Free Home by Marilynne Robinson

magazine to the kitchen table and read it there. A stray, she thought, learning the terms of domestication. Testing the comforts, weighing the costs. So she was tactful, careful to seem unsurprised. Once when she opened a cookbook on the table he said, “I hope you’ll tell me if I’m in the way.”
    “Not at all. I appreciate the company.” She had been waiting for the chance to tell him that.
    “Thanks,” he said. “I don’t really want to keep to myself so much. It’s just a habit.”
    I T WAS IN FACT A RELIEF TO HAVE SOMEONE ELSE IN THE HOUSE . And it was interesting to watch how this man, gone so long, noticed one thing and another, as if mildly startled, even a little affronted, by all the utter sameness. She saw him put his hand on the shoulder of their mother’s chair, touch the fringe on a lamp-shade, as if to confirm for himself that the uncanny persistence of half-forgotten objects, all in their old places, was not some trick of the mind. Nothing about that house ever did change, except to fade or scar or wear. Miracles of thrift in their grandparents’ generation had meant that the words “free and clear” could be spoken over the house and all it contained by the time it came into the young hands of their father. Those words blessed the stodginess and the shabbiness. All that big, crowding furniture and all that prim and doubtful taste commemorated heroic disciplineand foresight, which could be, and must never be, undone by bringing other standards to bear than respectability and serviceability. Their parents often told them how fortunate they were to have all their needs supplied, while their neighbors fitted out their lives as best they could on layaway and the installment plan. The Boughtons bought outright the big wooden radio and the upright piano and the electric refrigerator and stove, because the grandparents in their remarkable providence had left them a number of debt-free acres ten miles out of town which they rented to a farmer for a mutually agreeable sum. So even the things they acquired were in effect gifts from beyond the grave, since, having no needs, they could enjoy certain pleasures and conveniences free and clear. No sooner than their neighbors did, of course. Thrift that was second nature to them in any case was reinforced by care not to seem as prosperous as they were, and was pleasantly coincident with a fondness for familiar things. Why should a pastor’s family run the risk of ostentation? Why should a family with eight rambunctious children bother owning anything that could be damaged? They sat on the arms of their mother’s overstuffed chair while she read to them, and they hung over the back of it, and they pinched and plucked at its plushy hide. If the nib of a feather poked through, they would pull it out and play with it, a dry little plume of down, sometimes unbroken. As they listened to the story they would turn and turn the painted vellum lampshade till the rim of it was soiled and the stems of the four nosegays on its four sides were nearly worn away. No matter that there were paths in the rugs, no matter that the big plate spoons were out at elbow with use and polishing.
    She learned the word “waft” sitting in her mother’s chair, breathing on a feather. Jack had come into the room, and the stir of air had floated it out of her hand. In those days the boys called her Glory B. or Glory Be or Glory Bee or Glory Hallelujah or Runt or Pigtails. Sometimes instead of Grace and Glory they had called their little sisters Justification and Sanctification, which came near irritating their father. But in general her brothers had ignored her,Jack not so completely as the others. He had stood in the doorway that evening and watched the feather circle against the ceiling in the air he brought in with him, and then he had reached up and caught it lightly in his hand and given it back to her. “It just wafted away,” he said. She might have been seven, so he would have