Thomas stops the wagon in front of the house to let me off before he takes it around through the alley where he’ll tie up Tam before heading back to the factory. He hangs the reins and stands, and I see he’s actually going to jump out and help me down from the wagon.
I quickly leap off.
I don’t need Thomas Higgins helping me out of a wagon. I don’t need anyone helping me out of a wagon.
“Very ladylike,” he remarks.
“Never my goal,” I mutter, grabbing my bag out from the back.
He snaps the reins and drives away. We don’t say good-bye.
I stand before 308 East First Street, a sloping white house sandwiched in between two other sloping white houses, all three of which have been made gray by the factory smoke. It seems the same suspendered little boys with dirty knees and rough and tumble little girls in braids run up and down the street as when I left, their faces and clothes also seeming gray. The flats of Corning . . . an entire neighborhood made gray by the belching black smoke of the stacks of Corning Glass Works, which rise up along the Chemung River like giant stalks of some hardy river plant.
Soon I won’t notice the smoke anymore. A few days, maybe a week, and this dirty fog will just be how the world looks. And all the gray brooms left out on gray porches, gray diapers flapping on gray laundry lines, and gray faces of those I pass on gray streets will be a mirror of my own gray face.
I spent most of my life pretending I didn’t care—about the smoke, about the squalor, about the gray people with no way out of their gray lives. But as I make my way toward the gray wooden steps into the gray sloping little house, the truth is, I care far too much.