He imagined the deep gouges in the chairs upholstered arms were made just then, as if the seemingly dusty rag-doll of a person rocking back and forth before him had just dug in with her yellowed nails, clear through to the creaking wooden frame. A woman grasping at what's left.

It wasn't true. He came expecting, half hoping, for some clawing and scratching that simply didn't happen. The old bird didn't have any fight left in her.

The fabric had worn away over the inglorious span of 50 years. Disintegrated, really, under the sheer weight of historic routine. Roy couldn't reconstruct in his mind what the furniture had even looked like when he was a child, let alone imagine the rocker in 1959 when his father had proudly supervised the two farm hands as they hoisted it from the back of the green Ford F-1 pickup truck that had more or less fossilized right near the mound of earth where the barn had been. Like the truck, the chair had always been a pulverized artifact, its sentimentality and charm beaten out of it by the numbness in which he guessed she now took comfort.

"Mom, Sarah is here." His mother gave a faint nod, closing her eyes as she did so, looking tiny and resigned in her tattered grey sweater. "Let's not keep her waiting, huh? I've put your bags in the car."

As she shuffled through the kitchen of the farm house -- now emptied of the old pine table and the chipped family china, of the old post office clock his father had restored and the old tin bread box once full of Pecan Sandies and marshmallow Pinwheels -- she stopped and spun slowly round, as graceful as a tiny pink jewelry box ballerina.

"Scrub the walls," she said. He had no answer before the ancient wooden door creaked gently shut behind her. - JV