The Glass House People (27 page)

Beth's plans for the future kept changing. She decided she might as well apply to some art schools this fall—maybe even look into some in Europe, while she was at it. Sometimes she found herself falling into the old, happy daydream about Ray and their shop, but she pushed it resolutely away. Until she saw him again, and really talked to him, she was going to try not to plan anything that would include him. Such resolutions were easier made than kept to, however. The memory of him could come upon her suddenly while she was helping Grandmother in the kitchen, doing the crossword puzzle with Grandad, or packing her stained-glass equipment away in boxes for their journey home: how Ray worked with his sleeves rolled up to the elbows, how his hands looked holding the glass cutter, how his eyes smiled at her from behind his protective shield as he shaped pieces of glass for his windows at the grinder. These memories were still powerful. Resolutions couldn't keep them away.

The tension in the house seemed to have blown away in the first cooling breezes of autumn. Hannah and Aunt Iris talked together a lot, trying to make up for lost time, like people who have been falsely imprisoned for years and years and are then set free. They could never really have back the time they had lost, but they worked at moving on. At their farewell party with Monica and Bernard, Beth heard Aunt Iris asking Monica about the Philadelphia Institute of Art, whether they accepted older students and so on. It looked suddenly as if Beth and her mother might not be the only ones in the family heading off to college.

On their last day at the house on Spring Street, Beth sat out on the porch glider with Romps at her side. She felt she had spent most of her summer sitting out here, scratching Romps's ears while she escaped the house. Now she looked around the porch at her grandparents and Tom and thought maybe Romps was the only one of them who hadn't changed that summer.

Hannah and Aunt Iris had walked to the store on the next block to buy snacks for the long drive back to California. They were leaving early the next morning. Tom had put in his order for chocolate chip cookies and pretzels. Beth wanted fruit and some animal crackers. Ray laughed at her childish taste in cookies—but never mind Ray and what he thought. Beth shifted in the glider and once more cast him out of her heart.

Footsteps on the pavement behind the shield of bushes in front of the house signaled Aunt Iris and Hannah's return. A few seconds later, they climbed the steps to the porch.

Grandmother glanced up with a smile for both of them and handed Hannah a pot of string beans. "Would you top and tail these, dear? I want to start dinner soon."

From her seat on the glider, Beth could see past Grandad and Grandmother in their rockers, past Hannah and Aunt Iris on the wicker couch talking with Tom while they prepared the beans. She could see right through the open front door into the house, to the foot of the stairs. And it was all too easy to imagine Clifton Becker standing on the landing up there, to see him falling backward toward the radiator. She had to close her eyes against his impact. Could he
really
just have tripped? Had a terrible accident?

As Grandad would say, "Maybe so."

She'd never know. No one would ever know. But let Clifton rest in peace.

It seemed to Beth now that the question calling out for an answer didn't deal with the past anymore but with the future—with the future of their family. Could they
really
move on from here? Would they make, it now, after all?

Maybe so.