His mother frowned. “Well,” she said finally, “I don’t know. If it’s just an old friend of hers, I don’t see the harm in her getting out of the house for a while. It’s up to Joanne, after all. None of our business.”
“But he’s nor just an old friend!”
“What is he, then?”
There was a silence. Everyone looked at him.
“Frankly,” John said finally, “I don’t see how—”
“No, listen. Please listen!”
“We’re listening, Ben Joe,” said his mother.
“No, you’re not. You never are. Look, I was just worrying if people would talk.”
“What would they talk about?”
He sat down, realized immediately the disadvantage at which this put him when everyone else was standing, and stood up again.
“Joanne,” he said, “don’t you see my point?”
“No,” Joanne said.
“John? You do.”
“I’m sorry, I don’t,” said John.
“You talk, don’t you?” Ben Joe said. He took a step closer to him. “Don’t you?”
John blinked his eyes at him.
“Look,” Ben Joe said. He was facing all of them now, with his arms straight by his sides and his fists clenched. “All I’m trying to do is stop one more of those amazing damned things that go on in this family and everyone takes for granted, pretends things are still all right and the world’s still right-side up. The most amazing things go on in this family, the most amazing things, that no one else would allow, and this family just keeps on—”
“Just what sort of amazing things are you talking about?” his mother asked. She was looking at him straight on and sternly, with her eyes just slits. “This family’s just like any other family, Ben Joe. There’s nothing going on here that—”
“Oh, no?”
“No.”
He slitted his eyes back at her.
“Just to give you a for-instance,” he said, “I don’t know if you all can dredge far enough back in your memories or not, but I can recall a time when Dad and the sheriff were out all one night in their pajamas—”
“That is enough,” his mother said.
“—pajamas, chasing down to Dillon, South Carolina, because Joanne had run off with a total stranger that came here selling clear plastic raincoats one autumn afternoon, run off to get married as soon as he asked her, which as near as we could figure it was three seconds after she had opened the front door to his ringing, and Dad was frantically chasing down every highway to Dillon and finally found them at seven-thirty in the morning waiting to fill out a marriage license. And he brought her back and everyone just said, ‘Well, let her sleep.’ ”
“It’s true!” Gram said. “It’s true. I remember it all!”
“What else could we have done?” his mother asked the clock.
“Which was fine, except didn’t they wonder even what led to it, or why, or try to do something to help her? No, and at supper they all told jokes and passed the biscuits and there was Joanne with a new trick, a piece of plastic that looked just exactly like vomit — she’d bought it at the magic store — and she was retching and then throwing the plastic on the floor, and she squealed, ‘Ooh, wouldn’t my vomit go good on the living room rug!’ and you all laughed and ran with her to the living room and life went on, and on, while—”
Joanne stepped up, and for a minute he thought she was going to hit him, but instead she pushed her coat in his face, choking him with the force of it, leaving him in a forest-green darkness that smelled of wool and spice perfume. He could feel the bones of her hands pressing through the wool to his face, and above the uproar John Horner was shouting, “Stop it, stop it!” but the coat was still being pushed against his face.
“Anybody home?” someone called.
There was a long, deep silence.
The coat fell away from Ben Joe’s face and hung, crumpled, around his shoulders. He blinked his eyes several times. Everyone in the room was looking toward the door, with their faces blank, staring at the tallest man Ben Joe had ever seen. He was bony and freckled with a long, friendly face, and though his overcoat hung on him badly, there was something very easy and graceful about the way he was standing.
“I would have called,” he said cheerfully, “but then if I had, you probably would be gone when I got here. And I would have waited for you to answer the door, but a man can’t wait forever. Can he?” he asked, and grinned at Ben Joe.
People were coming out of their surprise now, opening their mouths to speak, but the stranger had moved rapidly into the center of the room with his hands still in his pockets and he said, “I knew the house. Know it anywhere. Though that glider has got to be new. I didn’t know that. You people are—” he looked around at them, still cheerfully—“Gram, Ben Joe, Mom, uh … Jenny? and a man I don’t know with, of course, Joanne—”
“You go away,” Joanne said softly.
“But I only just got here.”
“I’m telling you, Gary …”
But before the name was out of her mouth, Ben Joe knew. He suddenly recognized the hair, flaming red and pushed carelessly back from his forehead exactly like Carol’s, and the familiar-looking eyes that had stared out of the dim snapshot. He stood gaping at the three of them — Joanne and Gary and John — in a brightly tensed, three-cornered group in the center of the room.
“I’m leaving,” he said.
“Ben Joe!” his mother called.
“I don’t care, I don’t care, I’m leaving!”
And he shoved the coat back in Joanne’s face. It fell to the floor, but she let it stay there and didn’t look his way. Jenny was in his path; he pushed her aside without even knowing it and flew through the hallway and out the door. Then he was outside. He was in the dark wind, with the cold already slapping at his face.
13
Shelley’s face was small and white; her hair was a mass of sausage-shaped curlers, shrouded under a heavy black net. She stood behind her screen door and looked out to where Ben Joe stood on the porch, under the yellow outside light, and to Ben Joe it seemed as if she was suddenly considering every detail of him, weighing him in the back of her faraway mind. With one hand she reached up vaguely to touch her curlers, obeying that part of her that wondered always, no matter what, whether she was fit to be seen. But it was only the most absent-minded gesture. Her eyes were still fixed on him, and she frowned a little and bent forward to see him more clearly.
“It’s me,” Ben Joe said.
“I know.”
She kept watching him. The two of them seemed to be standing between the two ticks of a clock, in a dead silence of time where there was no need to hurry about anything; as long as she stayed silent and watchful they were frozen stock-still between that clock’s ticking. Then she gave up, not finished with whatever it was she was trying to do but just giving up in the middle of it, and, clutching her quilted bathrobe more tightly about her, opened the door for him.
“I’ve been walking for hours,” he said.
She nodded. Nothing seemed to surprise her. When he stepped inside she held up both hands, in a gesture like a doll’s in a toy-shop window, to take the light sweater he was wearing, and he shucked it off and handed it to her.
“I know you weren’t expecting company,” he told her as she turned to hang up his sweater. “You can go on and do whatever you were doing before. I won’t mind.”