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Show Moon - 65 out of a hot bath. She seemed hardly to notice Joy now, which made Joy feel safe around her. Her aunt fascinated her, as if she were a bright bird gracing their home with its hectic presence. During that visit Joy woke up with pain in her legs, a frequent thing, perhaps because of the dancing. She started down the stairs to find her mother, who often sat up late reading. Sometimes her mother would rub her aching legs and read The Book of Knowledge aloud while the two of them sat close together under the afghan. Her motherwas pregnant again, and Joy would put her head to her mother's stomach to hear the baby kick. The aching went away then, and Joy thought her mother was a magic woman, a mother-god. On this night she did not go all the way down the stairs, for she heard Esther talking. She sat down in the shadows on the stairs, unsure of what to do. Esther was talking loudly, and Joy could smell the smoke from her dark cigarettes. "No one tells the truth in this family." Anne was silent. Joy imagined her sitting on the sofa wrapped in the old afghan, smiling and nodding, waiting for Esther to go on. "Daddy got the last word, so to speak." She laughed. It sounded shrill, forced. , Joy rubbed the ache in her shins and thought that she should go back upstairs before someone found her. "I found him in the front hall closet." She laughed again, louder. "A skeleton in the closet." "No!" Her mother's voice was loud now, too. "He'd hung himself by one of his neckties, one of those awful ones Ruth used to buy him for Christmas." |