Family Linen by Lee Smith Page B

of the house then like a bullet, hurtled into the back seat, and slammed the door.
    â€œI’ll be there at seven,” Lacy said, meaning
at the hospital, I’ll be at the hospital
, backing out.
    Lovely Myrtle stood by the blossoming pink hydrangea and waved. Lacy remembered her waving just that way from—it seemed—countless floats. Myrtle was Miss Booker Creek, Homecoming Queen, Valentine Princess, while Lacy got good grades and sulked. Myrtle waved, getting smaller and smaller as Lacy backed away, with the mountains spread out blue behind Mother’s house, beyond the green hillside. She backed onto the street and pulled into traffic. Although the town had sprawled in all directions, with malls proliferating on the outskirts, the downtown area had stayed exactly the same. Mother’s house, on the hill at the south end of Main Street, overlooked it all, as it had for half a century. The house was symbolic of so many things: of the fact that she alone, of the three sisters who had grown up there, carried on the traditions which their own mother had tried to instill in them; of her own lofty ideas, ideals, and sensibilities; and of, finally, her profound isolation. Driving through town, Lacy thought of how they had all preferred, finally, in different ways, terra firma. How they all had chosen to come down the hill.
    â€œI still don’t see why I had to come,” Kate said. “I could have stayed home by myself.”
    Lacy didn’t reply, negotiating the traffic. There never used to be any traffic.
    â€œLois Emery stays by herself,” Kate said. “But you don’t think I’m a person. You don’t think I’m responsible. You think I’m some dumb kind of a baby.”
    â€œWhen you’re sixteen,” Lacy said in what she hoped was a light tone, “then you can stay by yourself.” She turned left at the courthouse and headed out of town on the bypass, toward the new grocery store Myrtle had recommended.
    â€œI could have stayed with Dad,” Kate said, trying it out.
“Bill
is.”
    â€œBill has a swim meet,” Lacy reminded her. “He’ll be at the club most of the time we’re away.”
    â€œI could have stayed with Dad anyway.” Kate was still trying it out. Lacy looked at her in the rearview mirror. They were all new at this.
    â€œI guess so,” Lacy said. She didn’t explain that Jack was keeping Billy under some duress. And that, as a matter of fact, children are not always welcome in a love nest. “Love nest” made her giggle—it was a phrase from one of the
National Enquirers
which Fay had had out at the One Stop. ALIENS ENTER LOVE NEST, FRIGHTEN ILLICIT LOVERS was the headline. Fay was still, as always, nuts. But that was the situation: Jack and Susan, back home in Chapel Hill, living in their love nest. Sooner or later, Lacy would have to make some decisions. She supposed she’d have to sell the house.
    She watched the land slip by on either side of the congested road. “Don’t be a stranger, now,” was what Nettie always said when she left. The old country goodbye. But Lacy did feel like a stranger now, driving through empty space. Daddy dead, Jack gone, Mother in the hospital. And Kate nearly grown up, so suddenly, so mysteriously: Kate’s period had started. Even those mountains, which Lacy always loved, looked different. How many times, in how many other places, had she closed her eyes and summoned them up before her? She has always had a Romantic, Jack called it Wordsworthian, attachment to them—she has always been more attached to the
place
, perhaps, than to her own family. That’s one of my problems, Lacy thought, that tendency to get more attached to the idea of the thing than the thing itself.
Oh, don’t be a stranger now
. The mountains seemed older, softer, and somehow sad—or perhaps it was only this particular wet June, so much foliage, the