“Oh. Well, he’s dead. He died about a year ago.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“And of course Auntie Adams is dead. She died.”
“I remember someone telling me.”
“All that’s left now,” said Gram, “is Arabella.”
They both started at a place in Jamie’s blanket. Behind them the door cracked open softly and the nurse poked her head in and said, “About time to be saying our good-bys now.”
“Do you remember,” Jamie said suddenly, “do you remember that funny old L-shaped bench that sat on your front porch?”
“What color was it?”
“Green. Dark green. Forest green, I think they call it. Us kids used to sit all together on it in the summer afternoons and eat fresh peaches out of a baskety box. Remember?”
“Well, no.”
“I do. I do. You-all were having Hulda Ballew as your maid then, and it was she that set the peaches out for us to dice up small with sharp kitchen knives and eat in little bitty bites, the boys to poke a bite on the tip of a knife to some girl they liked and she to bite it off, dainty like, on summer afternoons. You got to remember that.”
“Well, I don’t,” Gram said. “I remember Hulda Ballew, but no green bench comes to mind.”
“You got to remember.”
“Ma’am,” the nurse said.
Something in her voice made Gram know it was time to give up. Her shoulders sagged and she fell silent, but she kept staring at the blanket.
“Say bye to our guests, Mr. Dower.”
“I’m coming,” said Gram. “We’ll come back, Jamie Dower. If you want us.”
“That’ll be right nice, Beth. Funny thing,” he said, looking at her suddenly. “You were such a fat little girl.”
Gram patted his hand on the sheet and then stood up and left the room, so suddenly that she took all of them by surprise.
“Well, good-by,” said Ben Joe.
“Good-by, young man.”
“You take a nice little nap now,” the nurse said. She pulled the venetian blinds shut and then tiptoed out of the room behind Ben Joe, closing the door behind her. “He’s not well at all,” she whispered as they walked down the hall. “I don’t know how he lasted this long, or managed to get here all by himself.”
“Hush,” Ben Joe said. They were approaching Gram, who stood waiting by the elevator. The nurse nodded without surprise and clamped her mouth shut.
When they were out in the car again Ben Joe said, “Put on your coat, Gram, you’ll catch a cold.”
“All right, Ben Joe.”
“You want me to turn the heat on?”
“Oh, no.”
He started the motor but let it idle while he watched her, trying to think whether there was something to say or whether there was even any need for anything to be said. Her face, with its clown’s coating of rouge, told him nothing. When he kept on watching her, she folded her arms across her chest and turned away, so that she was looking out of the window toward the home. Ben Joe let the car roll out into the street again.
“That house,” Gram said, looking back at the home, “wasn’t even here when Jamie Dower was born.”
“I know.”
“It wasn’t even here when we were growing up, did you know that? They hadn’t laid the first brick yet. They hadn’t even dug the foundation yet. There were only trees here, trees and brambly bushes with those little seedy blackberries on them that aren’t fit for pies, even—”
“I know. I know.”
She grew silent. He didn’t know what her face looked like now. And he didn’t try to find out, either. He just looked straight ahead at the road they drove on, and kept quiet.
12
On the wall behind the silverware drawer in the kitchen was a combination blackboard and bulletin board, frayed at the edges now from so many years of use. Ben Joe stood leaning against the refrigerator with a tomato in his hand and studied the board very carefully, narrowing his eyes. First the blackboard part. Jenny’s great swooping handwriting took up half the board: Eggs
Lavoris
Contact lense fluid
Who in this family wore contact lenses? He frowned and shook his head; he felt like a stranger. Under Jenny’s list his grandmother had written, in straight little angry letters: Chewing gum
And then came Tessie’s writing, round and grade-schoolish, filling up the rest of the board right down to the bottom: What shall we do about it? I will think of somthing. What I want to know is, how do you think?
He switched the tomato to his left hand and picked up the piece of chalk that hung by a string from the board. With his mouth clamped tight from concentrating, he bent forward, inserted an “e” in “somthing,” and then stepped back to look at it. After a minute he underlined the “e” twice and then dropped the chalk and reread the whole message. Something about it still confused him.
His eyes moved over to the bulletin-board part. In the old days it had been crowded with the children’s drawings, ranging from kindergarten-level pictures of houses with smoking chimneys up to the tiny complicated landscapes Ben Joe had done in upper grade school. Now only one of them was left — a drawing done by Jenny, when she was six, of a circle superimposed on a furry cylinder, which she had said was the Lone Ranger and Silver seen from above. Other than that, there were only two yellowed scraps of paper. The first was one of the few reminders of his father that had been allowed to remain; it was a note written by Susannah, back when her writing was as uncertain as Tessie’s, saying: Mama, the last five times that Gram has gone to a church supper and you’ve gone to a Legal Women Voters’ supper both at the same time Daddy has fed us as follows: (1) popcorn (2) grilled cheese sandwiches (3) fudge (4) popcorn (5) ice cream, please talk to him.
Ben Joe frowned again, considered changing the comma to a semicolon, but eventually let it go for some reason and turned to the next piece of paper. This was his own, in crooked, preschool capitals, and he could not remember when or for what reason he had written it. It said: Song By
Benjamin Josiah HawkesWhat shall we do with the trunk-ed sailor
Is a matter worth disgusting.
Everybody’s pinto is agoing to heaven
Heaven, in the morning.
It had a tune, his mother had told him, something like the scissors-mender’s chant, all on one note, except that the last word in each line was several notes lower. They said he used to sing it at the beach, but he had no memory of it now.
He looked down at his tomato. There was a bite in it, although he hadn’t noticed he had taken one. He considered storming into the den and accusing Tessie of spit-backing, which was a habit she had developed after biting into chocolates that turned out to be caramel-filled; but on second thought he decided he might have taken a bite after all. There was no telling. He had been confused and absent-minded all day; he attributed it to the visit at the home for the aged, but just knowing the reason didn’t help him any. All he could think of that might help was to isolate himself in the kitchen for a while after supper and stare at the bulletin board, where years arranged themselves one on top of the other in layers before his eyes. Sometimes that helped. Sometimes it didn’t, too. He sighed, took another bite from his tomato, and began rereading the blackboard.Eggs
Lavoris …
“What are you doing here?” Jenny asked.
“Why?”
“I thought you were just going out to get a snack. You missed the last half of the program.”
“Oh. Okay.”
He moved aside to let her get into the refrigerator.