Free All the Days and Nights by William Maxwell

around some.”
    “What?”
    “She’s got the sofa in the bay window where the table belong, and the table is out in the center of the room.”
    “I tried them that way but it doesn’t work,” Mildred Geliert said.
    “It don’t look natural,” the colored woman agreed. “It was better the way you had it. She asked me did I know where to look for what I wanted and I said I could put my hands right on everything, so she sat down and commenced to read, and I took myself off upstairs.”
    “When Virginia was a baby, Mother Geliert came and stayed with her so Mr. Geliert and I could go to Chicago. When I got back she’d straightened all the dresser drawers and I thought I’d go out of my mind trying to figure out where she could have put things. She’d even got into the cedar chest and wrapped everything up in newspaper. She smiles at you and looks as though butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, and then the minute your back is turned — Did she ask for me?”
    “No’m, I can’t say she did.”
    “Or about the children?”
    The colored woman shook her head.
    “You’d think she might at least ask about her own grandchildren,” Mildred Geliert said. Her eagerness gave way to disappointment. There was something that she had been expecting from this visit of Adah Belle’s to the house on Eighth Street, something besides the woolens that Adah Belle had been instructed to get. “Was there any mail?”
    “Well, they was this postcard for little Virginia. It was upstairs on the table beside the bed in her room. I don’t know how that child’s going to get it if she’s out here. But anyway, I stick it inside my dress without asking.”
    “It’s from her Sunday school teacher,” Mildred Geliert said, and put the postcard — a view of stalagmites and stalactites in Mammoth Cave, Kentucky — on the mantel.
    “While I was at it, I took a look around,” Adah Belle said.
    “Yes?”
    “Judging from the guest-room closet, she’s move in to stay.”
    “That’s all right with me,” Mildred Geliert said, her voice suddenly harsh with bitterness. “From now on it’s her house. She can do anything she likes with it.” As she put the little boy in the crib, her mind was filled with possibilities. She would force Harrison to give her the house on Eighth Street; or, if that proved too expensive for her to manage on the money the court allowed her, she could always rent those four upstairsrooms over old Mrs. Marshall. Adah Belle would look after the children in the daytime, and she could get a job in Lembach’s selling dresses or teach domestic science in the high school.
    “She save brown-paper bags. And string.”
    “Don’t get me started on that,” Mildred Geliert said. “Did she say anything when you left?”
    “I call out to her I was leaving,” Adah Belle said, “and when she come out of the library she had these two boxes in her hand.”
    “What two boxes?”
    “I got them with me in the kitchen. ‘Will you give these to the children,’ she says. ‘They’re from Mr. Geliert. I don’t know whether Mrs. Geliert will want them to have presents from their father or not, but you can ask her.’ ”
    “As a matter of fact, I don’t,” Mildred Geliert said.
    Out in the kitchen she broke the string on the larger package and opened it. “Building blocks,” she said. The other box was flat and square and contained a children’s handkerchief with a lavender butterfly embroidered in one corner. “I wish he wouldn’t do things like that. With Edward it doesn’t matter, but the sooner Virginia forgets her father, the better. He ought to realize that.”
    “He don’t mean no harm by it,” the colored woman said.
    Mildred Geliert looked at her. “Are you going to turn against me, too?”
    “No’m,” Adah Belle said. “I ain’t turning against you, honey. All I say is he don’t mean no harm.”
    “Well, what he means is one thing,” Mildred Geliert said, her eyes fever-bright. “And