the back of the house there was another part that took up half the basement and had big glass doors to the patio and yard, which was kind of a waste because Ruth was never going to go out those doors. But Ruth had a nice light living room herself and two bedrooms.
I’d always figured that my mother would never leave the farm and the valley because it was her home, and because she wouldn’t be able to get Ruth to move. But now I knew that I was more attached than she was. When she’d said, “Let them,” about drowning the place where I’d lived most of my life and she’d lived all of hers, I realized that if she’d had her way she would have left long ago, and that made me realize that for most of her life she hadn’t had her way about much. As for Ruth, my mother had always figured she could handle her. When I’d called her at the new house for the first time she said Ruth was already in her place downstairs. “Carrying on,” she said.
“I gave her a sedative,” my mother said. “How else was I going to get her out of there? I gave her a sedative and two of the boys from the ambulance squad brought her over here and hauled her in and laid her down on the bed. A brand-new bed, by the way.”
“You gave her a sedative?”
“In her iced tea,” my mother said as though it was the most normal thing in the world and I should have thought of it myself.
I should have thought of it myself. “What exactly did you give her? What dosage did you use?”
“Mary Margaret, I was administering sedatives when you were still in diapers. All that matters is that your aunt is in her new place, I’m in mine, and we’re done with the rest. I have some packing up and cleaning out to do if you want to be useful.” And so I was making myself useful.
There wasn’t much packing to do at Ruth’s house, either. Cissy had already carted all her dolls away, repaired and cleaned some of them, and taken them to the new place, which had a wall of bookshelves that were just the right kind of thing for doll display if you were interested in doll display. “Someday your daughter will play with these,” Cissy said to me as she placed them side by side, but Ruth got that look on her face and I knew that would happen over her dead body. “They don’t look the same,” she said. That’s what she said about everything. The stove didn’t cook the same. The TV didn’t work the same. “I could have let them drown you, Ruth,” my mother called from the top of the stairs. “She’s always been hard,” Ruth muttered.
“She’s right,” I said. “The valley is gone.”
“I miss it,” Ruth said.
There wasn’t much left in the old kitchen. I’d already brought Ruth her place mats, vinyl with daisies in one corner that I’d given her for Christmas, and the frying pan she used for grilled cheese. She wanted the throw pillows from her couch, which had been ruined in the big storm. My mother got new furniture for Ruth’s place just the way she did for her own. While Ruth wouldn’t say so, I could tell by the way she ran her hand over it that she liked the flowered pattern on the new couch. It was more her thing than the old tan couch with the scratchy upholstery that had been in her living room for twenty years.
“Just bring me a few things, Mimi,” she’d said. “I need my old egg turner, and the trivet on the stove. Oh, and that picture of bluebirds I have on the bedroom wall. And the mirror from the spare room, too. I can’t find my mother’s marcasite brooch. If your mother hasn’t taken it it might have dropped under the bed when they removed me.” That was how she described it until the day she died: “they removed me.” My mother wouldn’t give her chapter and verse on the removal, but I got the idea from Cissy that Ruth had spent so much time yelling and screaming the first day that the near neighbors, who weren’t that near, thought about calling the police.
“I never liked that brooch in the first place, which is why she got it, and why she wants a brooch when she