out of neutral. But all anyone really remembered was the shrimp.
There was one chocolate-covered cherry left that day, and Ruth gave it to me, which I knew was a real sacrifice. “If our place caught fire would you run down and rescue me?” I said.
“Your daddy would rescue you,” she said.
He didn’t rescue me that night, after the school called and asked how come they hadn’t gotten a sick note. “I should paddle you,” my mother had said, but she sent me upstairs without chocolate pudding instead. “You know where she was all day,” I heard her say to my father.
My mother and my aunt Ruth were as different as two sisters could be. My mother was sturdy and strong-minded. She had short hair that got permed in town once a month, first thing in the morning after she got off her shift; she’d sit in the chair trying to kill the smell of the chemicals with a cup of strong coffee Patsy made her in the back room, right next to where she mixed the chemicals.
My aunt Ruth’s hair had natural curl, so that it waved around her face, and was the color hair is when you’re a grown woman who was blond as a little girl. She was thin and almost unnaturally fair, so that you could see a road map of bright blue veins running up her arms and legs and even beneath the surface of her face, with one vein running crosswise on her forehead and disappearing at the corner of one eye. Once I said that maybe Aunt Ruth didn’t like the outdoors because she was afraid she would burn—it was a night when I was sleeping with no pajama top and a back full of Bactine because I’d stayed by the pool at LaRhonda’s house too long—and my mother said, “Don’t be silly, the woman used to sit out at Pride’s Beach all day long in summer in a swimsuit.” There was a whole big story in the way she said it, like maybe she was off working or studying or helping her mother while her sister was lounging by the cool water, sunning herself. But it was hard for me to imagine—not the part about my mother, but the part about Ruth out in the wild. When I was younger Aunt Ruth and I had practiced having her leave the house; I would stand at the end of her little walkway with my arms open and a big artificial smile on my face, a school picture smile. One day she managed to take two steps through the door and onto the slate pavers, then said, “Oh, goodness, no,” and backed inside.
When my mother said that about Pride’s Beach I wanted to ask why Aunt Ruth wouldn’t leave the house, but it would have been like sticking my finger into the blades of the fan sending cool air over my hot back. My mother talked about her girlhood as though Aunt Ruth had been her cross to bear from the beginning, making sure she got on the school bus, giving up her milk money when Ruth lost her own. When their mother died she left Ruth the house, but it turned out that with the taxes and the repairs all Ruth could do was sell it and move to the little place at the back of our farm. One of my earliest memories was of being four and going with my father and Ruth in his truck to pick up a few pieces of furniture, of Ruth drifting from room to room—which didn’t take long, it was a small house—saying, “Goodbye, stove. Goodbye, cellar,” until my father said, “Come on now, Ruth, we got to go.”
“Where you going with that rocking chair, Buddy?” she said when we got back to our house.
“Your sister wants that for the living room,” my father said.
“She always gets what she wants,” Ruth said, which even at four I thought seemed mean and maybe even untrue.
I could remember that day, but I couldn’t actually remember Aunt Ruth outside. I must have seen her do it, because it was a year or two after she moved in behind us that she started being balky about leaving the house, which turned into not leaving the house at all. It was one of those things you didn’t notice right away, maybe didn’t notice at all until one day when she was supposed to go to a party with my parents. “She hasn’t