He washed his hands in the tiny bathroom and returned to the kitchen. Emily was dishing out breakfast. He sat down at the table and watched her lay two strips of bacon on his plate. "Come eat, Josh," she called.
Josh was running a tin trolley car along the edge of the couch. He brought the trolley to the table with him, swaggering along in his rocking-horse gait, studiously silent. (He was the quietest, most accepting child Morgan had ever known.) In his layers of shirts and sweaters he seemed to be having trouble bending his chunky arms. Emily picked him up and set him in his chair. "What's that?" he asked, pointing to his cup. "It's orange juice, Josh." Josh took a bite from a strip of bacon, fed another bite to the front window of his trolley car.
"Did you mail my letter?" Emily asked Morgan, sitting down across from him. "What letter?"
"My letter to Gina, Morgan."
"Oh, yes," Morgan said. "I took it to that box in front of the Post Office."
"It'll reach Richmond by Tuesday, then," Emily said.
"Well, or Wednesday."
"If she writes me back the same day, I might get a letter on Friday."
"Mm."
"She hardly ever writes the same day, though,"
"No."
"I wish she were a better letter-writer." He said nothing. She looked up at him. "Is something wrong?" she asked. "Wrong?"
"You seem different."
"I'm fine," he said.
She went back to buttering her toast. Her hands were white with cold, the nails bluish. The curve of her lashes cast faint shadows' on her cheeks. It struck him how unchanged she was. Year after year, while everyone around her grew older, Emily kept her young, pale, unlined face, and her light-colored eyes gave her a look of perpetual innocence. She wore the same clothes. Her hair was the same style, piled in braids on top of her head with a few stray tendrils corkscrewing at her neck to give her a hint of some secret looseness always possible, never realized-that could stir him still.
Well, he would go to the editors. Of course he would. He'd go storming in with the paper. "See here, what's the meaning of this? Don't you people ever check your facts? Morgan Gower, Hardware Store Manager! Where's your sense of responsibility? I am Morgan Gower. Here I stand before you." But they would say, "Aren't you that fellow Meredith? One that works for young Durwood?" In fact, he had no case.
Emily zipped Josh into his jacket for a walk, but Morgan decided not to go with them. "Don't you feel well?" she asked him.
"I'm fine, I tell you."
"Did you pick up those coughdrops?"
"Yes, yes, somewhere here…" He slapped his pockets and beamed at her, intending reassurance. She went on frowning. "Don't forget we have that show tonight," she told him.
"No, I haven't forgotten." After they left, he watched them through the living-room window-Emily a fragile little thread of a person, Josh in his fat red jacket trudging along beside her. They were heading north, across a field, toward the scrubby pine woods that ran along the highway. The field was so lumpy and rutted that sometimes Joshua stumbled, but Emily had hold of his hand. Morgan could imagine her tight, steady grip-the steely cords in her wrist, like piano wire.
He turned away from the window a fraction of a second before the phone rang, as if he'd been expecting it. Maybe he just wouldn't answer. It was sure to be someone pushing in, someone who'd found Mm out: "So! I hear you died." But, of course, no one had any way of knowing. He made himself go into the bedroom, where the phone sat on the bureau. It rang six times before he reached it. He lifted the receiver, took a breath, and said, "Hello."
"Is that you, Sam?" a man asked.
"Yes."
"It is?"
"Yes."
"You don't sound like yourself."
"I've got a cold," Morgan said.
Morgan grinned into the mirror.
"Well, I guess you heard what happened to Lady." Then a strange thing happened. It felt as if the floor just skated a few feet away from him. Not that he lost his balance; he stood as firm as ever, and his head was perfectly clear. But there was some optical illusion. His surroundings appeared to glide past him. He might have been riding one of these conveyor belts that carry passengers into airport terminals. Come to think of it, he had felt this way once before in an airport near Los Angeles. He'd gone to fetch Susan-it must have been four or five years ago; she'd had some kind of crack-up over a broken love affair-and after flying all one day he'd landed but gone on flying, it felt like. Or everything had flown around him, as if he'd been traveling so long, such a distance, that a sudden stop was impossible. He blinked, and reached out for the bureau.
"Sam?" the man asked.
"I'm not Sam. Please. You have the wrong number." He hung up. He looked around the trailer, and found it stable again.
Then he took his cap and jacket from the closet and put them on, and he wrote a note to Emily: Gone on an errand. Back soon. He let himself out the door and crossed the yard to his truck and climbed in.
It was a forty-five-minute drive to Baltimore, and all through it he talked steadily underneath his breath. "Silly damn Bonny," he muttered, "damn meddler; stupid, interfering meddler, thinks she's so-" He glanced in the rearview mirror and swung out to pass a van. "Sitting there rubbing her hands together, laughing at me; thinks she got to me somehow. Ha, that's how much she knows, yes…" He wondered how she'd found out what town he lived in. He had never told her. He considered the possibility that she had put the item in every paper in the state of Maryland-every paper in the country, even. Lord, all across the continent, for anyone to see. He pictured her telephoning hundreds and thousands of editors, rushing into their offices, trailing balls of Kleenex and rough drafts on the backs of cash-register tapes-a woman with her accelerator stuck. She had always lived a headlong kind of life. Any mental image he had of her (he thought, honking at a wandering sports car) showed her breathless, with her hair in her eyes and her blouse untucked. Look how she'd thrown his clothes out, and his mother and his sister and the dog! Cursing to himself, slamming on his brakes, he forgot that she had thrown them out at different times. He imagined that she'd dumped them all at once. He seemed to remember Brindle and Louisa, deposited in front of the hardware store, waiting on little camp stools till he could collect them. Or, why camp stools, even? Lying on their backs, like overturned beetles, in an ocean of discarded costumes. He recalled that Bonny often seemed to be held together by safety pins. Safety pins connected a slip strap to her slip, a buttonhole to the thready place where a button should have been, and her watch to its black ribbon band. And the watch was almost never wound. And the gaps in her hems were repaired with Scotch tape that rustled when she walked; no, when she ran; no, when she galloped by. She had never been known to just walk.