Archie Goes Home

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This all began innocently, although I have been around long enough to be suspicious of what seems to be an innocuous telephone call like the one I received on a sunny June morning as I sat in the office with coffee after breakfast. The voice at the other end belonged to my aunt Edna, who was phoning from down in southern Ohio, the area where I was born and reared.

Edna usually calls when she’s concerned about my mother, which has gotten to be a little more frequently the last few years. “Is it about Mom?” I asked, clenching the receiver as if I were trying to strangle it.

“Oh, well, she is... all right, Archie, she is just fine,” my aunt said without conviction. “And please don’t tell her that I telephoned you. I have enough of a reputation as a busybody as it is.”

“Then what is the problem?” I learned long ago that you don’t rush Edna Wainwright, my mother’s slightly younger sister. She is going to tell a story at her own pace, and there is nothing anyone can do to speed her up. Maybe that’s because of where she lives. Everything in that hilly, semirural region down near the Ohio River moves at a pace New Yorkers would call excruciatingly slow. I leaned back in my desk chair and drained the last of Fritz Brenner’s fine brew from my cup. The sweep second hand on my watch had nearly made a full revolution when Aunt Edna cleared her throat. Progress.

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