Chapter 8 — What Enid Wouldn’t Say

I was learning to read her, which she did not make easy, because Enid Kirkland communicated her needs exclusively through complaint and her affection exclusively through instruction, and you had to translate everything.

When she said the basement stairs were “a nuisance in this weather,” she meant she had become frightened of them, and had been doing her own laundry in fear for four years rather than admit it.

When she complained that the pear tree was “dropping fruit all over creation,” she meant she could no longer manage the ladder and it grieved her to watch Albert’s tree go to waste.