Sweet Talk by Stephanie Vaughn Page A

he died, my father moved the family, without consulting anyone, from a large house on the edge of town to a smaller one near the center. He was thinking ahead to their old age, he told me. The smaller house was near drugstores and supermarkets, and closer to the hardware store he ran. It was near the hospital in case of emergency. The Christmas after hebought the house, he drove me into the countryside to discuss the future.
    “These are the insurance policies, this is the will.” He handed me thick brown envelopes. “This is the key to the safe-deposit box. Do not let your mother sell that house when I am gone. It is in a good location for old people.” I had been home from college only two days, but already I felt like a child again, inarticulate and fearful. I felt the old speech rhythms return, the truncated syntax, the vague euphemistic vocabulary, and a sense that there were always secrets to be kept from someone else in the family.
    “You’re still alive,” I said. We walked down a slope to a pond, sliding on the crusted snow.
    “I’ve arranged it so that your mother will not be able to get her hands on all of the money at once,” he said.
    I thought of her back at the house, wrapping presents with my grandmother. I thought of how pleased she had looked as my father and I left the house, suspecting, perhaps, that we were going to collect a surprise Christmas present. Instead, we stood at the edge of the pond as the sun went down, and defined the limits of her future—where she could live, how much she could spend, who would die first—as if her life were a geometric pattern, something that could be drawn with ruled sides and with perfect arcs spun off the tip of a compass.
    The sun slid behind a row of fir trees, and the pond glowed lavender near the shadows of the oppositebank. “The ice is too thick this winter,” my father said. “There’s no light at the bottom of this pond. The water plants will die and then the fish will die, too.” He spoke matter-of-factly. It was not his pond. “If we don’t have a thaw, the farmer will have to come out here and drill holes to save the fish.” He paused and looked at me. He seemed about to suggest a lesson in life. “It’s a good thing we do not live in the country,” he said. “Your mother and grandmother think they would like to live in the country, but it is better for them to live in town.”
    The following summer, he died. Two winters later, my grandmother died, not long after falling on the ice in front of our house. There was a step she had forgotten about, at the juncture of our walk and the city sidewalk. It was not a badly designed step—just one that, in her old age, she had overlooked.
    Aunt Ruda knows that something is up. Every day for the last two weeks, my mother has been going through closets and trunks and throwing away things that once belonged to my father and grandmother. Old shoes, shirts, dresses, sweaters, cheap jewelry, soured cologne still in its Christmas box, gun magazines, clippings of inspirational pieces from Christian newsletters. Ruda stands on the porch and frowns at the seven garbage bags sitting by the curb.
    “She’s selling the house, isn’t she?” Ruda says. My father was Ruda’s brother, and now she takes a proprietaryinterest in the house on his behalf. “If she moves into the country, she’ll never be able to get out of her drive in winter.”
    “I don’t know what she’s doing,” I say truthfully.
    In a spiral notebook, I have made an orderly list of the decisions that must soon be made about my mother’s chemotherapy treatments. Where will she have them—in California with me, or in Ohio, near Ruda and the other relatives? Should a registered nurse be engaged? Should a housekeeper be brought in? My mother ignores the notebook and moves through the house in a distracted way, bumping into furniture. “This house is too small,” she tells me. “It was designed for short people.” She has decided