3

“WHAT DID SHE MEAN? What did she mean?” cried Amy.

A prudent man far short of six feet tall, Mr. McKinney usually found opportunity to absent himself from scenes that might become emotional. As a lawyer, he refused to handle divorce cases not only because he disapproved of divorce but because the parties sometimes screamed at each other in court, nor would he take custody cases. A man of his temperament was correct in choosing to be a corporation lawyer where everything was cut and dried and the cogent facts did not prompt profanity or tears.

Amy was not old enough to realize that a female does not give rein to emotion while a man is yet in the house. He therefore picked up the felt hat he used near the water and put it on his silver-gray head and he departed.

Mrs. McKinney believed in the truth and honored it. At the University of Oregon long ago she had taken lessons in elocution and there learned to say, with appropriate gestures, “Oh what a tangled web we weave / When first we practice to deceive.” She did not offer the truth gratuitously, for she knew that idly offering the truth shatters images, dashes hopes and blasts illusions and, carried too far, would not leave two people in the whole world on speaking terms. But if the truth was demanded of her, she felt bound to reveal it and to shoulder the responsibility. To conceal the truth was to place one's credibility in jeopardy. She might never be believed again. But after almost eight years, Mrs. McKinney dared hope she would never be called upon to tell this truth, that Amy would live out her life believing herself to be a true McKinney — and yet she knew that to have been a foolish hope. Doubtless many and many a member of the Presbyterian church knew the truth. It may well have been the Reverend Doctor Matthews himself who had exposed Amy as adopted, maybe as an example of the mysterious ways in which God works. The arcane fashion in which God worked in this instance was to cause to be born to a couple who did not want her a child who was thus available to a lonely couple who did want her. That, in a kinder way, is what Mrs. McKinney now told Amy almost as if the words for years had been ready on her lips.

“Darling, darling Amy. You just stop your crying now. You just stop it and listen to your mother.” And when she had said what she said, she held the little girl and stroked her hair and felt the dear vulnerability of the back of her neck. “We chose you especially,” Mrs. McKinney said. “So you see, dear, you are very, very special.”

Mr. McKinney, as he knew he would, found everything calm and happy in the beach house. He hung up his funny old hat and that evening they sat down to a hearty clam chowder.

It is a pity that as the years passed Amy could not remain pleased that she was adopted and not simply born to the McKinneys. It is a pity that the years alter the perspective just as they age the hands and face; and a pity that there exists such an occasion as Mother's Day whose founder died of a broken heart because the day was snatched from her hands by florists, candy companies and the printers of gaudy cards finished off with gilt and sleazy rayon ribbons. Perhaps no holiday, not even Christmas when the police testify they are most often called upon to quell family rows that sometimes end in flying bullets — perhaps no other holiday so contributes to feelings of guilt, loneliness and bereavement. Whereas once one simply wore a red carnation if one's mother was alive and kicking, and a white one if one's mother had passed on or over, now Mother had become so formidable, or was thought to be, that she must be appeased with concrete gifts. Sometimes cards, candy and flowers do not exactly suit. Sometimes a mother is pushed into being demanding simply because she is a mother, and no protestation that she wants nothing of her children but their love will alter their conviction that her feelings will fester if they do not come forward with appropriate and timely tribute. On the other hand, some mothers look on gifts and periodic recognition of their fecundity as their due, and cannot forgive children who are so engrossed in bettering themselves they forget a mother's many sacrifices, her frequent tears and all the nights she sat up with them when they were ill or apprehensive of monsters. No serpent's tooth, they say, has the sharpness of an ungrateful child, but no serpent's tooth has the sharpness of many an unappreciated mother.

Mrs. McKinney was neither unappreciated nor was she unappeased. On her knees each night beside the massive functional bed she shared with Mr. McKinney, she whispered formidable prayers of thanks and called on God to keep Amy well, to look after her progress in school, to render her chaste until that happy time when a good young man would step forward, take her in marriage and initiate her into those rites that women can do without and it seems that no man can. Mrs. McKinney had no reason to expect a sudden cloud on her horizon.

Weekdays in the McKinney house were comfortably sterile. Meal followed meal with expected regularity and no menu was so altered that there was not something in some dish that was familiar. The tall clock at the bottom of the stairs was wound regularly by Mr. McKinney just before he retired at ten each Saturday night; he corrected its negligible irregularity after glancing at his watch which he had that day set by a chronometer kept in a jewelry store across the street from Frederick & Nelson's. An hour each week was set aside for Amy's piano lessons and an hour each afternoon for practice at the Steinway baby grand the McKinneys rented and meant to buy if Amy exhibited a true love of music. Amy mastered the once difficult “Tiger Lily Waltz” which used a black note, and she went on to a composition that required the crossing of her wrists. Appropriate books were pressed in upon her — Hurlbut's Illustrated Bible; Wild Animals of the World was a fine companion during many a rainy Seattle afternoon and containing a chilling series of pictures of a snake in the act of swallowing a white rat whole. The gentle McKinneys were perhaps not aware of this. Amy played with appropriate children who came in when they were called and did not track across a newly mopped kitchen floor.

If the weekdays were sterile, Sundays were antiseptic. The air was sharp with the matter-of-fact odor of Johnson's paste wax applied the previous day to every available wooden surface; the floors glistened and those in the hall reflected the morning sun that fell against the heavy oval plate glass in the front door. An almost life-sized steel engraving of Robert Burns had been chosen to compliment Mr. McKinney's own Scots ancestry. The poet stared across the living room at a sepia print of Rosa Bonheur's The Horse Fair, a curious print to be hanging there since it was a horse that was instrumental in their natural child's death. It displayed such cumbersome activity it would have disturbed a less tranquil room. Mr. McKinney believed there was room for women in the arts and had himself marched in a parade organized by suffragettes, an occasion that was still murmured about in the Rainier Club where the poached salmon was so good and the waiters did not hover.

Now it was the Sunday of Mother's Day and Mrs. McKinney removed from the icebox, whose chilly interior kept them fresh, two carnations, perfect blooms, one white that she would wear to church in fond memory of her mother, and a red one for Amy to wear in deference to her. Both she and Amy wore new shoes of white kid, new dresses of white dotted swiss, and hats. She felt they both looked pretty perky and, thinking that, she smiled.

God knows what had gotten into Amy. One supposes she had been brooding, had overheard something at school. Possibly at nine she already felt the occasional human need to hurt somebody close.

Still smiling, Mrs. McKinney first pinned on her own carnation — a precious moment — and then she stepped forward with the red one.

Did a shadow fall across the new-waxed floor? Amy turned her face away, took a step back. “Maybe I ought to have a white one, too,” she said. “Because maybe my real mother's dead.”

Now it was Mrs. McKinney who stepped back, and in her eyes was an appeal that Amy take back, make unsaid what she had said. Mrs. McKinney covered her face with her hands and began to sob. Then Amy was in her arms and they both sobbed, and it was just so that Mr. McKinney found them, himself on edge because he had not ten minutes before nicked himself with the straightedged razor he preferred to the so-called safety razor, and the styptic pencil he counted on had been long in stopping the flow of blood. He spread his hands before him in despair, but it was the last time he was called upon to witness any such scene. Never again in his or in his wife's lifetime did Amy speak of her natural mother.

Now the former Kaiser chopped wood in exile at Dorn, in Holland. Certain women cut their hair short and wore lip rouge. President Harding died, some said after eating spoiled crabmeat from a faulty can, some said by his wife's hand. Amy had been warned about and then one day accepted the monstrous fact of the menstrual flow of blood. The “Tiger Lily Waltz” was but a memory, succeeded over the next few years by a hatred of Bach and a love of Mozart. In grammar school she had excelled in the new Palmer method which had replaced the elegant Spencerian script; it was a method that required everybody to write exactly like everybody else; anybody could sign your name to a check and you'd not be the wiser. She wrote the word “Lanning” over and over so perfectly and the phrase “This is a specimen of my handwriting” that she was awarded first the bronze and then the silver pin which she accepted just before eighth-grade diplomas were handed out in the happy presence of Mr. and Mrs. McKinney. They were on hand four years later for Amy's graduation from high school and all the special Girl Scout awards in between. There had been companionable fudge-making and taffy pulls with other girls who came over to spend the night, and giggling.

Now there was a motorboat in the boathouse instead of a dinghy, and camping in the woods; the world was indeed pleasant and the University of Washington was pleasant and certainly as fine as anything on the East Coast where, whatever else they have back there, they do not have Mount Rainier nor such wild flowers as grow on the flanks of Mount Olympus.

Amy no longer wore her Delta Gamma pin. She didn't feel like it. Later on when she began to collect gold charms to attach to her gold bracelet, she attached the Delta Gamma pin because most of it was gold. Throughout college she had preferred nature and economics to the thé dansant. Economics teaches the shrewd management of money and the handing out of the right things at the right time; thus she was quite prepared to take a position managing the women's dormitories at the university. She dealt easily with inventories, thousands of pounds of potatoes, sacks of sugar, tubs of butter, effective lighting and the installation of showers.

It was time now to be the comfort to her adoptive parents that they had been to her. They were both now over sixty and had no great record of longevity in either of their families. Mr. McKinney, never a tall man, was shrinking, growing shorter before Amy's eyes. The spaces between the vertebrae narrowed. Then the back begain to ache, and Mr. McKinney was in frequent pain. Both he and Mrs. McKinney became dependent on old photographs to recall the past, and it disturbed them when Christmas tree ornaments they remembered had somehow vanished. What had become of everything? Scarcely a week passed but some old acquaintance went, as they said, to his reward.

Since the house was right there in Seattle, no question arose of Amy's living at the university or having a place of her own, and besides they needed her at the end of their day. They saved up things to tell her. They met her late afternoons at the heavy front door; each wanted to be the first to greet her. They clamored, but quietly.

“Amy dear,” Mr. McKinney would say, “I spent all morning hunting down slugs. I found more than twenty and destroyed them.” So it was after he had retired from his law practice. He was having a hard time finding things to do; in the yard and around the house he walked slowly; sometimes he paused, as if listening.

Mrs. McKinney walked slowly, too, but did not complain about her right leg which hurt so much.

“Amy,” she would say, “do you think maybe this evening we could get the hems of those dresses of mine let down?” She was disturbed at how short dresses were getting and perhaps thought that in letting her own hems down she could halt the trend. Amy let hems down and tried to keep the floors glistening as they had been, but her duties at the university were so demanding that Mrs. McKinney had a man come once a week to wax and polish and he did it so well that one of the small oriental rugs flew out from beneath her feet and she broke her hip for the first time. The following year she broke the other hip.

Women have a right to expect to live longer than their husbands. To begin with, they are younger. A woman is ready to marry earlier than a man is. If her husband is a good man, it is he who does the worrying, and worrying saps the strength and renders the aging body vulnerable to ailments and disease. A woman prepares herself to go on alone, and that she might go on alone as comfortably as possible, a good man arranges his affairs carefully, so that when he dies there is enough money and everybody knows where everything is and what not to sell. He will make the arrangements for his own funeral because his wife will be busy that day with people coming in and with getting out the china.

Mrs. McKinney had the right, too. She was often concerned that Amy had not married shortly after college, because that is what usually happens, and then that would be all settled and all the china and the silver and the rugs would have a more definite place in the future. But Amy appeared to feel it her duty to be with them rather than elsewhere when she had free time, so it was all quite complicated and thought-provoking. Both Mr. and Mrs. McKinney wished they were not so dependent on Amy for company, that as they'd grown older they'd made more friends, but the trouble was so many of their friends had died, and it is hard to make friends with younger people because they don't see much future in you. It is terrible how lonely you get when you get old and how you count on your children which may be the only immortality you have, however faithfully you have always professed to believe what the church teaches. If only one could be certain of an afterlife, there would not be all this dependence on children.

The Great Depression was felt by a great many people. Mr. McKinney was by no means a rich man, but he had not been a foolish man either. When he saw Auburn Motors go to 238, a company that manufactured an automobile — the Duesenberg — which nobody could afford and another — the Auburn — that nobody but young sports bought, he knew something was up. He sold what stocks he had and bought bonds. He couldn't understand why other men didn't know something was up, but you can't talk to your friends because nobody likes to talk about their financial affairs because they just don't, and they don't want to hear anything from an attorney, who is not even a businessman.

The McKinneys were not social people; they had few friends because they had never felt the need of them. Their life with Amy was quite enough, but it was now necessary to help what few friends they had because of the awful times. Mrs. McKinney said there must be some kind of sign on their house because so many people, some of them very young people, stopped around back for something to eat. She kept extra suppiles in the new, bigger Kelvinator. Without it, she said, she did not know what she would do.

And then as the Depression was ending because the War was coming and the factories were turning out guns and aircraft, Mrs. McKinney, who had always been so kind, had to have her right leg cut off and shortly after that she died.

So it was Mr. McKinney who wept. Everything he had arranged to be in order for her was now in order for him, and he wanted nothing of it without her. Amy hugged him and after the funeral they took the ferry to the beach house to get away, but of course they couldn't. The old wood stove was especially painful to see; for so many years he had fed it driftwood that his wife might make her chowders and her cornbread.

He had imagined that with him gone, Mrs. McKinney might like to travel, for she had sometimes mentioned Japan and China and on the rare occasions they went out, ate out, it was Chinese food and Japanese food they ordered. He had no wish to travel alone. He could not stand his own ocean without her, let alone another ocean which might have made sense to him with her by his side. Why, it had occurred to him that after his death she might meet a nice widower on the boat, someone with money equal to hers, so there wouldn't be any of that business; if this widower were traveling he was bound to have something himself, unless he was one of those other fellows. As for him, he did not care to meet any widow — there would have always been only one Mrs. McKinney, always, always. Tears sprang into his eyes when he remembered how she had once touched him and smiled at him.

Amy was doing well at the university and loved her work with the Girl Scouts; he could not be so selfish as to ask her to travel with him.

There was nothing much to do with his money; there isn't much to do with money so long as you own your house and have enough to eat. He already had his books. Maybe someday Amy could think of something to do with it. He realized that over the years they had been almost prodigal in their use of kindling for the fireplace that dispelled Seattle's damp. They had used Heaven knew how many sticks to start the fire. Now he saw it could be done perfectly with only two sticks, provided he rolled up into spills and knotted past issues of the Post-Intelligencer.

He had never before kept track of the variations in temperature; now he kept a log each morning and evening of the changes. He bought a device to measure the rainfall: it was no more than a beaker with graduated markings on the outside. Had he known what it was before he bought it — had he not got himself involved with the clerk, taken up the clerk's time — he could have made an adequate one himself.

He found a little later that there was no particular use in putting on his shoes in the morning, that slippers were more comfortable; he had come to dislike the sound of his own tread, and it was so much louder with shoes. The afternoons were hard.

“I was just sitting here waiting for you,” he would tell Amy. “How about a little game,” and after she had “freshened up” they would play double solitaire.

“You're such a good dad,” Amy told him. “You ought to let me get you somebody to come in during the day.”

“Don't want anybody,” Mr. McKinney said. “Somebody who came in would put things in the wrong places, and I wouldn't have anything to do. Amy, it's terrible not having anything to do.”

If he had had somebody in five years later, he would not perhaps have pitched down the stairs into the cellar. There Amy found him shortly after five in the afternoon.

He never regained consciousness; it is unlikely that on his deathbed he reviewed what his life had been or considered whether he got from it what he wanted. He had been given just seventy years, precisely the years the Bible he believed in had allotted him. He had been born, became a lawyer, married, grieved over a lost son, been kind to his wife and to Amy, grieved over his lost wife, and died. His life was as clean and two-dimensional as the steel engraving of Robert Burns, as immaculate as the regularly polished floors.

His funeral was solemn and decent. The right things were said. Those friends who attended — and those who did not were dead — were older than he, and Amy imagined that even as a child he had preferred older people who had put away childish things. Here in this decent church he had married his wife; here he had mourned his son who lay in a coffin hardly four feet long; here he had arranged with the Reverend Doctor Matthews for another child — she, Amy. Here he attended to the last thing required of him, the passing of the collection plate on the right side of the church. Where else? And here he ended — with someone not truly his own. She, Amy. As she would end, but with nobody.

What was missing, what had always been missing? Sparkle. Drive. Why did she feel that sparkle and drive counted? Joy? At the cemetery it rained and it rained; the undertaker had arranged for oversized black umbrellas.

She stood alone in the big house and her eyes moved to The Horse Fair. Maybe for a moment Mrs. McKinney had rebelled and had bought and hung that turbulent print of faunching, intractable beasts.

Amy stood there, weeping.

The economy straightened itself out; the country went to war again. Millions died, some quickly and some after exquisite suffering. More were maimed who would live out their damned years in institutions where they might sometimes be visited by those who could bear the sight of them. But the Depression was over.

Philip Nofzinger worked in a minor administrative position for Boeing and ordinarily carried his lunch to work with him because he could count on it. He did not care much for business but rather for sailing and the violin; so much he confessed to Amy at a small party where everybody took drinks out into the garden and examined the flowers. It was declared that the hostess had a green thumb. Nofzinger shared Amy's enthusiasm for Mozart and asked if he might call on her and together they would play the duets? He was thirty-five and wary of young women who were not likely to have their heads on their shoulders. He had lived long with his mother and admired her settled ways, sane politics and ability to find things.

After their duet-playing, Nofzinger found himself troubled during the week by thoughts of Amy, and she of him. Marriage was decided upon within the month and “the knot was tied,” as Nofzinger put it, at a civil ceremony which struck them both as more seemly for people of their years. Amy had not thought men any longer wore brown suits. She wore a dress of pale-blue crêpe de Chine and a small hat to match and high heels, an outfit not unbecoming but unnatural for her who preferred tweeds, heavy silver jewelry set with turquoise and shoes that made it less difficult to get from here to there.

She refused to move in with Mrs. Nofzinger, knowing that never works, and Nofzinger refused to move into the McKinney house as being somehow emasculating. So the McKinney house was put on the market.

Nofzinger and Amy moved into a small new house quite surrounded by a hedge of holly which does so well around Seattle and is so much appreciated at Christmastime by those who live elsewhere. They continued their duets in the evening and discovered they had in common an interest in wild mushrooms and knew which of the amanitas were not deadly. They both liked sailing. Each anted up half the price of a thirty-foot yawl which they moored off the boathouse on Puget Sound. They named her Sea Drift after a musical composition by Delius. They were struck by the fact that they both knew Delius. Nofzinger was struck by the fact that Amy had a boathouse.

Nofzinger had early learned to be neat and did not want to talk about children. Children of friends of his had so little sense of value, so little knowledge of physics that cherished objects fell from the edges of tables and smashed. They did not close doors; they slammed them. He hated sudden, loud noises; he did not like to be surprised. He would not have one of those toasters that tick away and suddenly hurl the burned bread aloft. Children's noses ran.

So he worked and she worked; on weekends and for two weeks in the summer they walked in the woods. Nofzinger bought Amy a good microscope for looking closely at mushroom spores and she bought him a viola because he liked their darker timbre. They were both surprised at the other's generosity; they often went to bed at night quite pleased.

They both liked to drink, never to excess, and this went on for ten years until suddenly one rainy winter afternoon it all didn't seem to make much sense. They were, then, never more than good friends, and there wasn't anything wrong with that except that everything was wrong with it, but what, exactly? He wondered what secrets she was holding back — anyone her age has secrets. He had thought marriage was more a snaring of secrets. She wondered what he was holding back. Not quite knowing why, she had not told him she had been adopted and justified her silence in assuming he already knew. She wondered if he did not speak of it because he felt to do so would cause her pain, or whether he indeed did not know, and if he knew would it make any difference in the way he felt towards her? Maybe he did know, and that was why they were friends and not lovers, that part of what he felt for her was pity and nobody on earth wants to be pitied, especially those who are deserving of pity. Good God, she thought. Is my having been adopted wrecking our marriage? Is that why he doesn't want children? — because I can name neither father nor mother, produce no grandparents for a child?

In ten years, Nofzinger had learned to play the viola so well he did some justice to a duet arrangement of Berlioz's Harold in Italy. It seemed to him that Amy was preoccupied with something more than the music. Sometimes he had to speak twice before she answered. She seemed far away.

Amy had read that if a woman is unfaithful, it is not wise to tell the husband; always deny it and he has a chance to believe what he thinks is true is not true. If you tell him the truth he will never forgive you. She had never been unfaithful, but she wondered if she owed it to him to share with him her knowledge of something she had found in her adoptive father's safety deposit box. That she did not share her knowledge seemed to her disloyal and distrustful. If he truly loved her, he would love her in spite of everything. Did she fear he did not love her? Or was there another reason she did not open an envelope she found in the box that said IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHO YOUR REAL PARENTS ARE OPEN THIS ENVELOPE.

Oh yes. Her preoccupation had begun a long time ago.

A little voice said, “Who am I?”

Now, if she really loved Nofzinger, didn't need anyone else, then it didn't matter who was out there and belonged to her. Are we not told that a husband is enough for a wife — that they are to cleave the one to the other?

The little voice continued to nag.

The divorce was as unemotional as the marriage. She found she could look at the dress in which she had taken another's name with but little sadness other than that anyone feels for the past. She believed he felt nothing at all in departing with his viola. In the main dining room of the Olympic Hotel — appropriate neutral ground — they had agreed that the ten years had been rather good, on the whole, that they had both grown and had had certain insights about life, and since Amy had enough money there was no trouble there, and he wanted nothing of her except maybe his share of the money from the sailboat, possibly as a loan? He would move back in with his mother who was now at the age when she needed somebody. She had reached the age when she would start breaking hips. As he said, it was all down hill, now.

So they toasted one another somewhat shyly in the dining room while a sedate combo of accordion and strings played “Nola,” a sprightly little tune, a nice little background of insouciance. Then they both choked up a bit remembering good days, the smell of the pines in the fog, the spray on board the Sea Drift, and then it was all over because that evening Amy had to be with her Girl Scouts and Nofzinger's mother had a surprise in the oven.

Amy sat at her dressing table. She wished he had argued against divorce, just a little. Maybe if she had had more confidence the marriage would have worked. Maybe if she knew — had known — who she was, whose face this was in the glass, if she had had a picture of ancestors in bonnets and capes and an identity to pass on to a child. Something.

She remained haunted with embarrassment over her last words with Nofzinger.

“I should like,” she began, “I should like to keep the name Nofzinger. Your name.”

He looked puzzled. “Of course. You have a legal right to it.”

“I know. That's the thing. I'd like to have you tell me it was all right with you.”

“Amy dear, of course it is!”

Amy dear.

But even a husband you have once had is family, isn't he?

She had left the envelope in the safety deposit box in the bank; she hadn't wanted it around the house because something so dangerously charged must somehow set up a magnetic field that is bound to attract the curious. So now she went to the bank.

But first she sat at a counter across the street and drank a cup of coffee. She wore the good tweed suit and the Indian jewelry in which she was most comfortable — but still. If her adoptive father had truly wanted her to know who her real parents were, why hadn't he told her? To break the seal of the envelope was to deny in no small way the good, kind McKinneys who had sheltered her, put up with her childish tantrums, cared for her in her illnesses, turned the pages of her picture books, urged her to stay within the lines when she colored, sent her to college and left her comfortably well off. She brooded over the incident of the red and the white carnations. Never once had either Mother or Dad McKinney raised their voices in speaking to her. She recalled their smiles.

“They were so dear!” And so they were, in choosing for her the right foods, the right friends, the right clothing. It was for her that they — usually so prudent with money — had bought the Britannica that hulked behind glass doors in the hall. And for her the Packard, for Dad McKinney knew little of internal combustion engines and Mother nothing at all. They knew only that a sixteen-year-old girl is more comfortable when asked what make of automobile her parents drive (and they do ask) if she can say, “Packard.” Yes, they were generous and they were dear, God knows.

But they were not hers.

Perhaps like many who wish to believe their motives unselfish, Amy deceived herself. She wanted to believe her wish to find her mother was unselfish — mother or father. She wanted to believe her true parents would want to know that she was “all right.” All right? Clothed. Fed. Her first swing, the tricycle. Beach house. Packard. Had not been frightened at becoming a woman. Had an education, gloves for some occasions, handbags. Had learned to dance. Surprising how many young women married the wrong men simply because they couldn't dance. Able to cope with humiliation or was so assured that the question of humiliation never came up.

Well, she did want her true parents to know she was all right. So she paid for her coffee and left a tip as large as the price of the coffee, that the waitress, seeing her depart, might wish her well in whatever she was up to. She walked across the street to the bank whose Ionic pillars suggested the grandeur that was Greece and the religion that was money.

She went through the serious little ceremony that gave her access to the vault — smiles, words more whispers than speech, and then the little buzzer that warned that a small gate was about to be opened, and there she was with the safety deposit box in her hands. She carried it into a private stall set aside for people who wish to close the door and in private, away from envious eyes, examine things they own. Since some things people own are liable to make them nervous and in need of smoking, a clean ashtray and a book of matches bearing the bank's insignia waited on the table. Amy lighted a cigarette, held it between her lips and squinted against the smoke while she opened the box.

Now she held the sealed envelope that had been buried under stocks and bonds and deeds; when she had first come upon it, it had been on top as if Dad McKinney in placing it there would urge her to make a decision at once as the first thing she did in her life alone. Earlier, in placing the sealed envelope at the bottom of the stack of papers, she felt she had made that decision, but she had not.

She broke the seal.

Nothing, nothing was ever the same again.