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Show Woodworth/14 on the rug. The furniture is all the same as it was when she was younger, but it has all been recovered, re-finished, re-painted and re-built. Mud and jelly stains have been replaced by creaseless slipcovers in brown tones; crayon and fingerpaint marks have been sterilized by an irreproachable shade of white. Philodendrons, ferns, jade plants and gawky avocado plants, having survived Browning childhoods and adolescence, have given way to spotless, unimpeeded windows. It's so neat, so tidy now that it should seem ordered. But Marty feels the chaos, barely kept at bay behind the matching slipcovers and contrasting curtains. The stains and marks and clutter had their own patterns, the rhythmn of a family. Her parents had talked twice about selling the house. Once during the summer after Jake died, when her mother had wanted to move to Nantucket all year long. Ned and Ruth would go away every weekend on "house hunts", leaving the girls with a baby sitter. And then again when Megan refused to go to college, and had taken an apartment of her own in New York City. Ruth had said that, now the children were all out of the nest, she wanted her own home and her own life- She had even talked of moving to an apartment, with just one bedroom and a studio with a convertible couch for Ned. Then, one day, a woman in a suit had come to the house with a swatch book and wall paper samples, and almost a quarter of a century had been methodically eradicated. Marty takes the stairs two at a time, pulling hard on the wavering banister, just as she used to on her way to bed. Even her room was painted while she was away at school, a pale blue that would be acceptable to the guests who might be using it now. But renovations had stopped there. The same striped yellow bedspreads still cover the beds, faded and stained with use. And the same |