Stay a Little Longer by Dorothy Garlock

derisively. “I certainly hope that you told him the same thing
     I did! The nerve of that man wanting us to give up our home!”
    As surely as if she had been struck in the chest, Rachel knew that Zachary had told her the truth; he had come to her mother
     with a very generous offer and she had turned him down, leaving the family in their financial predicament. She wondered if
     everything else he told her was equally true.
    “Why didn’t you take his offer?” she asked, her face flushing bright red.
    “Do you… do you want to sell our home?” Surprise was written across Eliza’s face.
    “It would make life easier for all of us,” Rachel pressed. “There’d be no more having to clean up after others, providing
     rooms for strangers. We wouldn’t have to constantly worry about making ends meet or paying our bills. It would be hard to
     leave, but with the kind of money that Zachary is offering, we could make a new start!”
    “Would you have taken the money?”
    “I would have,” Rachel said, swallowing the lump in her throat.
    Without uttering a word in reply, Eliza stepped away from her daughter and crossed the room to the scarred bureau. Picking
     up a silver picture frame, she stared intently into the eyes of her lost daughter, into the photograph that she had had taken
     of Alice right before her wedding. Rachel waited for her mother to speak, but Eliza remained silent; it was as if she were
     waiting for Alice to say something.
    “Why wouldn’t you take what was offered?” Rachel asked again.
    “Do you still remember the day that you and Alice spent the whole afternoon sliding on rags down the staircase banisters because
     you thought that you could clean them faster that way?” Eliza asked, her eyes never wavering from the picture. “I can still
     hear your laughter carrying through every nook and cranny of the house.”
    Rachel remembered how they had raced each other back up the steps before once again sliding down, laughing until they were
     almost out of breath. She recalled how on one particular trip she had crashed violently at the bottom of the stairs, but before
     the tears could well up and come pouring out, Alice had been by her side, kissing her scrapes and calming her fears. “I do,”
     she answered simply.
    “How about the day that Alice spent in the kitchen making apple pies for the Fosters after their barn burned from a lightning
     strike? She said she was worried that they would be too busy to remember to eat. She spent half of the night making sure things
     were just right.”
    Unbidden recollections of how Alice had proudly walked down the long road to the Fosters’ farm carrying a tray of fresh, still
     cooling pies sprang up in Rachel’s mind. It always seemed as if her older sister were leaping from one good deed to another;
     from knitting mittens to be sent to an orphanage in Minneapolis to giving singing lessons to some of the less well-off girls
     at church. There were so many selfless things Alice had done out of the goodness of her heart.
    “As much as I might have complained about it, I even have fond memories of that rainy April day she brought home that wounded,
     mud-caked, mangy dog and nursed it back to health in the sitting room. Then, just as it was nearly ready to be back on its
     own, it went and had a litter of puppies! Until my dying day, I’ll never forget the way that Alice’s face lit up at the sight.”
    “Me neither,” Rachel admitted.
    Because mine did exactly the same thing!
    “What I am trying to tell you,” Eliza continued, finally turning back to face her daughter, “is that every one of those memories
     happened here… they all happened right here in this house. They’re in the cracked walls and the floors, they’re right there
     in every corner and every closet, they are in every window and doorway and even out around the washing line, all of them waiting
     for one of us to rediscover them.”
    “Mother,” Rachel began gently.