weeks, then months. He’d resigned from the university and taken a job teaching science at Owenburg High School. Three years later he was still here. He no longer thought about dying, but he didn’t think much about living, either. It was a trade-off, he supposed, if you wanted to analyze it, a defense mechanism. If you didn’t want to remember the past, you didn’t dare consider the future.
If you didn’t allow yourself to feel, to care, you could get through the days. And more importantly, you could get through the nights. That was his immediate goal in life. To sleep through the night. He hadn’t quite made it yet, but he was working on it, and maybe in another ten or fifteen years he’d figure out how to do it.
“The television weatherman said it’s going to get down to fifteen degrees tonight,” Faye commented, breaking into his thoughts.
“It’s too damn early in the winter for it to be so cold.” Janet looked up from her pie with a scowl in the direction of the television.
“Janet, that language isn’t appropriate at the dinner table,” Almeda said.
“Oh, hell,” Janet muttered. “It’s nearly the twenty-first century. I’ll say damn if I want to.” Janet had taught physical education and American history at Owenburg High for forty-five years, retiring five years earlier. At seventy-two she still coached the Owenburg girls’ and women’s softball teams. She swam three times a week at the health club in Knoxville, making the forty-mile drive alone, in her 1972 Chevy Impala.
“Be that as it may,” Almeda began, but Lois cut her short.
“It’s sleeting outside,” she informed her sisters. “It’s so slippery I almost fell on my fanny taking Weezer’s food out to the barn.” Weezer was a huge, bad-tempered goose, the family “watchdog,” thirty-five years old and still going strong. Jacob had read somewhere that geese could live to be a hundred years old. In his opinion Weezer was certainly ornery enough to last that long.
“If it gets as cold as they say,” Faye chimed in, “the ice on the ground will last all night.”
“Oh, dear,” Hazel said, with a worried frown. “Think of all those pour souls traveling home from Thanksgiving with their families.”
“And all the snowbirds heading down the interstate to Florida,” Janet added with a touch of acid.
“Oh, yes,” Hazel said, ignoring the sarcasm. “I’ll remember to say a prayer for all of them. Maybe they’ll cancel school tomorrow, Jacob, and you can sleep in.” She reached across the table and patted her nephew’s hand.
“I could use the extra day off,” he agreed. “But not for sleeping in. The woodpile’s getting low. I wouldn’t want to head over here for breakfast one morning and find the fire in the stove’s gone out.” He had his own cabin a hundred yards up the hill but he took a lot of meals, and spent a lot of time, at his aunts’ home.
“No, indeed,” Almeda said, folding her napkin carefully before laying it beside her plate. “There’s been fire in that cookstove every day since I was a girl.”
“The world wouldn’t end if there wasn’t,” Janet said under her breath.
“I like cooking on the old stove,” Hazel, always the peacemaker, broke in quickly. “But I don’t have anything against electricity. And to tell you the truth, I’d just love to have a microwave.” She shot a defiant glance at her older sister out of the corner of her eye.
“Microwaves. Ridiculous appliances.”
“They really are very convenient,” Hazel began. Almeda snorted. For seventy-five years she’d ruled her sisters’ lives. She didn’t intend to stop now.
“Get one if you want it,” Janet told Hazel. “Quit being such a baby.”
“We’ll look at them for you the next time we go to the travel agent,” Faye offered.
“Yes. The office is only a couple of miles from the mall in Knoxville. I think Wainwright’s department store would be the best place to check, don’t you?” Lois decided with a pixiewise nod of her gray-streaked red head. Both the twins were small, barely five feet tall and slender as children.
“Yes, Wainwright’s. We’ll look into it when we go pick up the brochures for our trip to Argentina.”
“Argentina?”
Jacob hid another smile. His twin aunts had been planning the trip of a lifetime ever since his grandparents had passed away fifteen years ago. As far as he knew they’d still never ventured farther away from home than Memphis, but they kept planning, and someday he hoped they made it to all the faraway, exotic places they dreamed about.
Dreams were another thing he’d learned to do without.
“Yes, Argentina,” Faye insisted when Janet had stopped laughing. “It’s a great travel bargain this winter.”
“I’ll bet it is. If you get there before the next coup attempt.”
“It’s time for Sixty Minutes,” Almeda announced imperiously. “I don’t want to miss is. Mike Wallace is doing an exposé on the savings and loan scandal.”
“Another one?” Hazel sighed. “Isn’t that ever going to be settled? You go ahead. I’ll tidy up in the kitchen.”
“I’ll help you, Aunt H,” Jacob offered. “Then I have to get back to the cabin. I can’t count on the weather being bad enough for them to cancel school tomorrow. I still have half a dozen midterm exams to mark.”
“I’ll give you a hand,” Janet said, pushing her chair back from the table as she turned to help Almeda, crippled by arthritis, to rise from her chair. “Sixty Minutes bores me to death.”
“Thanks, Aunt J,” Jacob said as he prepared to carry a stack of plates and bowls into the kitchen. “But they’re essay questions. Still want to volunteer?”
“I withdraw my offer,” Janet said with a cackle. “I’ll find something else to occupy me until bedtime.”
“It wouldn’t hurt you to improve your mind a little with a good book,” Almeda said, reaching for her walker, her only concession to the infirmities of age.
“I already have one. It’s Stephen King’s newest thriller. I love the way that man can scare your socks off without half trying.”
Almeda sniffed. “Rubbish. Good night, Jacob boy,” she said, lifting her cheek for his kiss. “Sleep well.”
“Good night, Aunt,” he said, touching his lips to her cheek. His aunts were all the family he had left; all the family he would ever have, now.
“I wonder,” Faye said, lifting the lace curtain over the bowed dining-room window, “if we should move Weezer onto the back porch. It really is miserable out there.”
“I’ll bring her inside,” Jacob offered, wondering what flaw in his character caused him to volunteer for such hazardous duty.
“Would you, Jacob? Thanks. Lois and I have to finish the designs for the Christmas decorations we’re planning this year.”
