Ben Joe nodded, with his mouth open. Gary laid his fork down and rocked back easily on the kitchen chair.
“So we got married and all, and of course Carol came along. You get to see that first picture we took of her?”
“It’s somewhere around the house right now,” Ben Joe said.
“Well, I’m glad. It’s a real good picture, I think. I was hoping you all thought so too. I always wondered why your mama didn’t come when Carol was born, or one of your sisters maybe. Almost a custom, you might say. But no one came.”
“Well, anyway, we were glad to hear about it,” Ben Joe said.
“That so?” Gary looked happy.
“Um …” said Ben Joe. He bent forward to lean his elbows on the table. There was a long string of questions he wanted to ask, like why was Joanne here now and why was Gary himself here, but he would hate to see that happy face of Gary’s get a closed, offended look. In the tiny silence he heard the front door open and a pair of high heels walk in, with little, soft baby steps beside them. He looked up at Gary to see if he had heard too, but Gary was musing along on some path of his own. The high heels climbed the stairs, and Ben Joe in his mind followed their journey to Joanne’s bedroom.
“I’d like to have a lot more children,” Gary said unexpectedly. “Dozens. I like kids. Joanne takes too good care of just the one. She needs a whole group of them. She’s always saying how Carol’s got to be secure-feeling, got to have no wonders about being loved or not. But this way she just makes Carol nervous — follows her around reading psychology books. Wants to know what her nightmares are about. I say let her alone — kids grow up all right. But that’s just like Joanne. She got in this Little Theater play once back in Kansas and had a whole bunch of lines to learn and got all worried about it. So did she just take a deep breath and start learning them? No sir. The night before the play opened I asked her did she know her lines and she said no not yet but she had got almost all the way through this book called How to Develop a Super-Power Memory. If that isn’t just like her …”
He smiled into his plate and then clasped both hands behind his neck and stared at the ceiling.
“She was like that about me once,” he said. “Followed me around reading books about marriage. But when Carol came along she got sidetracked, sort of. It happens. So if she was too busy with Carol I’d just go bowling with the boys or watch TV maybe. And Joanne’d start feeling bad — say it was her fault and she was making the house cold for me. First time she said that was in a heat wave. You couldn’t hardly see for the little squiggly lines of heat in the air. ‘Cold?’ I says. ‘Cold? Honey, you make this house cold and I’ll love you forever for it,’ but Joanne, she didn’t think it was funny. Carol was crawling across the table in rubber pants and Joanne picked her up and spanked her for no reason and then started crying and saying history was repeating itself. Huh. You believe in history repeating itself, Ben Joe?”
“Well, not exactly,” Ben Joe said.
“No, I mean it, now. Do you?”
“No,” said Ben Joe. “I can’t believe history’s going anywhere at all, much less repeating itself.”
Gary lit a slightly bent Chesterfield that he had pulled from his shirt pocket. He was enjoying himself now — as wrapped up in his story as if he were watching it unfold right there on the kitchen ceiling, he never even looked at Ben Joe.
“Course she meant you-all’s history,” he said, “which is so confusing I never have got it straight and don’t intend to. Hardly worth it at this late date. But whatever it was, it’s got no bearing on us and Joanne’s house wasn’t a cold one, no. But Joanne, she gets i-deas. And up and left one day. Well, I don’t know why. But here I am, come to get her. I always say,” he said, looking suddenly at Ben Joe, “no sense acting like you don’t miss a person if you do. Never get ’em back pretending you wouldn’t have them if they crawled.”
“I hope you do,” Ben Joe said suddenly. “Get her back, I mean.”
“Thank you, sir. Thank you. It’s a right nice house you have here. You born in this house?”
“Yes.”
“I figured so. I always have wanted to come visit you all. Joanne, she sometimes talks about this place when she’s rested and just sort of letting her mind drift. Tells about all the things that go on here just in one day. It’s right fascinating to listen to. Tells about your daddy, and how his one aim in life was to go to Nashville, Tennessee, and watch real country-music singers, the way some people want to go to Paris, only he never did get there—”
“I’d forgotten that,” Ben Joe said.
“Oh, Joanne didn’t. She was full of things. I know about the time when your mamma and daddy were just married, and he bet her that she’d drop out first on a fifteen-mile hike to, to …
“Burniston,” said Ben Joe.
“Burniston, that’s it. Only neither one of them dropped out, they both made it, but what really got your daddy peeved was that the whole town of Sandhill followed them for curiosity’s sake, and none of them dropped out, either … O, ho …” He threw his head back, with his mouth wide and smiling for pure joy, so that Ben Joe had to smile back at him. “And how you are the only boy in Sandhill that they made a special town law for, forbidding you to whistle in the residential sections because it was so awful-sounding. And Susannah’s cracker sandwiches, made with two pieces of bread and then a cracker in between—”
“Joanne told you all that?”
“She did.”
Ben Joe was quiet for a minute. For the first time he actually pictured Joanne married, telling a person what she had noticed in a lifetime and giving someone bits of her mind that none of them had even known she had. What bits, he wondered, would he give Shelley (if there were any to give)? And how did one go about it? Would he just lie back and say what came into his mind the minute it came, removing that filter that was always there and that strained the useless thoughts and the secret thoughts from being made known? But how could that be any gift to her? He frowned, and marked the tablecloth over and over with his thumbnail.
“I’ll do the dishes,” Gary said.
There were some things Ben Joe didn’t want to tell; he didn’t care if she was his wife. He wouldn’t want to tell all about his family, for instance, the way Joanne had done. Or about the little aimless curled-in-on-themselves things he was always wondering, like if you were an ant, how big would the rust on a frying pan look and could you actually see the molecules going around; and why was it that a sunlit train going through a tunnel did not retain the sunlight for a minute, the way the world did just at twilight, so that it was a little trainful of sunshine speeding through the dark like a lit up aquarium — useless things that a child might think and that Ben Joe had never seemed to grow out of. What would Shelley say to him if she knew all that?