.
    I cleared the bureau of whole handfuls of Kleenex filmed with pinkish-gray powder. I collected hairpins from the rug, worn stockings from the seats of chairs. I found her cameo brooch under a corner of the bedspread and held it up to the light, wondering what to do with it. Maybe Laura would like it. It was more her style. Then I thought of Mother’s will, so-called—the scrap of paper she always kept in her jewelry box, telling which of her personal objects should go to whom. She revised it year by year, and continually moved the jewelry box to new hiding places. I had to hunt for quite a while—I finally located it on the bottom shelf of the glassed-in bookcase—but sure enough, there was a paper folded into a tiny square below Mother’s pearls and her baby bracelet and Grandmother Amory’s glove-button hook. A sheet of her favorite stationery, cream-colored, a row of withered-looking wildflowers strung across the top.
    My dear, darling girls
,
    Now if I die I don’t want to be mourned and grieved over. I want my sweet children to just carry on as usual. I like the hymn “Be Still My Soul” if there is any question about what to use in the service
.
    I believe I want Laura to have my personal jewelry, all except the little amethyst finger ring for Mrs. Pruitt at the church and Papa’s flip-top pocket watch for Jeremy and some small memento, I just can’t decide which, for Miss Vinton. Maybe Laura could select something. Amanda can take the English china and the silver, except for my teaspoon collection which I think might go to Mrs. Jarrett. Also she may have the wooden rack to keep it in
.
    Perhaps my clothing could be distributed to the Poor
.
    I hope that my sweet girls won’t feel slighted but I do think Jeremy might like the house and furniture, and I