And words are easy things to say. But there are other things than words that are not easy to twist from lie to truth…the way her lips felt beneath my lips, the tenderness of fingertips that slide along the cheek.
He snubbed out the cigarette and rose and walked over to the trunk. The lock was rusty and the key turned hard, but he finally got it open and lifted up the lid.
The trunk was half full of papers very neatly piled. Sutton, looking at them, chuckled. Buster always was a methodical soul. But, then, all robots were methodical. It was the nature of them. Methodical and, what was it Herkimer had said? Stubborn, that was it. Methodical and stubborn.
He squatted on the floor beside the trunk and rummaged through the contents. Old letters tied neatly in bundles. An old notebook from his college days. A sheaf of clipped-together documents that undoubtedly were outdated. A scrapbook littered with clippings that had not been pasted up. An album half filled with a cheap stamp collection.
He squatted back on his heels and turned the pages of the album lovingly, childhood coming back again. Cheap stamps because he had had no money to buy the better ones. Gaudy ones because they had appealed to him. Most of them in poor condition, but there had been a time when they had seemed wonderful.
The stamp craze, he remembered, had lasted two years…three years at the most. He had pored over catalogues, had traded, had bought cheap packets, picked up the strange lingo of the hobby…perforate, imperforate, shades, watermarks, intaglio.
He smiled softly at the happiness of memory. There had been stamps he'd wanted but could never have, and he had studied the illustrations of them until he knew each of them by heart. He lifted his head and stared at the wall and tried to remember what some of them were like, but there was no recollection. The once all-important thing had been buried by more than fifty years of other all-important matters.
He laid the album to one side, went at the trunk again.
More notebooks and letters. Loose clippings. A curious-looking wrench. A well-chewed bone that at one time probably had been the property and the solace of some well-loved but now forgotten family dog.
Junk, said Sutton. Buster could have saved a lot of time by simply burning it.