Free Earthly Possessions by Anne Tyler Page A

“at how important my life is. See how I’ve been blessed with eventfulness?” And she would lift her warm brown hands, spilling wealth.
    “She’s got no common sense, that woman,” my mother said.
    I think what Mama meant was, sense to realize when she was badly off. Mama might have liked her better if Alberta would only come crying sometime. But Alberta never cried. She told her news between breaths of laughter: scandals, disasters, miracles, mysteries. Someone broke into the radio shop and wiped it out, left a note behind: “Sorry for the inconvenience.” In Julian’s handwriting. Her father-in-law arrived on the doorstep with all his worldly goods, sixty years’ worth of clippings and old theatrical costumes, and since there were no extra bedrooms he slept in the dining room surrounded by fake ermine mantles, military uniforms, swords and crowns and boxes of hats. At any hour of the day or night he would call to her for health food snacks.
    “That house ought to be boarded up and condemned,” my mother said.
    The winter of my junior year in high school, Alberta eloped with her father-in-law.
    Well, it wasn’t exactly your everyday occurrence. Edwin Emory staggered around looking stunned, but no more stunned than I was. I couldn’t understand why she’d left them that way. (Left
me.)
I had thought she was so happy. But then, I also used to think that barbershop quartets on the radio were one man with a hoarse voice. What I mean to say is, I was easily fooled by appearances. Maybe all families, even the most normal-looking, were as queer as ours once you got up close to them. Maybe Alberta was secretly as sad as my mother. Or maybe, as Mama said, “That woman just wanted to be envied for everything, even her scruffy old father-in-law.” I never had looked at it that way before.
    For a while I brought the Emorys cookies and casseroles, but I never got much response. Their house sank in on itself and went silent. Edwin sat around drinking muscatel wine inhis thermal underwear while Linus tried to run the shop. (Saul and Amos had left home years ago.) But mechanical things were depressing to Linus, and he had some kind of nervous breakdown and was sent to live with an aunt. Then Julian dropped out of school. He had a fight about a gambling debt and wasn’t heard from again. And last of all, Edwin left. We didn’t know exactly when, or for where. He just wasn’t around any more. One day I chanced to look out the window and see a stranger boarding up the Emory house, just as Mama had always said they should. And that was the end of that.
    Or seemed to be, till Saul came home. Saul wore a uniform so crisp it looked metallic; he stood in a room as if planted there. It was clear the Emorys hadn’t dwindled away to nothing just because I had lost sight of them. Though he couldn’t say exactly where a couple of his brothers were, he knew they were all alive—even Julian. And Alberta and her father-in-law were someplace in California, or had been as of last Christmas; not that Saul cared. Only Edwin was gone forever. He’d died of liver trouble while visiting his sister in New Jersey. Now Amoco was going to buy the house and tear it down for a filling station, beat out Texaco, and Saul was here to settle the sale and put the money into back taxes. He wanted to sell the radio shop as well. He would take the first offer, sign the papers, and go, he said. He’d just got out of the Army, had a life to start. He couldn’t afford to spend much time on this.
    But he did. The settling of the house took longer than he’d expected—you
know
how complicated just the title search could get, with Emorys—and then a broken-down radio shop is not all that much in demand. He stayed on through March, April. I was glad. With Saul around, life seemed more definite. We had to get on a schedule, give him his meals at predictable hours. Also, he was good at fixing things and he made repairs we’d been needing for years. In the