With horrified suspicion, Milt said, “What do you mean?”
“I mean we fulfilled our childhood attachment for each other. At the time it wasn’t possible since she was in her twenties and I was only eleven.”
“What sort of attachment?” They had by now entered the store. The posture that Milt had taken caused Susan to look up from her work. Milt said to her, “Is it true you were his fifth grade teacher?”
“Oh yes,” Susan said. She glanced at Bruce, and they exchanged an irresponsible amusement. Without hesitation she took up where he had left off; she saw the whole situation. “He was my favorite pupil. I don’t mean because he was bright. I mean because he was so mature, and by that I mean he was so sexually attractive.”
Milt could say nothing.
“I still have a picture of him when he was eleven,” Susan said, in her calm, reasonable voice. “When it was possible, I had him sit up at my desk with me while I taught the class. But even so we had to wait. We saw each other secretly over the years. He used to visit me at my house when he was in high school. That was almost old enough; we came very close to consummating it then. But we still had to wait just a little longer. Do you want to see the picture?”
“No,” Milt muttered.
“It was worth waiting,” Susan said. “The longer you hold off the better it is. Isn’t that right, Bruce?” she said.
Milt’s discomfort had become so obvious that they stopped. But Milt remained gloomy and taciturn, hanging around the rest of the afternoon, unable to leave but not able to converse any more with them. Finally he said good-bye and went out to his parked Swedish car. Waving, but not looking in their direction, he started up and drove off.
“We shouldn’t have teased him,” Bruce said. But it had been fun. They had enjoyed doing it, and now they smiled at each other. If we had a chance, he realized, we would do it again.
Later on in the month he got wind of something from a salesman who had driven up from Colorado. In Denver a typewriter shop was up for sale, a small place the owner of which had been killed in an auto accident. The man’s relatives had no taste for the business and they hadn’t set much of a price on it. According to the salesman, there were several good franchises that came along with it, plus a modern front and fixtures, and not too moldy an inventory. And Denver was expanding every day.
If the place was any kind of buy it might get snapped up by someone else, he realized. So now he did not drive; he took a plane. A relative of the deceased owner met him at the Denver airport and they drove to the store together. It had a neon sign, and the rather new cash register alone was worth four hundred dollars. Most of the inventory was made up of expensive office model machines, but he did not doubt that he could trade them back to the manufacturers for lower priced models. He liked the location; of course he did not know Denver, but the business district seemed active, and he saw plenty of traffic. And the other stores, especially those on the same side of the street, seemed quite modern and well-tended.
He flew back to Boise, picked up his car and drove to Montario, and discussed the Denver store with Susan. With him he had brought back pictures of it; he showed them to her and she agreed that it looked good. And they did need something else. The Montario store was not enough.
“Should I sell my house in Boise?” she asked. They had rented it out, thinking that they might someday decide to go back there.
“Sell it,” he said. “We’ll sell everything here. It’s too far to transport anything from here to Denver. Anyhow, the place has better fixtures than we have here.”
“Won’t we take a loss if we sell out here?”
“We didn’t take a loss when we sold the R & J Mimeographing Service,” he said.
She nodded. “Do you want to make an offer on the Denver place, then? I haven’t seen it, but if you think it’s what we want, and you think we can get rid of our place here—” She smiled at him. “I’ll leave it up to you.”
“I’ll make them an offer,” he said. “We’ll see what comes of it.”
Through their attorney Fancourt they offered the Denver people twelve thousand dollars for the inventory, fixtures, franchises, lease, and location. After weeks of quibbling, the Denver people accepted their offer.
Toward the end of the year they completed arrangements to sell the Montario Typewriter Center and take over the Denver place. The whole thing dragged on, since the Denver store—called the Colorado Office Equipment Company—comprised part of an estate divided between a number of heirs. But finally everything had been untangled. He and Susan made a final trip back to Montario, and then they took up the proprietorship in Denver. And that was that.
Business, in Denver, worked out well and they could see that if they kept at it long enough they would have what they wanted. By degrees Susan retired from the store and he took it over on his own. He bought what he felt he could sell, and the store’s policies were his; she did not complain about his handling and each of them was able to take a relaxed position with the other when they were home together at night. They bought a house in Denver; Taffy entered the Denver public school system; they came to realize that they had done the right thing and that probably there would be no basic changes from now on. They would continue in the retail typewriter business in Denver, and they would live in terms of each other as they were doing as long as nothing happened to either of them, or, for that matter, to the country and the society around them. If the world in which they were living managed to maintain itself, they could probably maintain their store and house and family. Their doubts, over the months, diminished and were gone. At no particular time the last anxiety left them. They were not even conscious of it; it occurred naturally, in the course of the regular working day.
The following summer Bruce heard from a roundabout source that Milt Lumky had died.
He still had Cathy Hermes’ address in Pocatello, so he and Susan wrote her. A week or so passed and then they got a letter from her, giving them some of the details about his death.
According to Cathy he had died of his Bright’s disease. She thought that it could have been avoided if he had taken care of himself. In the letter Bruce read an oblique bitterness directed toward him, but probably directed toward everyone else as well, everything that had to do with Milt, including Milt himself. Several times in the letter she upbraided Milt and herself in retrospect. Milt should have given up traveling around his territory, first of all. He should have taken a desk job somewhere, so he could go to the bathroom when he needed to, and rest when he needed to. Her fixation on those points showed up again and again in her letter. The best thing would have been if she could have gotten a divorce and then Milt and she could have married and settled down in Pocatello. After Bruce and Susan had gotten married, she said, Milt had talked about it, but at last he had stopped talking about it. And it had never come up again.
Other than that the letter was filled with formal phrases. She seemed matter-of-fact about his death.
A day or so later their telephone at home rang, and when Susan answered it he heard her say, “Maybe you better talk to Bruce.”
“Who is it?” he said, getting up from his chair.
With an odd expression on her face, Susan said, “It’s Cathy Hermes, calling long-distance from Pocatello.” As he started into the hall toward the phone she said, “It’s something about money.”
“What money?” he said.
“You better talk to her,” she said.
He picked up the receiver and said hello. “This is Mrs. Hermes,” a woman’s voice said in his ear. “I wanted to ask you something, Mr. Stevens.” After beating around the bush, Cathy at last said that Milt, before his death, had told her about different people who owed him money, and that he had mentioned several times that Bruce owed him five hundred dollars.