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doesn’t (I think being cryptic is what I mean), there’s no point asking any more questions, so we just finished up with the beds.
    After lunch John had to work on his science project, so he went off to the barn, with Daddy warning him to do his project and not his space suit. I biked over to the center of Thornhill to check my math homework with Nanny Jenkins, my best friend. Nanny’s parents run the store in the village and Mr. Jenkins plays the cello, too. Math is not my best subject and I find that if
I don’t check my problems I’m apt to make silly mistakes in adding or subtracting that make the whole problem wrong even if I’ve been doing it the right way. We finished about five o’clock and it was time for me to get along home, anyhow. Mother doesn’t like us to ride our bikes after dark unless there’s a very good reason. It’s a nice ride home from the village, up the one real street in Thornhill, a nice wide street with white houses set back on sloping lawns and lots of elms and maples (it’s just a typical New England village—at least, that’s what Uncle Douglas says), and then off onto the back road. The back road is a dirt road, and it’s windy and hilly and roundabout and so bumpy that cars don’t drive on it very often. Our house is at the other end of it, just about a mile and a half. In the autumn it’s especially beautiful, with the leaves turned and the ground slowly being carpeted with them. Where the trees are the heaviest and the road cuts through a little wood, the leaves are the last to turn, so that as I pedaled along, the evening sun was shining through green, and up ahead of me, where the trees thinned out, everything was red and orange and yellow.
    A little green snake wriggled across the road in front of me, and I thought how thrilled Rob would be if he were along. Almost every day all summer he would go up the lane hunting for a turtle to bring home as a pet. We never found a turtle, but we’ve seen lots of deer, and a woodchuck that lives in the old stone wall by the brook, and any number of rabbits; and once we saw a red fox.
    When I got home, Uncle Douglas’s red car was parked outside the garage behind our station wagon, so I knew they were there.

    And suddenly I felt very funny about going in, and took twice as long as I needed to put my bike in the shed. I hung my jacket up in the back-hall closet and picked up Suzy’s and Rob’s jackets, which they’d evidently hung on the floor, and put them on hangers—anything to put off opening the back door and going into the kitchen.
    Why was I so shy about seeing Aunt Elena and meeting Maggy, or even saying hello to Uncle Douglas again when I’d been talking with him only the night before?
    Finally there was nothing to do except open the door and go in, so I did. And instead of finding the kitchen full of everybody as it usually is at that time of day, I saw Aunt Elena standing in front of the stove alone. She turned to greet me and she said immediately and briskly, “Ah, Vicky, you’ve saved me. I am not ten feet tall like your mother and I cannot reach the coffee.”
    So I didn’t have to say anything. I didn’t even have to kiss her, which would have been the easiest thing in the world to do up to the time the telephone rang the day before and which now seemed to take more courage than I possessed. I pulled a stool over to the stove and climbed up on it and got the can of coffee.
    â€œNo, the other one,” Aunt Elena said. “I promised your mother I’d make some café espresso for after dinner.”
    And all I could say was, “Oh.” I stood there, watching her. She didn’t look any different; she looked just the same way she had a few weeks before, when she and Uncle Hal were up for the weekend; and yet she wasn’t the same person at all. She stood there in her black dress measuring coffee, wearing