Anne Tyler - If Morning Ever Comes

“Oh, you,” Susannah said. “That’s beside the point. Go up and get some sleep, Ben Joe. The house’ll be bedlam when Carol wakes up.”

“Okay. Have a good day at work.”

“Thank you.”

He stood watching her for a minute, but Susannah had already forgotten him. She was on her hands and knees under the table now, crawling after one of her slippers, and it was as if Ben Joe had never been there.

When he awoke, his mother was in the doorway watching him. He was not sure whether she had spoken his name or not; in his sleep he seemed to have heard her voice. But maybe all that had awakened him was the feel of her eyes — wide eyes, as dark as her daughters’, but with small lines now at the corners. She was the kind of woman who did not become very wrinkled as she aged but instead acquired only a few lines around her mouth and eyes, and those so deep that they were actual crevices even when her face was calm. She was smiling a little, so that the mouth lines curved and deepened even more, and she stood with one hand on her hip and the other on the doorknob and watched Ben Joe.

“Ben Joe Hawkes,” she said finally, “what on earth are you doing home?”

Ben Joe sat up in the familiar wooden bed and pushed his hair back from his forehead. “I already told you,” he said. “I told you the reason on the phone.”

“That was no reason.” She shook her head. “Of all the things to do … What’s going to happen to your school work?”

“I don’t have to be there every minute.”

“If you make good grades you do. If you’re going to be any kind of decent lawyer.”

Ben Joe shrugged and pulled his pillow up behind him so that he could sit against it. The sheets smelled crisp and newly ironed; his mother had smoothed them tight on the bed herself and turned the covers down for him, and he could hold that thought securely in his mind even when she scolded him for returning. You had to be a sort of detective with his mother; you had to search out the fresh-made bed, the flowers on the bureau, and the dinner table laid matter-of-factly with your favorite supper, and then you forgot her crisp manners. He wondered, watching her, whether his sisters knew that. Or did they even need to know? Maybe it was only Ben Joe, still watching his mother with those detective eyes even though he was a grown man now and should have stopped bothering.

“Have you had breakfast?” his mother was asking.

“Yes’m. Had it with the girls before they went to work.”

“Well, I’m home for lunch now. You want a bite to eat?”

“I guess.”

She came further into the room and opened his closet door. From the front rack she took a bathrobe and tossed it to him, not watching where it landed, and then crossed to pull the shade up. He saw that she was still wearing those wide walking skirts with the mid-calf hem that had been popular some fifteen years ago. On her, with her bony height and her swinging walk, they still looked up to date. Her hair was a light, dusty color, once as blond as his and Tessie’s. It was short and a little too frizzy around the sharp angles of her face, but she still didn’t seem like an old woman. He gave up watching her and, pulling the bathrobe around him, stepped barefoot to the floor.

“You’re thinner,” she said. She had stopped fiddling with the window shade and was taking stock of him now, with her hands deep in the pockets of her skirt. “You’ve been cooking for yourself, I’ll bet.”

“Yes’m. What time is it?”

“About twelve.”

“Is Joanne up?”

“Oh, yes. She and Carol are in the den, I think.”

“Is she okay?”

“Of course she’s okay. And it’s her own business, Ben Joe — nothing we have any right to touch. I don’t want to hear about your meddling in it. Hurry up and get dressed, will you? Lunch is nearly ready.”

She swung out of the door and vanished, humming something beneath her breath as she went downstairs. Behind her, Ben Joe sighed and tied his bathrobe around him. It would be a good time to shave; none of the older girls came home for lunch.

When he came downstairs he could smell lunch already — all the varied smells of odds and ends left over in the refrigerator and reheated now in tiny saucepans. Although he was rested now, his stomach still felt shaky from the trip and he made a face as the smell of lunch hit him on the stairs. Gram must be doing the cooking today; she was an old Southerner and floated all her vegetables in grease.

He pushed open the kitchen door and found his grandmother standing by the stove just lifting the lid off a steaming saucepan. She was his father’s mother, and close to eighty now, but there was a steely, glinting endurance to her. Joanne used to say her grandmother reminded her of piano wires. She was small and bony; she wore men’s black gym shoes that tied around her bare ankles, and her dress, as usual, was a disgrace — a sort of blue denim coat that was fastened with one string at the back of the neck and hung open the rest of the way down the back to expose a black lace slip. (Her underwear was her one luxury; she had seven different colors in her bureau drawer.) As she stirred the leftovers she sang, just as she always did, in a deafening roar that came effortlessly from the bottom of her tiny rib cage:“I ain’t gonna knock on your window no more,

Ain’t gonna bang on your door …”

“Hello, Gram,” Ben Joe said in her ear.

She spun around, just missing him with the saucepan lid. “Ben Joe!” she said. “I hear you came in this morning and didn’t even say hey to me. That true?”

“You were up in the attic making a gun belt,” he said.

He hugged her and she hugged him back, so hard that he could feel her hard, bony chest and the point of her chin just below his shoulder.

“We’re having leftovers,” she said. “I know what view you hold of leftovers, but you just wait till tonight. You just see what manner of things we’re preparing.”

She replaced the saucepan lid and undid her hair. It was her habit to take three bobby pins from her head, at least twenty times a day, and let her straight white hair fall almost to her shoulders. Then, with the bobby pins clamped tightly in her mouth, she deftly wound her hair around one finger, squashed it on top of her head in a bun, and nailed it there again with the bobby pins. All this took less than a minute. While she was doing it she kept right on talking, shifting the bobby pins to one corner of her mouth so that they wouldn’t interrupt her speech.

“Turkey we’re having,” she said, “and giblet dressing, and yams — Ben Joe, you got to talk to Jenny about her grocery rut. She’s got into a rut about grocery shopping. Buys the same old thing every time. No imagination. Now, Jenny, she is a right good cook and I want to see her get married, real soon. I don’t hold with a girl staying and looking after her family and being a little old secretary all her life when she is as home-minded as Jenny is. Got to get a family of her own. But what man’ll marry a girl feeds him hamburgers every night? Course she does all manner of clever things to dress them up a little, but still and all it’s hamburger and the cheap kind of hamburger at that. Ever since you left and put her in charge of the money matters she’s been parsimonious , is what, taking it too serious. Call people to eat, will you? Your ma’s upstairs and the others’re in the den.”

“Yes’m.”

He left the kitchen and headed for the den, which was through the living room and at the other end of the house. It had once been his father’s study, and although the medical books on the shelves had long since been disposed of, there was still the extra telephone on the desk, installed when the girls had first become old enough to tie up the lines on the regular phone. Since their father’s death the room was used as a TV room, and now the set was blaring so loudly that Ben Joe could hear it way before he crossed the living room. And once he was inside the den the sound hurt his ears. The shades were down and at first it was too dark to see anything but the silhouettes of the people watching and beyond them the screen, bluish and snow-flecked. A fat man was shouting, “Whaddaya say, kiddies? Huh? Whaddaya say?” and behind his voice was a loud, angry humming from the set itself. Ben Joe blinked and looked around.