“Ben Joe …”
“What,” he said. Every time she interrupted him he had to go back to the very top of the blackboard and begin reading all over again.
“Never mind,” she said.
“Well, go on, now that you’ve interrupted me.”
“I just wanted to know where the ice water is. I’m getting some for Gram. What’s the matter with you tonight?”
“I don’t know. I went with Gram to the old folks’ home.” He jammed his hands into his pockets and with the toe of his sneaker he began tracing patterns in the linoleum. There was no sense in going back to reading the blackboard until Jenny was out of the room again.
She had found the ice water. She poured it into an orange-juice glass and put the jar back in the refrigerator.
“Hey, I wonder …” she said suddenly.
But Ben Joe, off on another track now, interrupted her. “Who in this family wears contact lenses?” he asked.
“Contact — Oh, you’re talking about the list. Susannah does.”
“How come I didn’t know?”
“You weren’t here,” Jenny said.
“Oh.”
“She got them with her first pay check from the library, after she switched jobs.”
“I never heard about it.”
“You weren’t here, I said.” She picked up the glass of water and started out again. At the door she stopped. “What I was just wondering,” she said, “was it this morning you went to the home? With Gram?”
“Yes.”
“Well, why don’t you come out into the living room? Gram just heard an old friend of hers died. She says she only saw him this morning, so that must be who it is. That Mr. Dower.”
“He’s dead?”
“That’s what she said.”
“But he can’t be. We only saw him this morning.”
“Doesn’t stop him from being dead, does it? Why do people always—”
“Ah, no,” said Ben Joe. He shook his head gently and turned his back to the bulletin board. (What good would it do him now?) There was no reason for him to feel so sad, but he did, anyway, and he just kept staring at a corner of the kitchen cabinet while Jenny watched him curiously.
“Why don’t you come talk to Gram?” she asked him.
“Well …”
“Come on.”
She backed against the door to open it and let Ben Joe pass through ahead of her. “All I ever know to do is get people water,” she said, “I know when I’m sad I don’t want water, and I don’t guess others do, either, but it’s all I know to do.”
“Well, I’m sure she’d like it,” Ben Joe said.
“Maybe so.”
In the living room he found his grandmother upright on the couch, sitting very stiffly with her hands in her lap and her eyes dry. Around her was clustered most of the family, some sitting next to her and some on chairs around the room.
“Only this morning,” she was saying. “Only this morning.” She caught sight of Ben Joe and called out, “Wasn’t it, Ben Joe? Wasn’t it only this morning?”
“Yes,” said Ben Joe.
“There. Ben Joe can tell you.” She turned to nod at the others and then, realizing that Ben Joe hadn’t yet heard the whole story, she looked his way again. “I called the home,” she said. “I wanted to tell him about something I’d forgotten. This evening I was just hunting under the bed for Carol’s hair brush and suddenly it came to me, so clear: Jamie’s mustache cup.”
“His what?” Ben Joe asked.
“Mustache cup. Mustache cup. You know, Jamie Dower was the only man I ever knew who really did use a mustache cup. That was something wonderful, when I was twelve. He got it just the last year he was home, on account of this lovely mustache he was growing. He was kind of a dandy, Jamie Dower. Always was. But it was a beautiful mustache, I have to say. Ben Joe knows. You tell them, Ben Joe.”
“Well …” Ben Joe said. The picture of Jamie’s face was before him, small and white and clean-shaven.
“Ben Joe knows,” Gram said to the rest of them. She smiled down at her hands. “I know it’s a small thing, but I suddenly thought of that mustache cup, white with pink rosebuds, it was, and I just had to tell him about it. So I called the home, and after a right long spell of hemming and hawing they told me. They said he had passed on just an hour ago. I didn’t let on how it hit me. I just said I hoped he’d had a peaceful passing, and hung up.” Her mouth shook for a minute, and the first tear slid down the dry paper of her cheek. “But it was only this morning …” she said.
A glass of water was poked suddenly under her chin. Gram drew back and blinked at it through her tears. Her eyes traveled slowly from the glass itself to the poker-stiff arm that held it and above that to Jenny’s face, sober and embarrassed.
“Why, thank you,” she said. She took the glass, looked at it a minute, and then smiled at Jenny and drank until the glass was empty. “There is nothing like clear water,” she told Jenny formally.
Ben Joe looked around at the rest of the family. His mother was in the easy chair, looking worried; Tessie was on the arm of the chair, and the twins and Susannah were sitting around their grandmother on the couch. All of them were unusually quiet. When the silence had gone unbroken for at least a full minute, his mother cleared her throat and said, “We’ll have to send a nice wreath of flowers, Gram.”
“He wouldn’t like it,” Gram said. “Used to get angry when I brought him my dessert.”
“Your — Well, anyway. It’d be a nice gesture to send a small wreath, just to show—”
“I will not send him flowers!” Gram said.
Ellen Hawkes was quiet a moment, figuring this out. Finally she said, “Well, some people prefer the money to go to a worthy cause instead. Maybe to the missionary league of his church, if he has one—”
“I tell you, no, Ellen. He never could accept a gift graciously. My mother said accepting gifts graciously is the true test of a gentleman, but I don’t go along with that. Jamie Dower was a gentleman all the way through. He just didn’t like gifts, is all.”
“But that was some seventy years ago, Gram—”
“No point discussing it,” said Ben Joe. “We don’t send flowers.”
Gram began crying again. The girls fluttered and crowded in around her and Jenny backed toward the door, in case she had to get more ice water. Ellen Hawkes clicked her tongue.
“What’s going on?” Joanne said.
She was standing in the doorway dressed to go out and carrying a coat over her arm. Everyone looked up except Gram, who had just been handed Ben Joe’s handkerchief and was now blowing her nose in it.
“Gram’s lost an old friend,” Susannah said.
“Oh, no.” She came quickly over to the couch and knelt down in front of her grandmother. “Who was it?”
“Jamie Dower,” said Gram, “and I can’t send him flowers.”
“Well, of course you can. What’s the matter with this family? Mom, since when have we got so poor we can’t send—”
“My God,” her mother said. She stood up and left the room, not sharply but with a slow kind of weariness.
“It’s not the money,” Ben Joe said. “It’s that Jamie never could accept a gift graciously.”
“Oh, I see.” She nodded and began gently stroking Gram’s shoulder.
“If you see,” her mother said from the doorway, “will you please explain it to me?”
“Well, it makes sense.”
“Not to me it doesn’t. Does it to you, Ben Joe?”
“Well, yes,” said Ben Joe.
His mother vanished into the hallway.
“What doesn’t make sense,” Ben Joe said, “is why it makes you unhappy not sending him flowers. If you know he’d be happier not getting them.”