Free Come Along with Me by Shirley Jackson Page B

father,” the maid in the apartment house said to Catharine, “They’re together again at last.”
    With the funeral over and her mother gone, Catharine put the apartment back the way it had been before her mother came to live with her. The extra bed was moved out and the little table went back by the window. She spent five dollars on a new slip cover for the armchair, and she had the curtains cleaned. The only thing left of her mother was the old trunk full of her mother’s memories and hopes. The little money from the sale of the furniture stored in Buffalo had paid for the funeral; Catharine had paid for the doctor and the medicine out of her salary and her fur-coat money. She asked the superintendent to put her mother’s trunk in the basement storage room, and the evening before he took it down she opened it, to make sure everything was in moth balls and to take out anything she could use, and, finally, to set her mind dutifully to thinking of her parents.
    For a minute or two her parents’ memory would be centered in a flood of other memories, the thin teacher who snatched the drawing out of Catharine’s hand and snarled, “I should have known better than to assign this to a stupid half-wit.” Coming upon a boy named Freddie frantically rubbing out an inscription in chalk on a fence, and, when Freddie ran away, reading with hollow empty sympathy words he had been so anxiously erasing: “Catharine loves Freddie.” And then her father: “Catharine, do the girls and boys in your school talk to each other about bad things?” The one or two parties, and the flowered chiffon dress her mother made. Her father sending her next door to get back a nickel she had lent to a school friend. And her mother: “I hardly think, dear, that your father would approve of that little girl. Jane. If I were to speak to her, very tactfully . . .”
    And herself, coming back someday, a famous artist with a secretary and gardenias, stepping off the train where they were all waiting for autographs. And there was Freddie, pressing forward, and Catharine, turning slightly aside, said, “I’m afraid you must be mistaken. I never cared for anyone named Freddie.” The tallest in the class, and thin, telling the other unpopular girls at recess: “My father doesn’t like me to go out with boys.
You
know, the things they do.” And finally, after school, staying by the pretty young teacher, saying, “Don’t you like Mary Roberts Rinehart, Miss Henwood? I think she’s a terribly good author.”
    The girls in school had called Catharine “Catty,” the teachers and her mother and father had called her “Catharine,” the girls in her office called her “Katy” or “Kitty,” but Aaron had called her “Cara.” “Strange Cara,” the one note from him began. Catharine had held it in her hands, sitting by an open window at night and looking at the stars, in Buffalo, with her father moving around suspiciously downstairs; in New York, with her mother dead.
    â€œRatty Catty, sure is batty.” Catharine remembered the jingle from the schoolyard and the notes passed from desk to desk, remembered it and turned it over in her mind while she leaned back with her feet on her dead mother’s trunk and felt the soft upholstered chair against her shoulders, saw the traffic moving in the street below her apartment window, knew her job and her paycheck were waiting for her the next day. “Ratty Catty, sure is batty.” Catharine smiled comfortably. There had been a kissing game at one of the few parties she went to, a grammar-school graduation party, and Catharine, in the background, had unexpectedly had to come forward to kiss a boy (what boy? she wondered now. Freddie again?). And the boy, moving backward, saying, “Hey, listen,” while Catharine stood uncertainly. Then someone had shouted,