Castleview by Gene Wolfe Page B

herself should have been there. She said, “No, I don’t think so. But he took my car, and I’m waiting for him to bring it back. Please come in.”
    Old Mrs. Cosgriff crossed the Howard threshold with a tiny hop.
    “It smells absolutely heavenly,” Sally said, accepting the casserole; then the obligatory, “Won’t you have some with me?”
    “Why, I wouldn’t mind one bit—it does smell awfully good, doesn’t it? You just sit down, dear, and I’ll make us some tea and dish up some.”
    Sally said, “Mrs. Cosgriff …”
    “Yes, dear?”
    “I don’t know how to explain this … .”
    “Then don’t you try, darling. Just tell me what it is you want, and I’ll see right to it. No explaining necessary.”
    “Mrs. Cosgriff, I don’t want to be left alone—not as long as someone else is in the house and I can have company. Would you mind very much if I went with you? I could fix the tea, and you could dish up, and we could talk a little.”
    With the wholly unfair abruptness of sudden illness, Sally was crying. She had not cried, not really cried, since she had been told of Tom’s death; she had raged and wailed and screamed at her mother, but she had not wept. Now, thus abruptly, she was a small girl again, a child; and this crotchety, gossipy old woman was her grandmother, was beloved Grandmaw Chattes herself, though Grandmaw Chattes was so long dead that her very face, her poor face, was nearly forgotten.
    “There, there.” Old Mrs. Cosgriff sighed. “There, there.” And took her casserole back, and set it on Sally’s coffee table on top of Good Housekeeping, and held her (though so bent by age that she was a head shorter than the child she held), and patted her back.
    It came to Sally, at the crisis of her agony, that for the first time since Fourth Grade she was crying as she had when she was small, coughing and choking on her sobs, her nose running as much as her eyes. She was ashamed of it, horribly ashamed, but it did no good to be ashamed; she only cried the more for shame, though she managed to wipe her nose on the apron she habitually wore in the house before weeping again.
    This, then, was why she had wept in childhood, although she had not known it. Then there had been only the unfocused sense of loss—the unplumbed knowledge that in the end the world would take away everything, even the worst things, so that at the end, when she had nothing left, she would miss even them; and surely it would take all the good things, all the best things, the good things first of all. That her most beautiful
dresses would turn ugly, hideous and foolish, merely by hanging in the closet; and that all the people, all the most beautiful people, the ones she loved best, would fall to rags.
    “I’m all right now,” she said. “I remember.”
    To which old Mrs. Cosgriff said, “We both need a nice hot cup of tea, dear. Let’s go in the kitchen.”
    Meekly Sally followed the old woman, still wiping her nose on her apron while old Mrs. Cosgriff bustled ahead, switched on the light, and refilled the teakettle at the sink.
    “Why, your window’s broke,” old Mrs. Cosgriff said.
    “Yes,” Sally admitted. “Somebody broke it tonight.”
    “You better get that fixed.” Old Mrs. Cosgriff shook her head. “This weather isn’t going to last forever.”
    “Tom always took care of those things. I suppose Mossby’s would send somebody?” (Mossby’s was the hardware store.)
    “You tell them I said they better.” Old Mrs. Cosgriff got down three dessert plates, three cups, and three saucers.
    Why, she knows exactly where everything is, Sally thought. Everybody keeps everything. in the same place, believing they’ve invented that place for themselves; but when you’re old enough, I suppose, you know that, know where the woman across the street keeps her tea, and her teapot, too. “Maybe we should put Seth’s in the oven,” she said. “I don’t know when he’ll be home.”
    Old Mrs. Cosgriff turned to