“All right, give me the number.” After a moment her mom said, “Carmen, where are you? What’re you doing?”
She was looking across the kitchen, through the open doorway to the hall. She said, “Just a second, Mom,” raised her voice and called out, “Wayne.” She waited.
Lenore was saying, “What? I didn’t hear what you said. Area code three-one-four, then what?”
“I thought I heard Wayne come in,” Carmen said. She paused before giving her mom the number, listened to her repeat it, said, “That’s right.” And in that moment looked up again. Sure of the sound this time. Someone closing the side door.
“For all the good it will do me,” Lenore said, “if I’m flat on my back and you’re down in Missouri somewhere.”
Ferris Britton appeared in the hall, looking into the kitchen, looking right at Carmen.
“You remember the last time?” Lenore said. “I was in bed two weeks, I couldn’t move and you came every day? You took care of me, you took care of the house . . .”
Ferris Britton, wearing that tight sport coat, thumbs hooked in his belt, grinning at her.
“I don’t know what I would have done without you. I couldn’t even go to the bathroom alone, remember?”
“Mom, I have to go. Somebody’s here.”
“Who is it?”
“It’s work we’re having done.”
Ferris was grinning and shaking his head now, showing some kind of appreciation, enjoying himself.
“I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”
“Tell me what time, in case I go out.”
“The same time, around eleven.”
“I could call you. No, if Wayne’s making good money down there, at least I hope he is, you call me.”
“I will, don’t worry.”
“What’re you fixing for dinner?”
“Mom, I have to go. Bye.”
Carmen hung up, Ferris still grinning at her.
He said, “That was your mom, huh? I don’t know if it’s a good idea giving her your phone number.”
Carmen took a moment. “You walk right in someone else’s house?”
Ferris was looking at the electric coffeemaker, over on the counter by the sink. He moved toward it saying, “Excuse me, but this isn’t exactly someone else’s house. It belongs to the Justice Department through seizure by the U. S. Marshals Service and is in our care. I thought I told you that.” He raised his hand as Carmen started to get up from the table. “Stay where you are, I’ll help myself.” Ferris took a cup from the dish drainer, filled it with coffee and came over to the table. “Smells good and strong. I don’t use sugar or cream, nothing that isn’t good for me.” Still grinning at her.
Maybe always grinning, Carmen remembering his boyish expression in candlelight, wavy brown hair down on his forehead, country-western entertainer or television evangelist. She said, “Are you gonna walk in anytime you want? If you are, I think we’ll find another place.” She had to look almost straight up at him standing close to the table and it made her mad. “Maybe we will anyway. I didn’t come here to be a cleaning woman for the Justice Department.”
Ferris stopped grinning. Carmen watched him squint at her now, squeezing lines into his forehead, another one of his expressions. Carmen believed he had three or four: deadpan, mouth open, this one and his gee-whiz grin.
He said, “You mean you aren’t a cleaning lady?”
She watched him set his cup on the table, turn and inspect the kitchen in a studied way, nodding,
before looking at her again.
“Well, you sure could do my house anytime.”
There was the grin back again and now he was taking off his sport coat, folding it inside out, making himself right at home.
“Hey, I’m kidding with you. Don’t you know when I’m kidding?”
She watched him slide into the breakfast-nook booth, bringing the sport coat across his lap. His wavy hair, his weight lifter neck and shoulders in a short-sleeve white shirt, red-print tie hanging in front of him, seemed to fill the space on the other side of the table. He brought his cup to him and hunched over to rest his arms on the table edge.
“I knocked. You must not’ve heard me.”
“You didn’t knock or ring the bell,” Carmen said, “you walked right in.”
“I hear you talking to somebody I want to know who the person is, or if you’re in some kind of trouble, need my help. That’s what I’m for.”
She watched him pick up his cup and hold it in two hands as he took a sip. He held it in front of him, looking over the rim of the cup at her.
“Mmmmm, that’s good. I was in court all week was why I haven’t come by. I take that back, I mean during the day. I come by two different nights like around eight, but you weren’t home either time. The pickup was here—I looked in the window, saw how you’d cleaned the place up.
Man, I thought I musta had the wrong house.”
Carmen said, “You looked in our windows?”
“Just the living room. No, I went around to the kitchen too. Where were you?”
“If we weren’t home then we were out.”
“Well, I know that. Where’d you go?”
Carmen took her time, wanting to tell him it was none of his business, but wanting to excuse him, too, because he was dumb, because he was overprotective, took his job very seriously and didn’t realize he was blundering into their privacy. She wanted that to be the only reason he was here, sitting close across the table with those huge arms and shoulders, staring at her.
“Let’s see,” Carmen said, “we shopped, bought a new shower curtain, some dish towels. I called my mother....Oh, Wayne bought a pair of work gloves.” She paused, staring at the marshal’s innocent irritating expression, and said, “We thought about going to a show, but didn’t know if we were allowed to.”
Ferris said, “Sure, that’s okay, you can go to the show. But call me and let me know which one. See, I have to know where you are, you know, in case something comes up. I think I got your old man a job over to Cape Barge, if he don’t mind getting filthy dirty crawling underneath towboats. A drydock’s the last place I’d ever want to get hired. He told me he was an ironworker before. I didn’t ask him, but is Wayne an Indian?”
Carmen said, “An Indian—why would you think that?”
“I heard one time they could only get Indians to go up on those high buildings, either ’cause they’re crazy enough to do it, not afraid of heights, or ’cause they’re surefooted—I don’t know, maybe they wear moccasins and aren’t as likely to fall.”
“I’m told they fall like anyone else,” Carmen said. “I’ll bet you also heard you’re not supposed to look down when you’re up pretty high.”
“Yeah, you get the urge to jump.”
“If you do, you’re not an ironworker. It’s looking up that can get you in trouble, if you start watching the clouds moving.”
“I imagine it takes getting used to,” Ferris said. “What’d your old man do before he was an ironworker?”
“He’s not my old man, he’s my husband.”
“I know he’s older’n you are, I saw it in the file. He’s forty-one and you’re thirty-eight, only he looks it and you don’t. You look more my age. I turned thirty-one this past July, but I keep in shape. I work with weights I got at home in my exercise room. I can do those one-hand push-ups, I can do nine-hundred and sixty-five sit-ups at one time without stopping. I’ll run now and then but I don’t care for it too much, I do leg exercises instead. You ought to see my workout room. It was the den before I got divorced. My ex-wife went back to Hughes, Arkansas, that’s near Horseshoe Lake, not too far from West Memphis, where I was born and raised.”
“I have a nineteen-year-old son,” Carmen said, “in the navy. Right now he’s on a nuclear carrier in the Pacific Ocean.”