This used to be all farmland, but now each town was linked to the others by a frayed strand of filling stations and shopping malls. Morgan sped along. The superstructure on his trackbed moaned. The padlock on its rear door clanked whenever he slowed down.
"Thinks she's so clever, thinks I care. Thinks it matters what fool thing she does to me." He entered the outskirts of Baltimore. They'd put up more apartment buildings. You couldn't turn your back, it seemed. At a traffic light a boy braked beside him in a long, finned Dodge that must have been twenty years old. All the windows were closed, but the music on his radio was so loud that it sailed out anyhow- the "Steadily Depressing, Low-Down, Mind-Messing, Working at the Carwash Blues." In spite of himself, Morgan beat time on the steering wheel.
At least there was a little sun here-a pale, weak, late-winter sun lighting white steeples and empty sidewalks. He drove north on Charles, passing a stream of small shops and then the University, deserted-looking, its buildings clean and precisely placed like something built of toy blocks. He turned into a corridor of large houses, cafes, apartment buildings, and parked on Bonny's street but some distance from her house, so she wouldn't easily see the truck from her windows. Then he got out and lit a cigarette and started waiting.
It was cold, even in the sunlight. He raised his collar around his ears. He saw the newspaper on Bonny's front walk. Ten-something in the morning and she hadn't brought it in yet; typical. A cardinal was sitting in the dogwood tree, a drop of red in a net of black branches. Morgan wondered if it could be one of those who'd hatched in that net in the mock-orange bush a few years back. He felt some proprietary interest. All one summer he'd chased the cat away; the parent birds would alert him, fluttering and giving their anxious chirps that sounded like the clink of loose change in a pocket. But didn't cardinals migrate? His cigarette tasted like burning trash. He ground it out.
Then here came Billy's wife, Priscilla, tapping up the walk in her spiffy white coat, carrying her basket-shaped purse that was sure to have a whale carved on its lid. She disappeared into the house. (She had to step right over the paper.) She was extraneous, no one he ever gave much thought to; he dismissed her instantly. He leaned forward and watched the door open again. Out popped a boy. His grandson? Todd? If so, he'd grown. He was carrying a yellow skateboard, and when he reached the street he just skated away-here one second, gone the next, for Morgan didn't watch after him. He was centered on that door still.
A long time went by. He leaned against the hood of the truck and listened to the engine ticking as it cooled.
The door first darkened, drawing inward, and then vanished altogether. Bonny stepped out on the stoop. Beneath her matted brown cardigan she wore something peasantish, unbecoming-a gauzy, full blouse, and a gathered skirt that made her look fat. Morgan assumed she was heading for the paper, but she ignored it as the others had and continued down the walk. Morgan slid around behind the truck. She didn't even look in his direction. She turned west, bustling along. He saw something flash in her hand-her red billfold, no doubt overstaffed as always with credit cards, outdated photos, and wrinkled little wads of money.
For a while he followed, keeping well back. He knew where she was going, of course. On a Sunday morning, with Priscilla there, and Todd, and who knew how many other people, she'd be off to the bakery for cinnamon rolls. But he followed anyway, and fixed his eyes on her. She'd let her hair grow, he noticed-a mistake. The puffy little clump at the back of her neck had turned into a sort of oval, with tattered ends.
What was going on in that head?
This was why he'd come: to find out. He'd driven here without wondering what for, and was confronted with it now so abruptly that he stopped short. All he wanted to ask was, why had she done it?
Was some meaning implied?
Did she imagine…?
No, surely not.
Did she imagine he really had passed away?
"Passed away" was all he was up to just now. "Died" would stick in his throat. No, he couldn't ask that.
He continued to stand there while Bonny went on racing toward the bakery.
Then he turned and went back to the house. He circled around it. (The front door opened to the center hall, where anyone might see him enter.) He walked to the side, toward the screen porch, reached through a rip in the screen and raised the rusty hook and let himself in. The moldy smell of the wicker furniture-like mice, like cheap magazines-reminded him of summer. He tried the knob of the glass-paned door that led to the living room. It was unlocked. (He'd warned them a thousand times.) Soundlessly, he slipped in.
The room was empty. Last night's Parcheesi game lay scrambled in front of the cold gray fireplace. A cup was making a ring on the coffee table. He crossed to the hall. From the kitchen Priscilla called, "Bonny? Back so soon?" He darted toward the stairs, keeping to carpets, where his footsteps would be softest. He mounted the stairs so swiftly that he scared himself-the blurred speed of his climb was too hushed, too spooky. In the upstairs hall his heel clicked once on the floorboards by accident. He ducked into the bedroom and clapped a palm to his pounding chest.
No one came.
Her bed was unmade and her nightgown was a spill of soiled ivory nylon across the rug. All the bureau drawers were open. So was the closet. He tiptoed to the closet. How unlike itself it seemed: so much space. You couldn't say it was bare, exactly (those clothes of hers she never would give up, skirts with the hemlines altered a dozen different times, Ship 'n Shore blouses from the fifties with their dinky Peter Pan collars), but certainly it was emptier than it used to be. The shelf where he'd kept his hats now held a typewriter case, a hairdryer, and a shoebox. He opened the shoebox and found a pair of shoes, the chunky kind so out of date they were coming back into fashion.
He opened the drawer in her nightstand and found a tube of hand cream and a book of Emily Dickinson's poems.
He opened the drawer in his nightstand (once upon a time) and found a coupon for instant coffee, a light-up ballpoint pen, and a tiny leather notebook with Night Thoughts written in gilt across the cover. Aha! But the only night thoughts she'd had were: Woolite Roland Park Florist Todd's birthday?
Something clamped his wrist-a claw. He dropped the book. "Sir," said Louisa.
"Mother?"
"I've forgotten the number for the police."
"Mother," he said, "I've only come to… pick up a few belongings."
"Is it 222-3333? Or 333-2222." She still had hold of his wrist. He couldn't believe how strong she was. When he tried to squirm away, she tightened her fingers. He could have struggled harder, but he was afraid of hurting her. There was something brittle and crackling about the feel of her. He said, "Mother dear, please let go."
"Don't call me Mother, you scruffy-looking, hairy person."
"Oh," he said. "You really don't know me."
"Would I be likely to?" she asked him.
She wore her Sunday black, although she never attended church-a draped and fluted black dress with a cameo at the throat. On her feet were blue terrycloth scuffs from which her curved, opaque toenails emerged — more claws. She encaged his wrist in a ring of bone.
"I said to the lady downstairs," she said, " 'There's burglars on the second floor.' She said, 'It's only those squirrels again.' I told her, 'This time it's burglars.' "