“No, thank you!” she said, patting the lady on the back as she moved through the crowd. The pain in her ribs was breathtaking, but in a strange way she was grateful of it because it helped her concentrate—upon the guests, and the guest book, and the clean glasses; upon the hot hors d’oeuvres, and the replenishment of the cracker tray, and the regular addition of fresh ginger ale to the punch bowl; and these worries in turn distracted her from Libby’s death, which had not yet sunk in. In the past few days—a hectic grotesque blur of doctors, flowers, morticians, papers to be signed and people arriving from out of town—she had not shed a tear; she had devoted herself to the get-together after the funeral (the silver to be polished, the punch cups to be hauled down jingling from the attic, and washed) partly for the sake of the out-of-town guests, some of whom hadn’t seen one another in years. Naturally, no matter how sad the occasion, everyone wanted a chance to catch up; and Edie was grateful for a reason to keep moving, and smiling, and re-filling the compotes of candied almonds. The night before, she had tied her hair in a white rag and hurried around with dust-pan and furniture polish and carpet sweeper: fluffing cushions, cleaning mirrors, moving furniture and shaking rugs and scrubbing floors until after midnight. She arranged the flowers; she re-arranged the plates in her china cabinet. Then she had gone into her spotless kitchen and run a big sink of soapy water and—hands trembling from fatigue—washed punch cup after dusty, delicate, punch cup: a hundred punch cups in all; and when, at three in the morning, she finally climbed into bed, she had slept the sleep of the blessed.
Libby’s little pink-nosed cat, Blossom—the newest addition to the household—had retreated in terror to Edie’s bedroom, where she was crouching under the bed. On top of bookcase and china cabinet perched Edie’s own cats, all five of them, Dot and Salambo, Rhamses and Hannibal and Slim: sitting well apart, switching their tails and glaring down at the proceedings with witchy yellow eyes. Generally, Edie enjoyed guests no more than the cats did, but this day she was grateful for the multitudes: a distraction from her own family, whose behavior was unsatisfactory, more irritant than comfort. She was tired of them all—Addie especially, swanning around with horrible old Mr. Sumner—Mr. Sumner the smooth talker, the flirt, Mr. Sumner whom their father the Judge had despised. And there she was, touching his sleeve and batting her eyes at him, as she sipped punch she had not helped to make from cups she had not helped to wash; Addie, who had not come out to sit with Libby a single afternoon while she was in the hospital because she was afraid of missing her nap. She was tired of Charlotte, too, who had not come to the hospital either, because she was too busy lying in the bed with whatever imaginary vapors plagued her; she was tired of Tatty—who had come to the hospital, plenty, but only to deliver unwelcome scenarios of how Edith might have avoided the car accident, and reacted better to Allison’s incoherent phone call; she was tired of the children, and their extravagant weeping at funeral parlor and gravesite. Out back on the porch they still sat, carrying on just as they had done over the dead cat:
Upon two of these lyre-back dining chairs—old friends in disaster, crowding around the walls of this little room—their mother’s casket had been laid, in Tribulation’s murky downstairs parlor more than sixty years ago. A circuit preacher—Church of God, not even Baptist—had read from the Bible: a psalm, something to do with gold and onyx, except he had read onyx as “oinks.” A family joke thereafter: “oinks.” Poor teen-aged Libby, wan and thin in an old black tea dress of their mother’s pinned at the hem and bosom; her china-pale face (naturally without color, as blonde girls were in those days before suntans and rouge) drained by sleeplessness and grief to a sick, dry chalk. What Edie remembered best was how her own hand, in Libby’s, felt moist and hot; how she’d stared the whole time at the preacher’s feet; though he’d attempted to catch Edie’s eye she was too shy to look him in the face and over half a century later she still saw the cracks in the leather of his lace-up shoes, the rusty slash of sunlight falling across the cuffs of his black trousers.
