Our house is not a grand house, whatever the Reader's new fame might suggest. It is a red-brick, two-story, Savannah house with a porch that lists very slightly to the left and a kitchen that has been "about to be renovated" since the second Bush administration.
My parents bought it in 1976.
My father was a postal supervisor who believed a man should own his roof outright or die trying, and my mother was a school librarian who believed the same thing about a garden. Between the two of them the mortgage died young and the garden grew old, and I grew up in the middle of both projects, holding flashlights and being told to hold them steadier.
The house is full of them still. My mother's handwriting is inside the pantry door in pencil, listing what goes on which shelf, in a hand that gets bossier as it goes down. My father's shelf brackets in the garage are all faintly crooked, installed by a man who owned three levels and trusted none of them. There is a shallow dent in the dining room floor where my sister Claire dropped a bowling ball at thirteen and then blamed gravity, accurately but in a tone that fooled nobody.
And in the backyard, beside the fountain, there was the Reader.
My mother called her "the girl."
That was her whole name in our house for fifty years. Wash the girl before your aunt comes. Trim the ivy back off the girl. Don't let the sprinkler hit the girl all night, the water spots her. She talked about the statue the way other women talk about a difficult but beloved relative who lives in the yard and does not eat much.
I was eight the summer I hid my marbles under her base.
I had a steelie I was particularly proud of, and a cat's-eye with a red ribbon in it, and a clear one I was convinced was worth money. I wedged the whole collection into the hollow under the base where the bronze met the stones, in a spot I had investigated with the thoroughness children usually reserve for cookie theft. Then I forgot them. Completely. I forgot them for an entire summer and most of a school year, and found them again the following spring covered in a green-black crust, and I wept over those marbles as if a bank had failed. My mother cleaned them in vinegar at the kitchen sink without mocking me, which tells you most of what you need to know about my mother.
When my father died β I was thirty-four, he was seventy-one, it was fast and it was not kind β my mother took to sitting on the bench across from the Reader every evening. She would go out after supper with a cup of tea gone cold beside her and sit facing the girl for an hour, sometimes more. She never explained it. I never asked, which I regret in the general way you regret all the questions that become unaskable. I think the Reader was the one listener in her life who had never once needed anything explained, interrupted with advice, or told her to be strong. A woman reading quietly in a garden. My mother sat with her until dark, for months.
Both of them died eventually in that house β my father first, then my mother six years later, in the front bedroom, with the garden visible if you propped the pillows right, which we did.
Claire wanted to sell.
I want to be fair to my sister: she lived in Charlotte, her life was there, and a house full of other people's handwriting is an anchor as much as a comfort. She was not wrong. But I could not do it. I could not stand in the pantry doorway reading shelf instructions in my dead mother's pencil and then sign a paper that made it somebody else's pantry.
So I bought her half. It took savings, and a loan I resented monthly for years, and an arrangement with a lawyer that left me house-rich and everything-else-poor for a decade. Claire got her money and her freedom with a clean conscience, because I offered. I got the crooked brackets, the pencil handwriting, the bowling ball dent, the bench, the fountain.
And the girl.
I never moved her. I want that understood. In all the years since β through storms, through a tree crew taking down the dead pine behind her, through a mason re-pointing the fountain β the Reader stood exactly where she had always stood, because she was not a possession of the house. She was one of its residents.
Until a woman with a tote bag walked through my side gate at 9:14 on a Tuesday morning and tried to evict her with a hammer.