Such was the significance of that kiss.
Francis and Annie married a month and a half later.
Katrina, I will love you forever.
However, something has come up.
o o o
“The turkey,” Annie said. “You’ll stay while I cook it.”
“No, that’d take one long time. You just have it when you want to. Sunday, whenever.”
“It wouldn’t take too long to cook. A few hours is all. Are you going to run off so soon after being away so long?”
“I ain’t runnin’ off.”
“Good. Then let me get it into the oven right now. When Peg comes home we can peel potatoes and onions and Danny can go get some cranberries. A turkey. Imagine that. Rushing the season.”
“Who’s Danny?”
“You don’t know Danny. Naturally, you don’t. He’s Peg’s boy. She married George Quinn. You know George, of course, and they have the boy. He’s ten.”
“Ten.”
“In fourth grade and smart as a cracker.”
“Gerald, he’d be twenty-two now.”
“Yes, he would.”
“I saw his grave.”
“You did? When?”
“Yesterday. Got a day job up there and tracked him down and talked there awhile.”
“Talked?”
“Talked to Gerald. Told him how it was. Told him a bunch of stuff.”
“I’ll bet he was glad to hear from you.”
“May be. Where’s Bill?”
“Bill? Oh, you mean Billy. We call him Billy. He’s taking a nap. He got himself in trouble with the politicians and he’s feeling pretty low. The kidnapping. Patsy McCall’s nephew was kidnapped. Bindy McCall’s son. You must’ve read about it.”
“Yeah, I did, and Martin Daugherty run it down for me too, awhile back.”
“Martin wrote about Billy in the paper this morning.”
“I seen that too. Nice write-up. Martin says his father’s still alive.”
“Edward. He is indeed, living down on Main Street. He lost his memory, poor man, but he’s healthy. We see him walking with Martin from time to time. I’ll go wake Billy and tell him you’re here.”
“No, not yet. Talk a bit.”
“Talk. Yes, all right. Let’s go in the living room.”
“Not me, not in these clothes. I just come off workin’ on a junk wagon. I’d dirty up the joint somethin’ fierce.”
“That doesn’t matter at all. Not at all.”
“Right here’s fine. Look out the window at the yard there. Nice yard. And a collie dog you got.”
“It is nice. Danny cuts the grass and the dog buries his bones all over it. There’s a cat next door he chases up and down the fence.”
“The family changed a whole lot. I knew it would. How’s your brother and sisters?”
“They’re fine, I guess. Johnny never changes. He’s a committeeman now for the Democrats. Josie got very fat and lost a lot of her hair. She wears a switch. And Minnie was married two years and her husband died. She’s very lonely and lives in a rented room. But we all see one another.”
“Billy’s doin’ good.”
“He’s a gambler and not a very good one. He’s always broke.”
“He was good to me when I first seen him. He had money then. Bailed me outa jail, wanted to buy me a new suit of clothes. Then he give me a hefty wad of cash and acourse I blew it all. He’s tough too, Billy. I liked him a whole lot. He told me you never said nothin’ to him and Peg about me losin’ hold of Gerald.”
“No, not until the other day.”
“You’re some original kind of woman, Annie. Some original kind of woman.”
“Nothing to be gained talking about it. It was over and done with. Wasn’t your fault any more than it was my fault. Wasn’t anybody’s fault.”
“No way I can thank you for that. That’s something thanks don’t even touch. That’s something I don’t even know-”
She waved him silent.
“Never mind that,” she said. “It’s over. Come, sit, tell me what finally made you come see us.”
He sat down on the backless bench in the breakfast nook and looked out the window, out past the geranium plant with two blossoms, out at the collie dog and the apple tree that grew in this yard but offered shade and blossoms and fruit to two other yards adjoining, out at the flower beds and the trim grass and the white wire fence that enclosed it all. So nice. He felt a great compulsion to confess all his transgressions in order to be equal to this niceness he had missed out on; and yet he felt a great torpor in his tongue, akin to what he had felt in his legs when he walked on the glue of the sidewalks. His brain, his body seemed to be in a drugged sleep that allowed perception without action. There was no way he could reveal all that had brought him here. It would have meant the recapitulation not only of all his sins but of all his fugitive and fallen dreams, all his random movement across the country and back, all his returns to this city only to leave again without ever coming to see her, them, without ever knowing why he didn’t. It would have meant the anatomizing of his compulsive violence and his fear of justice, of his time with Helen, his present defection from Helen, his screwing so many women he really wanted nothing to do with, his drunken ways, his morning-after sicknesses, his sleeping in the weeds, his bumming money from strangers not because there was a depression but first to help Helen and then because it was easy: easier than working. Everything was easier than coming home, even reducing yourself to the level of social maggot, streetside slug.
But then he came home.
He is home now, isn’t he?
And if he is, the question on the table is: Why is he?
“You might say it was Billy,” Francis said. “But that don’t really get it. Might as well ask the summer birds why they go all the way south and then come back north to the same old place.”
“Something must’ve caught you.”
“I say it was Billy gettin’ me outa jail, goin’ my bail, then invitin’ me home when I thought I’d never get invited after what I did, and then findin’ what you did, or didn’t do is more like it, and not ever seem’ Peg growin’ up, and wantin’ some of that. I says to Billy I want to come home when I can do something’ for the folks, but he says just come home and see them and never mind the turkey, you can do that for them. And here I am. And the turkey too.”
“But something changed in you,” Annie said. “It was the woman, wasn’t it? Billy meeting her?”
“The woman.”
“Billy told me you had another wife. Helen, he said.”
“Not a wife. Never a wife. I only had one wife.”
Annie, her arms folded on the breakfast table across from him, almost smiled, which he took to be a sardonic response. But then she said: “And I only had one husband. I only had one man.”