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think how sad to spend one’s life in caring for the houses of others. I never had any premonition, and I felt myself to be—oh, quite different from Auntie Doll, amicable but different, a different sort entirely.
    Doris baked yesterday. Lemon slice, with browned coconut on top, and chocolate strip with walnuts. Good, she’s iced it. I like it so much better this way. She’s made cheese bread, as well—aren’t we grand today? I do believe she has spread butter on it, not that disgusting margarine she buys for economy. I settle snugly, and sip and taste, taste and sip.
    Doris pours more tea. We are comfortable. Marvin is hairy in shirtsleeves, elbows on the table. High day or holiday or Judgment Day—no difference to Marvin. He would have put his elbows on the table if he’d been an apostle at the Last Supper.
    “Care for a little more lemon slice, Mother?”
    Why is he so attentive? I watch their faces. Does a questioning look pass between them or do I only fancy it is so?
    “No, thank you, Marvin.” Aloof. Alert. Not to be taken in.
    He blinks his pallid eyes and grimaces his face into a puzzled frown, wanting to speak something but unable to begin. He has never had a facility with words. I grow more suspicious by the minute, and regret now the tea and my own partaking.
What is it? What is it?
I want to shout the question impatiently at his face. Instead I foldmy hands, as I am meant to do, over my silk lilac belly, and wait.
    “The house seems kind of empty now that Tina’s not here,” he says at last, “and Steven doesn’t get home very often.”
    “She’s been gone a month or more,” I remind him tartly, somehow delighted that it is I who am reminding him of a thing.
    “It’s too big, that’s what Marv means,” Doris puts in. “It’s too big, with neither of the kids here now except holidays and that.”
    “Big?” Why should I take it so keenly? “I wouldn’t call it big, as houses go.”
    “Well, you couldn’t compare it to the big new split-levels and those,” Doris says. “But it’s a four-bedroom house and that’s big enough for these days.”
    “Four bedrooms big? The Currie house had six. Even the old Shipley place had five.”
    Doris lifts brown rayon shoulders, looks expectantly at Marvin.
Say something
, her eyes spell,
your turn now
.
    “We thought,” Marvin speaks as he thinks, slowly, “we got to thinking, Doris and me, it might be a good idea to sell this house, Mother. Get an apartment. Smaller, easier to keep, no stairs.”
    I cannot speak, for the pain under my ribs returns now, all of a stab. Lungs, is it? Heart? This pain is hot, hot as August rain or the tears of children. Now I see the reason for the spread table. Am I a calf, to be fattened? Oh, had I known I would not have eaten a bite of her damnable walnuts and icing.
    “You’ll never sell this house, Marvin. It’s my house. It’s my house, Doris. Mine.”
    “No,” Marvin says in a low voice. “You made it out to me when I took over your business matters.”
    “Oh yes,” I say quickly, although in fact I had forgotten, “but that was only for convenience. Wasn’t it? It’s still my house. Marvin—are you listening to me? It’s mine. Isn’t that so?”
    “Yeh, all right, it’s yours.”
    “Now wait a minute,” Doris says, a high hurt squawking, like an unwilling hen the rooster treads, “you just hold on a minute—”
    “The way she talks,” Marvin says, “you’d think I was trying to do her out of her blamed house. Well, I’m not. Understand? If you don’t know that by now, Mother, what’s the use of talking?”
    I do know it, and do not. I can think of only one thing—the house is mine. I bought it with the money I worked for, in this city which has served as a kind of home ever since I left the prairies. Perhaps it is not home, as only the first of all can be truly that, but it is mine and familiar. My shreds and remnants of years are scattered through it visibly in lamps and