Free Earthly Possessions by Anne Tyler

that winter. Uncle Gerard slipped us ten-dollar bills from time to time but that just paid for Mama’s blood pressure medicine. Finally in desperation I put up a ROOMS TO LET sign, and a factory watchman named Mr. Robb took the east front bedroom. He didn’t like it much, though. He said we kept the house too cold, and he moved out three weeks later. The sign just gathered dust. Itried a little harder in the studio and asked all customers if they would tell their friends about us, but that didn’t help. I think the sight of Mama put them off. She had this way of wandering in sometimes, halfway through a sitting—pulling herself along by clutching at pieces of furniture. I could tell when she was coming by the sudden startled look on a customer’s face. “It’s amazing,” she would say in the doorway, “how every corner of the world agrees simultaneously that someone’s dead. Don’t you think so? I mean if a man dies in one room then his meal in another room goes untouched; he doesn’t show up for his doctor appointment; the photos he was sorting just stay in a heap. There’s never a slip-up; the world has everything so well arranged.”
    “My mother,” I would tell the customer. “Look a little toward the light, please.”
    “But then I never did place much faith in physical things,” said my mother. “Oftentimes I’ve set a cup down and left it somewhere, and been surprised to see it there two weeks later. You would think just once there’d be a lapse of some kind; the cup would forget and be back on the shelf when I looked at it again. Or gravity: you’d think you could take gravity by surprise, just once, and set a tray very suddenly on air and have it stay. Wouldn’t you?”
    The customer would clear his throat.
    “I see now I didn’t give the world enough credit,” my mother said, and then she wandered out again.
    On certain evil days I had thoughts of running away, but of course I never did.
    One afternoon in late March, the front bell rang and I opened the door to a very tall soldier with his cap in his hand. He had straight black hair and that sealed kind of face that keeps its own counsel. An Emory face. Only I wasn’t sure which one. I said, “Amos?”
    “Saul,” he told me.
    “Saul!”
    “Hello, Charlotte.”
    He didn’t smile. (Emorys seldom do; they just look peaceful.) “I saw your sign,” he said. “I came to town to settle the property and I wondered if I could room and board with you till I get it taken care of.”
    “Of course,” I said. “We’d be glad to have you.”
    “I hear you’ve had some trouble this winter.”
    “Well, some,” I said.
    Saul only nodded. The Emorys were used to trouble; they didn’t have to make a big to-do about it.
    The way we knew the Emorys was this: the mother, Alberta, was a woman who kept no secrets. She would tell her business to anyone, even us. She would bring us a pie or a bowl of fresh berries and stand half the morning in our kitchen doorway, talking on and on in her lush soft voice. Discussing her husband, Edwin Emory the radio repairman, who drank far more than he worked. And her four strapping sons: Amos, Saul, Linus, and Julian. Julian was my age; the others were older. The men in that family were wicked and mysterious, but thanks to Alberta we always knew what they were up to. Amos kept running away; Saul got in trouble with girls a lot. Linus was subject to unexplainable rages and Julian had a tendency to gamble. I don’t believe there was a day in their lives that something complicated wasn’t happening to them.
    This Alberta was a gypsyish type, beautiful in certain lights and carelessly dressed, slouchy, surprisingly young. In the summer she often went barefoot. Needless to say, I loved her. I hung on everything she told me: “Then what? Then what?” I wished she would adopt me. I longed for her teeming house and remarkable troubles. For on Alberta, troubles sat like riches. “Look,” she seemed to be saying,