“Okay.”
Outside it was beginning to get cold. There was a little chill around his neck where his collar was open, but he just walked more quickly to make up for it. With his hands in his pockets and his lips pursed in a silent whistle he headed east, down past rows of medium-sized, medium-aged houses that jangled faintly with the TV or radio noises locked inside them. Occasionally he caught glimpses of families moving around behind lace curtains, but no one was out on the sidewalk. A dog rushed past, trailing a leash; nobody attempted to follow him. And at one house an old woman in a man’s overcoat rocked on a cold porch glider.
“Hey,” she said.
“Hey,” said Ben Joe.
“No moon out tonight.”
“No.”
He turned up Evers and walked more slowly. None of the walk took any thinking. When he was in high school it had become second nature, like going downstairs in the morning for breakfast and then realizing, once he was down there, that the actual descent had been an utter blank in his memory. The first few times he had come here actually shaking, with his hair slicked down and his face thin from the tension of keeping his teeth from chattering. He would have gone to the bathroom six or seven times in the half-hour before, just from nervousness. But gradually it became just an ordinary thing, this walk. Even when there was no definite date planned he would go, just to sit in the living room with Shelley and talk to her. She wasn’t very quick-witted and she didn’t entertain him with fast talk and bubbles of laughter the way his sisters entertained their dates, but she did listen. No matter what he talked about she would listen, smiling happily at him all the time, and when he was done she would just hug him or tell him how much she liked the way the barber had cut his hair this week, but he knew she had heard what he had to say, anyway. He smiled into the darkness, thinking about that, and cut through a vacant lot to Holland Street and the Domer house.
The lights were turned on inside. The place was the same as always — big and worn and comfortable, with years of dead leaves piled around it. He would have thought Mr. Domer had raked those up by now; Mr. Domer was a small and tidy man. When Ben Joe crossed the front lawn the leaves roared around his ankles. He climbed the long steps to the front door. Years ago, in the summertime, they would stop at this top step when they came in from a date. They would look up to the open window upstairs and there would be the little triangular-faced, white-nightgowned blur of Shelley’s sister Phoebe peering down at them. She must have been about seven, that first year. She had thought, from seeing the cartons in the Saturday Evening Post, that all boys kissed their dates on the girls’ doorsteps, and every night she had lain in wait in her bedroom, watching hopefully. How old would she be now? Sixteen or seventeen, he supposed. And gone from that window. There was only the closed glass pane now, and the still white organdy curtains behind it.
He knocked twice. A figure came toward him and peered out the window glass in the door, still only a silhouette behind a mesh curtain. Then she opened the door and let him step in. She seemed stunned for a minute; her mouth was slightly open.
“Ben Joe!” she said. “Is that you?”
“Sure it is. Have I gone and changed all that much?”
“No. No, only it’s been such a long … Well, hey, anyway.”
“Hey.”
Shelley stood awkwardly in front of him, beginning to look happy and a little scared. She never had known what to do about greeting people. If she had been one of the girls he had dated after her, she would have come tripping up and shrieked, “For goodness’ sake!” and kissed him loudly on the mouth even if she didn’t remember his name. But not Shelley. Shelley stood straight before him, with her hands pleating little bunches of her skirt at the sides, and smiled at him.
“Mom said she saw you sweeping the front porch,” he said. “I’m home for a little vacation. I thought I’d stop by and see how you were getting on.”
“Oh, well, I’m fine. Just seems funny to see you, I think …”
She moved over almost soundlessly to shut the door behind him, and he turned to watch her. There were little changes in her; he could see that even under the dim light in the hallway. Her hair, which used to hang almost to her shoulders in such straight blond ribbons that it had made him think of corn syrup, was bunched scratchily behind her head now and held there by a few pins, much like Gram’s bun. Her face was prettier and more clearly defined, but she still gave the impression of a waifish kind of thinness that made her seem more like fifteen than twenty-five. Partly it was because she was pale and without make-up, and her eyes were such a light blue; partly it was because she was wearing old clothes that must have been her mother’s and were far too big for her. The skirt was a dingy pink, accordion-pleated and very long; the sweater was an old bulky maroon one that somehow made her shoulder blades stick out more in back than her breasts did in front. But she still moved the same way — almost frightenedly and without a sound, and always in slow motion. Now she slowly opened her hands at her sides, as if she were consciously telling herself to relax, and looked down at her clothes.
“Now, Ben Joe,” she said, “I have to go put another dress on. I didn’t know I was about to have company. You wait in the living room, hear? I’ll be right—”
“But I’m just going to stay a minute,” Ben Joe said. “I only came to say hello.”
“Well, you just wait.”
She turned and darted up the curving stairs, and Ben Joe had to go into the living room alone. He chose a seat at the end of the sofa, nearest the unlit fireplace. The room seemed to him like the huge front room of a long-unused summer house; all the things that were not particularly liked and yet still too good to discard had been left here by the Domers when they moved South. Wicker armchairs and threadbare sofas sat on an absolutely bare wooden floor, and the few decorative items scattered around were worthless — a china spaniel with three puppies chained to her collar by tiny gold chains; a huge framed photograph of a long-ago baseball team; a rosebudded cracked china slipper with earth in it but no plant. Ben Joe shivered. This had been a cheerful room once, back when he was in high school.
He heard Shelley’s shoes on the stairs and a minute later she was in the living room, crossing in front of him with a company smile and a white skirt and sweater that fit better than the old ones. She had combed her hair, although he was sorry to see that it was still in a bun, and there was a little lipstick on her mouth.
“I’m going to get you some coffee,” she said.
“No, I don’t want any.”
“It’s already made, Ben Joe. You wait here and I’ll—”
“No, please. I don’t want any.”
“Well, all right.”
She sat down on the edge of a wicker armchair with her hands on her knees.
“Where’s Phoebe?” Ben Joe asked.
“Phoebe.”
“Phoebe your sister.”
“Oh,” she said. All the breath seemed to have left her; she gasped a little and said, “Phoebe and Mama and Daddy, all of them, they’re dead, you mustn’t have heard, it only happened a while—”
“Oh, no, I never—”
“They had a wreck.”
“I’m sorry,” Ben Joe said. He thought of the small white blur in the upstairs window, still almost realer than Shelley herself. He watched Shelley’s fingers twisting a pearl button on her sweater. “Nobody told me,” he said helplessly.
“I only been back a while now. Not many people know about it.”
“Was … How old was Phoebe?”
“Seventeen.”
“Oh.” He fell silent again, and tugged gently at one of the little cotton balls on the sofa upholstery.