“It’s okay, Mama,” she was saying now. “You can go on now. Come on in, Benjy honey. I do apologize for sitting in the dark like this, but my eyes is strained.”
“It’s okay,” Ben Joe said.
He looked at her closely, noticing how tired she looked. It was hard to tell how old she was. Nine years ago, when his father had first met her, she had been about twenty. Now she could be any age. Her face seemed never to have resolved itself but stayed as vague and unformed as when she had been a girl. Her hair was straggly and colorless, and she was never anything but homely, but she had an enormous, bony frame that made people look a second time when they passed her on the street. There was not an ounce of fat on her. When she walked, her bones seemed to swing loosely, and she never hit hard upon the earth or seemed, for all her boniness, to have any sharp corners to her. Yet he could see the strain lines beginning around her eyes and mouth, and the way the skin of her face had grown white and dry.
“You sit yourself,” she was saying now. “Wait a minute …” She looked around among the straight-backed chairs, searching for the most comfortable. When she found it she pushed the bowl of soup into Ben Joe’s hands and ran to pull it up. “If we’d of known,” she said, “I’d of cleaned up house a little. How come they’ve not told us you were back?”
“Well, I only got here yesterday.”
“Sit, now. Oh my, let me take that soup bowl off your hands. What you think of New York?”
“I like it all right.” He sat down on the chair and stretched his feet out in front of him. On the table under the window, among the doilies and flower pots and bronzed baby shoes, sat a photograph of his father. It was taken when he still had his mustache, long before he had ever met Lili Belle, but he looked much the same as he had when he died — rumpled hair, black then with only the first touches of white, and crinkling gray eyes and a broad, easy smile. Except for Gram’s bedroom, where Ben Joe’s mother never set foot, this was probably the only place in the world that still had a picture of Phillip Hawkes. Ben Joe reached out and turned it a little in his direction, looking at it thoughtfully.
“You have to excuse Mama’s being so rude,” Lili Belle was saying. “She has gotten like that more and more. The other day this lodger of ours, he stopped to talk to me on account of wanting to know where the clean towels were kept, and Mama clunked him in the chest with the griddle-cake-flipper. Didn’t hurt him none, but I had a whole heap of explaining to do.”
“Was she right about your having some kind of trouble?” Ben Joe asked.
“I’d say she was. That’s why I was sitting in the dark like a spook. Little Phillip is in the hospital with pneumonia and I was resting my eyes from sitting up with him so much. I don’t know where he got it. Folks tell me I take too good care of him, so it can’t of been that he got too cold. Though he is right much of a puddle-wader, that could’ve done it. I told him and told him. When it was serious and I had reason to be worried I was just possessed by the thought of those puddles. I had it in mind, in this dream I had one night, to take me a vacuum cleaner and go vacuum all the puddles up. But the worrying part is over now. Doctors says another ten days or two weeks and he’ll be out.”
“How long’s he been in?” Ben Joe asked.
“Two weeks.”
“How’re you managing the bills?”
“I plan to make it up gradual. I been working at the mill part time since little Phil started school, but not a full day, because I like to be home when he needs me. Oh, Mama would take care of him — says she’s ashamed he was ever born, but I notice she’s right fond of him. But I’d rather it be me. I’ll work full time till the bill’s paid off and then go back half-days again.”
“We’ve got some money in the savings account,” Ben Joe said.
“No, honey, I don’t want it.”
“But we never even touch it. It’s the money Dad saved up and Mama won’t use it no matter what — says it’s only for emergencies. You’re right, you shouldn’t work when little Phillip’s at home.”
“I wouldn’t take it, Benjy. It bothers me to take what we do take offen you all. Your sister Jenny’s been bringing it real regular.”
“Been what?”
“You know — the once-a-month money. She’s not missed a time.”
“But I thought — Doesn’t she mail it?”
“Why, no.” Lili Belle stopped playing with the folds of her skirt and looked up at him. “Neither one of you’s ever mailed it,” she said. “What she said the first time she came was, she would bring it the same as you’d always done.”
“For Pete’s sake.” Ben Joe sat forward in his chair with his elbows on his knees. “I wonder how she knew.”
“Oh, girls’re smarter than you think.” She laughed, and then became quiet again and looked at her hands. “She’s a real nice little girl,” she said. “First time she came I was just merely polite, you know, figuring that what’s your mama’s is your mama’s and I didn’t want to seem to be trying to make friends of your mama’s own daughter. But she was so friendly — came in and taught little Phil how to play this game about scissors cutting rock and rock covering paper, or something. Real good with children, she is.”
“She is,” Ben Joe said. He sat quietly for a minute, and then he cleared his throat and said, “Lili Belle?”
“Hmm?”
“I’ve got something I want to talk to you about.”
“Well, I’m listening.”
“I thought I should get it said, in case I don’t come back to Sandhill for a good while again. I figured …”
He was silent.
“I’m right here listening,” she said. Her face was gentle and interested; Ben Joe wondered if it would become angry by the time he was through talking. Did Lili Belle ever get angry?
“I’ve got this letter,” he said miserably.
“This …?”
“Letter. Letter.” He touched his pocket, where the rim of the pink envelope showed. “This, um—”
“Oh, yes.”
“Ma’am?”
“Letter.”
“Yes. And I wanted, wanted to show it to you because—”
“Well, I seen it before, Benjy honey.
“I know you have. That’s what I’m trying to—”
“No, I mean I seen it on you before.” She laughed gently, startling him. “Sure. First time you came after your daddy died, I seen it. Little piece of pink in your pocket, just like now. You’d not been to see me for two whole months, and then you came by but never said nothing about the letter. I figured you had found it in your daddy’s office and read it, all about how I was asking him to come back to me and little Phillip. I was afraid you’d come to taunt me with it.”
“Why to taunt you?”
“Account of the spelling, of course.”
“The what?”
“The spelling. I never spelled too good.”
“Oh,” he said. He could think of nothing else to say; he was too surprised. For a moment he sat staring at her blankly and then he had to smile back at her.
“When you never did mention it,” she was saying, “I figured you had just brought it along that one time to show me you had it safe. To show me you had took it from his office after he died so that no one else could see it. That why you brought it, Ben Joe?”
“No, ma’am,” he said.
“No?”
“No, I took that letter before he ever died. What I came to tell you is, I took it before he even saw it.”
He was afraid to look up at her. When he finally did, when she had been silent so long that he had to look, he saw that she didn’t seem shocked or angry but was just absorbing the news still, shaking her head a little and trying to fit all this in with what she already knew.