Biblical by Christopher Galt Page A

knew that Joe felt the same.
    She watched the car approaching. She had spotted it after she had put on the coffee and turned back to the window. With only a handful of houses scattered along this stretch of back road, an approaching car more often than not signaled an impending visit. Mary watched the car as it came up North Road then took a turn onto the long driveway up to the house.
    “Joe …” she called out over her shoulder. “We’ve got company …”
    Mary took off her apron and hung it on the kitchen hook before making her way to the front door, again calling for Joe as she did so. She stopped at the hallway mirror to check her hair before stepping out onto the porch.
    The grief hit her instantly, totally, devastatingly. As it always did.
    Twenty-three-year-old newly-wed Mary Dechaud looked into the mirror and an eighty-four-year-old reflection looked back at her. For the shortest sliver of time, she didn’t recognize her reflection in the same way she hadn’t recognized herself as the sad, lonely looking old woman in the photograph on the dresser. Mary clasped her hand over her mouth to stifle her cry and the old woman in the mirror did the same. She remembered. In that instant, it all came back to her, as it always did in these painful, searing moments of recall. She turned in the direction of the study to call again for Joe, but stopped herself. Joe was not there.
    Mary took a moment to look at the newspaper, neatly folded and masthead upwards on the hall stand beneath the clock, smoothed flat her skirt with hands on which she now saw the marks of age, the thickened knuckles, the blue veins beneath parchment skin, and opened the door and stepped out into the sunlight to meet her two sons, who she now remembered had arranged to come and visit. She grasped the porch rail andleaned on it, simultaneously steadying posture and composure, quietly absorbing the impact of more than half a century suddenly remembered.
    *
    “No one is forcing you to leave,” said George. “It’s just that, well, the way your memory has been of late, both Jim and I think you’d be better off with someone to help you if you need help.” George, as usual, did all of the talking while James leaned back in the couch, quiet. It was odd, she thought as she poured them both coffee, how inheritances could be split like that. George looked so very much like his father – the same auburn hair and large, soft eyes – but that was where the similarity ended. James, who outwardly looked nothing like Joe, was his twin internally: gentle, caring, kind. George, in contrast, had collected traits from somewhere else in his genetic background; traits that made him pushy, aggressive, domineering. Throughout his life, George’s pleasant looks had been protection and disguise for his inner meanness. Mary knew that the expensive European car parked outside would be his – he had made his way in life by pushing others around or out of his way. He had started with his brother.
    Mary thought again about Joe’s Aunt May – maybe that’s where George got his character, or at least part of it. She felt a rising panic when she remembered how she had puzzled over the tarnish on Aunt May’s newly gifted candlestick when it had really sat on the same table, in the same place, for sixty years.
    “What do you think, James?” she asked her older son.
    “I worry about you here too, Mom. There’s no one around for quarter of a mile. If you fell, or got confused …” James stumbled over the last part. Mary’s memory – the increasingly long periods where the distant and the long-ago became the immediate and present – was the reason for her sons’ visit.
    “But this is our house … your dad’s and mine.” Mary checked herself when she started to look in the direction of Joe’s study.They were looking for signs, she knew that; small indications of her losing her marbles.
    “Dad’s been gone fifteen years, Mom.” James leaned forward,