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not
remember
them.”
    â€œNatalie,” Mrs. Waite said, her hands quiet for a minute while she stared at the wall before her, “what will I do when you’re gone?”
    Embarrassed, Natalie carefully turned down the flame under the boiling eggs. “I’ll be back a lot,” she said inadequately.
    â€œA mother gets very lonesome without her daughter,” Mrs. Waite said. “Especially when it’s an only daughter. A mother gets lonesomer than anything in the world.”
    One of the things which Natalie most disliked about her mother was Mrs. Waite’s invariable trick of putting serious statements into language that Natalie classified as cute. Mrs. Waite, too long accustomed to seeing her most heartfelt emotions exposed, discussed, and ignored, had long since fallen into protecting herself by stating them as jokes, with an air of girlish whimsy which irritated both Natalie and Mr. Waite as no flat statement of hatred could have. Because of this, Natalie—who had sometimes thought of running to her mother with a voluntary expression of affection—said briefly, “You’ll find something to do.”
    Mrs. Waite was silent. She had set the casserole carefully into the oven and turned her attention to the silverware before she began again, very timidly, “And at home when we had no dishes for all those people we used to ask one of the aunts to bring along . . .”
    *   *   *
    Lunch on Sundays was a pick-up meal; Mrs. Waite had over the years prevailed upon her husband to accept the fact that the oven would not hold at the same time an unusual meal for his friends and the correct nourishing lunch he believed his due. Although in most ordinary matters Mr. Waite would far sooner have sacrificed his friends than himself, in the question of his hospitality and the probable Monday conversations about it, Mr. Waite was willing, with objections, to forego his own comfort, always believing that it was a temporary measure due to Mrs. Waite’s inefficiency and that the next Sunday would see him sensibly fed. Since it was his custom to greet regular occasions with regular remarks, Mr. Waite habitually observed over his Sunday peanut-butter sandwich, “This is not food for a grown man.”
    On Sundays Mrs. Waite had an answer for him, probably because originally she had had all the week to prepare it; she habitually answered, “
You
make the dinner and
I’ll
make the lunch.”
    Standing at the kitchen table next to her father, Natalie looked peacefully at the scene of competence around her. The dishes used in the morning had been washed, the breakfast cups and saucers put away, and the company cups and saucers set out instead. The family napkins, suspended for the present lunch and dinner, reposed on the kitchen mantel to be brought out again on Monday. The very familiar kitchen things—the plant which Ethel kept beside the sink, the smaller teakettle, the plastic-handled tableware—were all pushed back and set aside before the company preparations. Natalie, because her mother and father were bickering, transplanted herself to an archeological expedition some thousand years from now, coming unexpectedly upon this kitchen and removing layers of earth carefully from around the teakettle—“This may have been a cookpot,” someone said wisely, and someone else added, “Or of course a chamber pot; we have no notion as yet of the habits of these peoples.” Further excavations—perhaps three or four days later, and after serious quarrels between the junior and senior members of the expedition, one force maintaining that it would be more sensible to move on; this was an infertile spot for discovery and besides the air was bad—might yield the skull of Natalie, and one, holding her precious head in his hands, turning it over and examining it intimately, might remark, “Look, here, at these teeth; they