Manners and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, American
Seattle! The ends of the earth. Oh, no. No! he protested, every fibre
of his old frame clinging to the accustomed. Seattle, at seventy! He
turned piteous eyes on his son George and his daughter-in-law Nettie.
"You're going to make your home with us, Father," they reassured him. He
clung to them gratefully. After it was over Alma went home to her
husband and their children.
So now he lived with George and Nettie in the five-room flat on South
Park Avenue, just across from Washington Park. And there was no extra
pillow on the floor.
Nettie hadn't said he couldn't have the extra pillow. He had told her he
used two and she had given him two the first week. But every morning she
had found a pillow cast on the floor.
"I thought you used two pillows, Father."
"I do."
"But there's always one on the floor when I make the bed in the morning.
You always throw one on the floor. You only sleep on one pillow,
really."
"I use two pillows."
But the second week there was one pillow. He tossed and turned a good
deal there in his bedroom off the kitchen. But he got used to it in
time. Not used to it, exactly, but--well----
The bedroom off the kitchen wasn't as menial as it sounds. It was really
rather cosy. The five-room flat held living room, front bedroom, dining
room, kitchen, and maid's room. The room off the kitchen was intended as
a maid's room but Nettie had no maid. George's business had suffered
with the rest. George and Nettie had said, "I wish there was a front
room for you, Father. You could have ours and we'd move back here, only
this room's too small for twin beds and the dressing table and the
chiffonier." They had meant it--or meant to mean it.
"This is fine," old man Minick had said. "This is good enough for
anybody." There was a narrow white enamel bed and a tiny dresser and a
table. Nettie had made gay cretonne covers and spreads and put a little
reading lamp on the table and arranged his things. Ma Minick's picture
on the dresser with her mouth sort of pursed to make it look small. It
wasn't a recent picture. Nettie and George had had it framed for him as
a surprise. They had often urged her to have a picture taken, but she
had dreaded it. Old man Minick didn't think much of that photograph,
though he never said so. He needed no photograph of Ma Minick. He had a
dozen of them; a gallery of them; thousands of them. Lying on his one
pillow he could take them out and look at them one by one as they passed
in review, smiling, serious, chiding, praising, there in the dark. He
needed no picture on his dresser.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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