Jim and Julia couldn't remember if Rose had ever been anything but a friend. She was part of their lives, part of the house and family, although neither close family nor distant relative. She'd been a friend of their mother's, Ruth, but their mother had so many friends and so many eras to her past.

The name on the urn, Rose Duttera, was next to the inscription, ‘Always Aunt Rose,' read to all by one of the young priests. He gave the urn to Julia and she opened the top and let spread to wind and water. She held Jim's arm then. She recalled how their mother had caught Jim stealing quarters from Rose's Kay car when they'd been at the cabin for a few claustrophobic weeks. Rose had argued there wasn't enough to do, so of course it'd come down to stealing quarters and cigarettes from a real aunt's purse. The mourners dispersed to the grass and Rose would've been waiting for them by the cars, a less involved being, more a glint of light from a chalice than a beam through a vestry window like so many other women in their family.

Mrs. Tanner, who had held Rose up when she'd fallen from her first stroke, remembered how in school their mother protected Rose, and gave her money to afford the nicer rosary. They'd all had boyfriends, even Rose, and she'd keep the rosary until she gave up the habit for another. That year the town flourished with young love, and color. The hippies had set up camp not far from downtown and Rose had met a bearded young man with a guitar. They'd thought she could do better than a young man half her age and surely she could, but something about her stint as a nun kept her looking for young men, younger men. Maybe she continued from where she'd left off as a seventeen year old looking for the right path. By the time he left her for the road she had found Jim and Julia in their infancy and became part of the wallpaper and dust of the house.

Blackmoore, the new clergyman of only ten years on, recalled Rose had caught him drinking on the stoop outside the steps to the basement where the organ blower was in disrepair. He complained to her and she listened. She offered him an arm and rested her head on his shoulder, a moment of discomfort then smoothed over by taking his bottle and having a drink. She'd been part of the first repair of the organ, and she loved the thin walkways through the tall pipes, the narrow steps up to the fanfare. Wouldn't it be a wonderful thing to sleep there, she'd told him, all those quiet but potentially loud pipes. They'd gone for a walk after that, down to the hills by the woods near the church, and she'd helped him get through the entire bottle. It was a cold evening.

Beauty pervades family. A single drop clears the dingiest waters, and Rose made Jim and Julia stand out in crowds of children. Rose made Julia's pale thin face glow with a few pink polos. Jim received attention every morning, his hair brushed to its highest potential, a firm part in the fray of curls. Fish oil for both every evening. How an outsider made the family beautiful couldn't be reckoned. She floated in and out of their ranks with ease and little grooming here and there kept even their parents looking tip-top. She'd been caught, in a family portrait, pulling a thread from Ruth's jacket. Her expression: one of delight for the portrait, and delightful distraction for the wayward thread. Jim and Julia's beauty hadn't pervaded the family, they were quite dull, Rose brought herself through in their shapeless bodies and made them vivacious teens.

The silver urn arrived with Jim one morning after she'd been taken away, dead. Ruth called both of her children with the news, and kept it short. Ruth often hung up the phone at the end of conversations without goodbye, as her goodbyes had all run out. Saying goodbye to Rose had to be the last of them. Jim slid the urn back and forth between his hands, mindlessly watching himself in the small silver cap. How, Ruth wondered, would she manage now? To be without another geriatric, without the similar sense of frayed worlds gone tattered, without the odd sentence strung together with fitful semantic dementia's lyricism.

Everyone returned to Ruth's home on the hill in Altoona where just down the block a man could get a cut and a shave for fifteen dollars. The bakery had closed down. Julia now owned half of the house as Rose's half ownership went in her will to the female of the two darlings, and for the male all of my belongings in my bedroom; Jim and Julia had been born in the room. The room meant more to Jim than the house, and he'd fallen in love with the narrow staircase up to it. So many times he'd sat on it with toys and waited for Rose to start Sunday's grand design with a piggish breakfast.

After drinks in the kitchen they stood around the shaded backyard, glad to be drunk and away from the sun and the river. Conversation kept a din in corners of the lawn, but most were quiet and sitting observant and mute. Jim sat in Rose's bedroom sorting through boxes on her bed. A pocket knife he'd given her as a gift after she made him read East of Eden, a violin from a bearded friend, left by one of his compatriots, and lacking of strings, hung on the wall for years, dusted weekly by Rose and the Merry Maid service. Julia walked the staircase to her brother. She stood at the door.

“It'll be very difficult not writing her anymore.”

“Maybe I should stay for a few weeks for mom.”

“If you can afford it,” she said and wrapped her arm around her waist. She continued, “I guess I don't have to stop writing her.”

“I'll quit.”

“Rose had a music box here,” Julia said and pulled a desk drawer open. Inside a sewing box and a bundle of letters from Germany sat next to a silver music box.

A man in the backyard sang to a small group. The backyard resounded his voice and bounced it around the trees and brick walls of the apartments on either side, then sending the warble up to Rose's window. A small bed of herbs in the middle of the yard hid a litter of kits. The gorged rabbit sat still under a large rhubarb. The cats ate half the kits, and a hawk the city had brought in for the pigeon problem had devoured one. Rose's rhubarb cake was the baker's favorite local dish. She traded him for his honey white loaves. It was generally agreed that the backyard was Rose's domain, and it had her charm, her sense of order. She hadn't made the cake that year in appreciation of the kits and hadn't eaten bread in years.

“There had been someone after that one young man, hadn't there?” Jim asked Ruth as they stood listening to the old man sing a second song.

“Is Julia still up there?”

“Looking through the letters.”

“She'll know.”

“Who?”

“The man you're listening to. But they split when he went to teach.”

“Him? Looks a little young.”

“That kind of school too, the very young or the very old Ivy.”

“I wonder how he left her.”

“Do you?” she said and laughed.

“Well, I wonder could it have been her choice not to accompany him.”

“Damn well should've been.”

“You wanted her for yourself.”

“Your father hated him. Said he couldn't write worth a damn and kept on about what he was studying, you know, who cares, who cares,” she said and waved the singer away and went inside.

To Ruth the world Rose inhabited had nothing to do with those who would sweep her off her feet, take her to some new world. Rose never spoke of men save for the singing man, and that was only to say she wasn't angry with him, but that he'd hurt her. She had the house and the family she needed and that was that. No man needed prove his muster to a woman as important as Rose. Pennsylvania can offer a damn worse life than she'd had it. Ruth waved him away from the kitchen and smoked alone.

The old man stopped singing and soon the brown and black lung men were leaving, rolled away in their wheelchairs by their daughters or one with his walker next to his trucker son, Carl something. Ruth brought out a five pound tub of Rose's chocolate chip mint ice cream and served it round to the non-drinkers. She dolled out the rest of the liquor to the drinkers and took down enough herself to be pleasant with a gathering of forty somethings. Would she say anything? Most likely not, but she couldn't help point out someone's lap dog pointing from within its zipped up mesh cage toward the rabbit in the rhubarb. Oh, she did make the best rhubarb cake. Jim came to his mother and held her elbow for a bit.

Later on when everyone in Altoona and Portage were asleep save for the amphetamine users and prostitutes, Jim sat on Rose's bed. He had closed the door and turned the lights full on to see about the room. He'd never been in the room for so long as he sat. Julia kept her feet turning in dreams in her childhood room on the second floor just below Jim and if she woke she fell asleep with the spinning feeling one gets when they've woken in a temporary place they'd known as home for so long. Ruth had fallen asleep in her dead husband's lazy-boy and on bad booze, so her stomach started her awake now and again, but with her apathy she nodded off soon enough and the sound of the clocks didn't wake her. Jim hadn't ever asked why Rose was part of the family, the real reason. She'd come at a point when Julia was just born, and Jim wasn't even a plan in his father's mind. The closeness of the secret made it much less secret than simple reality. No reason to ask if Aunt was ascribed. All too soon the children adopted the barbershop's dog as Uncle Biscuit, and the large toucan at the Italian restaurant became a great aunt Hullo, for his name was Hullo, of course.

The letters divulged simple little signs here and there.

Dear Rose Peapod Genuine Spruce Magestic, I'm to be let from the hospital on monday. Sally

A letter from her sister, a ward of the state, dated 1955. Rose's sister had become part of that large first wave of deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill. Sally came home and to Rose a letter from Ruth, calming her old classmate and best friend.

Dear Rose, I'm sure she'll be fine once she's had her chores and rules meted out to her. It's only a matter of time before a boy sees her. Love, Ruthie

At breakfast the next morning Jim came down to his sister and mother cooking loads more food than made sense. Julia popped a piece of thick cut bacon in her mouth and chewed and kissed her brother on the cheek.

“Some clergy over for breakfast, soon. So get clothes on.”

He rushed upstairs and began his shower routine, but picked up the rest of the letters instead.

It wasn't a letter between the last two, but a facsimile of a police report.

Sally Duttera kept overnight for prostitution and released with a warning. Mentally unstable. Fine: $5.00 paid by sister, Ruth.

Ruth? He hadn't read it wrong, it was in his hands. But it couldn't be true. And it wasn't.

“I looked a lot like Rose back then, and I just said I was her sister and Sally agreed and they released her. Rose had a job at the church at that point, a telephone job. She didn't want to leave it to go to get her sister out of jail, and she wouldn't lie to the nuns. So be it, I said and walked down there and got Sally.”

“Sally didn't have five dollars to pay the fine?”

“Funny, Jim,” Julia said.

“They wouldn't let her go to just anyone. Say I was her...”

“Pimp?”

“It was a different town then.”

“I'm sure. I didn't know Rose had a sister, and I didn't know her sister was mental.”

“Not just mental.”

“No, not just mental,” she said at Rose's door.

Jim stood at the desk, now filled with correspondences, and large envelopes of photos. Two windows of the room shone sun on the place with light enough to see all the corners, the ceiling free of webs, every window devoid of paint chips or dead insects. The telltale signs of life had been meticulously gone over by Rose's unbelievable cleaning spirit. She'd left behind only her few things and Ruth.

Ruth sat down on Rose's bed. “Sally wasn't anything close to the mental we were used to. She was the kind of girl even the girls at the hotel fell in love with because she slaved passionately for love. I know it all because a girl working the doors there had told Rose about Sally. Rose thought Sally was just drinking, and at that point drinking was practically healthy. Rose and I drank and smoked all day waiting for Gerry to come home.”

“Did Sally drink herself to death?” Jim asked.

“She was clubbed and left up in the hills by a few of the old shanty towns.”

“What?”

“It was normal. They'd find a body every few months. Altoona had a lot of transients from Galitzen, Portage, wherever, Hollidaysburg, and they'd come in and work a room for a few weeks and go on to Gettysburg or whore the highway,” she said and waved it all out the window.

“Tragic. God, whoring the highway. Way to put it.”

“Well, even more so if you're mental, and she'd been conditioned. That asylum had a few doctors and nurses that were sick, just sick. It's all so awful; to think you'd been so reliant on a place for your ill, and you find they're being doubly mistreated. Anyway, she was identified by her silvering hair and her anklet from the hospital.”

“How did Rose take it?”

“She moved in with me right when Gerry and I got married. We married a few years after his mother had enough money to keep his sisters and brothers alright, and then he moved down from Portage to Altoona. He stopped mining then and worked the railroad,” she said.

Jim sat on the bed at her feet and flipped through a photo album of the old house up in Portage Gerry had given to Rose years ago. Julia looked a lot like Gerry, a tall brow and handsome large nose.

“We never left the house without each other,” Ruth said, “She tucked in close.”

Ruth closed her eyes and put her face in her hands, smiling into the warmth of the sun. Her arthritic fingers kept their rings as prisoners. He sat down at the little desk and leafed through the letters and photos, placing some here and there for Julia. He wouldn't have gone to a brothel, would he? Not in Chicago. There weren't any he knew of. He'd probably end up a statistic if he did. Sure, there were the massage parlors getting busted, but he didn't think of them as brothels, they were just on the line of acceptable heavy petting. The things men must do in towns to make it to the next month, the next year, and down the road to death. If he were a small town boy it would have been unavoidable, like Charles Trask. But he figured himself more like Adam, though he'd never join up with the wars now. Half of his high school friends had been torn apart by roadside bombs.

Ruth would have church and little else. Rose kept the place moving. She lay on the bed and clasped her hands just on her thin torso. She didn't have much of anything save for the house and Rose's things. She'd given all of Gerry's things to charity and Rose, a belt and radio for the grandchildren to remember him by, all of his shaving kit for Jim, and his religious fare for dear Julia. She touched her elbow where Jim had held her up last evening. Rose had done that too, on walks. Maybe where Jim had learned it. Such a comfort to be held. Awkward to think of never being held by her peers ever again, only her adult children. She would give it all she could, but the emptiness would get at her will to move, and stillness would win sometime in late November.