'Well, I know that.'
'Old James came over with that picture he took yesterday,' he said. 'You were gone off on my bicycle. He brought it in a special brown envelope like he does to customers. I said, "Mama, here is that picture you was asking for." She says, "What?" I pulled it out to show her. She said, "Oh," and then went back to her sewing and didn't look any more. I put it back on James's doorstep.'
‘Well, now, don't you worry-' said Joan, but she had to stop there, because she wasn't sure what he was talking about. She stood frowning at him, with the wind whipping the hair around her face and her hands clenched white on the pocketbook.
'I won't be a bit of trouble,' he said again.
She said, 'No,' and stooped nearer to him. 'I can't take you,' she said. 'I have to go off, Simon. And you have to stay with your family. When they are back to normal, though, you can come and visit.'
Simon just stood there, very straight. She didn't know what to do, because he had his head drawn back in that way he had and if she'd hugged him he would have hated her. So she waited a minute, and then she said, 'Well, goodbye.' He didn't answer. 'Goodbye,' she said again. She kept on facing him, though, because she couldn't turn first and just leave him there. Then when she was beginning to think they would stand that way forever he swung around and left, and she watched him go. He stumbled through the field in a zig-zagging line, not parting the grass ahead of him but pressing on with his hands at his sides. 'Simon?' she called once. But Simon never answered.
When she turned away herself, and bent to pick up her bags again, she was thinking that out of all the bad things she had ever done this might be the one sin. It made her feel suddenly heavy and old; the weight of her sadness dragged behind her through the fields like another suitcase, and she couldn't look up or let herself think about anything but walking, putting one foot ahead of the other.
The Smith house loomed up suddenly, just beyond a little rise in the ground. Inside a wire fence the hens scratched irritably at the dirt, and from the house came the sound of someone's singing. Joan set her suitcases down and looked back, thinking to see some sign of what she had left, but there was only the gentle slope of wild grass stretching as far as she could see. Behind that was James, dark and slow and calm, rocking easily in his chair and never knowing. And that long front porch where she and Simon used to shell peas on summer evenings, while Janie Rose sang ‘The Murder of James A. Garfield' through the open window. She picked up her suitcases and walked on, with that sudden light, lost feeling that came from walking in a straight line away from people she loved.
The clock in the drugstore where the buses stopped said there were ten minutes to go. Tommy Jones behind the soda fountain checked her bags and handed her the tags, and she said, 'Thank you,' and smiled at him dazedly without thinking about him.
'Coke while you wait?' he asked.
'No, thank you.'
'On the house.'
'Oh. No.'
Her voice sounded thin and sad. She felt like a stick, very straight and alone, standing upright with nothing to lean against. Surely people should have noticed it, but they didn't; Tommy smiled at her as if this were any normal day, and the two other people in the store went on leafing through their magazines. Dan Thompson's wife came in, wearing one of Dan's baggy printing aprons the way she usually did and carrying a fresh stack of this week's newspapers. The insides of her forearms were smeared with ink from them. When she saw Joan she smiled and came over toward her. 'Hi,' she said. 'You want a paper?'
'I guess so,' said Joan. She fished in her purse for the money and handed it over, and Carol gave her a paper off the top of the stack.
'Nothing but the most startling news,' she said. 'We took it all from the Rockland paper this week. Usually we get it from Clancyville.'
'Well, that's all right,' Joan said. 'I haven't read the Rockland paper either.'
'Good. You know what I think sometimes?' She heaved the papers onto a soda fountain stool and began rubbing the muscles of her arm. 'Sometimes I think, what if every paper gets its news from the other papers? What if this is twenty-year-old news we're reading, just circulating around and around among newspapers?'
'I don't suppose it'd make much difference,' Joan said absently.
'Well, maybe not.' She picked up the papers again. 'You bring James over for supper some night, you hear? We haven't had the two of you together in a long time.'
'All right,' said Joan. She didn't see much point in telling Carol she was leaving, not if Carol hadn't noticed for herself. And she hadn't. She went off jauntily, with a wave of her hand, and threw the papers on the floor in front of the magazine rack and left the store. Yet there was Joan, all dressed up in her high-heeled shoes. She looked around at the other customers again, but they went on reading their magazines.
When the bus drew up, she was the only person to board it. The driver didn't smile or even look at her; already she was outside the little circle of Larksville, and only another stranger to the people on this bus. She sat in a seat by herself, toward the rear, and smoothed her skirt down and then looked at the other passengers. None of them looked back except a sailor, who stopped chewing his gum and winked, and she quickly looked away again and sat up straight. The bus started with a jerk and wheezed up to full speed along Main Street, making a sad, going-away noise. Through the green-tinted windows Larksville looked like an old dull photograph, and that made her sad too, but once they had passed the town limits she began to feel better. Some of that light feeling came back. It crossed her mind, as she was pulling on her gloves, that all she was going to was another bedroom, to years spent reading alone in a little house kept by old people, remembering to greet her mother's friends on the street, smiling indulgently at other people's children. But then she shook that thought away, and folded her gloved hands in her lap and began looking out the window again.
It was almost an hour before the bus made its next stop, in a town called Howrell that Joan had always hated. Gangling men stood lined along the street, spitting tobacco juice and commenting on the passengers whose faces appeared in the bus windows. Underneath Joan was the slamming and banging of bags being shoved into the luggage compartment, and then the driver helped a little old lady up the steps and into the bus. She wore a hat made entirely of flowers. From the way she advanced, clutching her pocketbook in both hands, examining the face of each passenger and sniffing a little as she passed them, Joan knew she would sit beside her. Old ladies always did. She stopped next to Joan and said, 'This seat taken?' and then slid in, not waiting for an answer. While she was getting settled she huffed and puffed, making little comments under her breath; she would be the talkative kind. 'I thought this bus would never come,' she said. 'I thought it had laid down and died on the way.' Joan smiled, and turned her face full to the window.
When the bus had started up again, and was rolling through the last of Howrell, Joan checked her watch. It would be nearly suppertime now. If she were in Larksville she would be sitting at the kitchen table cutting up a salad. She pictured herself there, her bare feet curled around the rungs of the chair. In her mind she seemed to be sitting an inch or so above the seat, not resting on anything but air. She ran through other pictures of herself – sitting in her parents' parlour, sitting on the porch with James, even sitting now beside this old lady on a bus rolling west. In all the pictures, she was resting on nothing. She turned her mind back to the firmest seat she knew-James's lap, in the evenings when Ansel had already gone to bed. But even there, there was a good two inches of air beneath her and she seemed to be balanced there precariously, her arms tight around James. She turned away from the window quickly, and said to the old lady, 'It'll be getting dark soon.'