The empty house taunted her, go ahead and open Norman’s red box. He’s been dead eleven months, it’s time you opened it up and found out what was inside. What do you have to lose? There’s probably nothing in there that isn’t a truth you’ve already realized. And what are you afraid of, Agnes, just what are you afraid of?
Uncle Collin had been right, probably all along. She should never have married Norman. They made a disaster of their marriage, she could feel that in her achy bones. Why did life hurt so much? She was only thirty-four years old, but she felt like an old woman – as old as Gracie Honeywalker, like she’d been a plantation slave in Kentucky and lived eighty years to run her own farm and boss around her grandsons.
But she had no grandsons, no farm, and wouldn’t be eighty for foryt-six years. If God let her live that long, which at this right she didn’t care to do anyway. Norman had had an affair, she barely knew him, and they’d agree to divorce when he came back from the war. But he came back in a box, so at least he’d saved her that trouble. She’d never opened that box – couldn’t bear to see him in a coffin. So Agnes guessed, she owed that much to him now, to open his red box.
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