Anne Tyler - If Morning Ever Comes

“The reason I asked about the Dowers,” Ben Joe said, “is that I met an old man from the train by that name. He said he was born right here in Sandhill.”

“That’s funny. Good Dower or bad Dower?”

“Well, Gram. I doubt if he’d have said.”

“If he was a bad Dower he would have. He would have said he was a good Dower.”

Joanne laughed.

“He said there was a street named for his father,” Ben Joe said. “I remember that much. He said that when he was here, Main and Dower were the only real streets in town.”

Gram looked up, interested now. “That’s so,” she said. “It’s true, that’s so.”

Carol spilled her milk. It trickled off the high-chair tray and into her lap, and when she felt the coldness of it she squealed.

“I’ll get a rag,” said Tessie.

She started for the sink, but her mother reached around and grabbed her back by the sash. “You sit right there, young lady. You have to be at school in fifteen minutes.”

“It won’t take long, Mama.”

But Joanne was already up, reaching for paper towels and then lifting Carol out of her high chair to sponge her off. “There, there,” she was saying, although Carol was only squealing for the joy of hearing her own voice now and had started pulling out all the bobby pins from Joanne’s hair.

“He went off to help his uncle make bed sheets in Connecticut!” Ben Joe shouted above the uproar.

His mother stopped chewing and stared at him.

“Mr. Dower, I’m talking about. And then his family moved away because his mother’s ankle bones started hurting—”

“Ben Joe,” his mother said, “if all of you children would cast your minds back to when you were small and I told you never , on any account, to speak to those strange-looking people you seem to keep meeting up with—”

“How old was he when he began in bed sheets?” Gram asked.

“Eighteen, he told me.”

“My Lord in heaven!” She laid her fork on the table and stared at him. “Why, that couldn’t be anyone but Jamie Dower. Jamie Dower, I’ll be. My Lord in heaven.”

“Was he a good Dower?”

“Good as they come. Shoot, yes. He was six years older’n me, but you’d never believe the crush I had on him. That was the reason I practically lived at the Dowers’—following him around all the time. I thought he was Adam, back then.”

“Adam?” Tessie said. “How was he dressed?”

Her mother pushed her plate closer to her. “Eat your beans, Tessie. Stop that dawdling.”

“Where was he going to?” Gram asked.

“Well, um — the home for the aged, is what he told me.”

“The home for the aged.” She shook her head. “My, my, who’d have believed it? He was a real handsome boy, you know — kind of tall for back then, though nothing to compare with some of those basketball players you see around nowadays. Real fond of stylish clothes, too. What would we have thought, I wonder, had someone told us back then where Jamie Dower would end up?”

“Tessie,” said Ellen Hawkes, “I give you to the count of five to drink that milk up. What’s that on your front? Beans?”

“Nothing,” said Tessie. She finished the last of her milk and wiped the white mustache off her upper lip with the back of her hand.

“That’s a funny-looking nothing.”

“Well, anyway, I gotta go. Good-by, Mama. Good-by, everybody.”

She vanished out the kitchen door, grabbing her jacket as she went. Her mother stared after her and shook her head. “You practically have to drag her to school,” she said. “Sometimes I think the brains just sort of dribbled away toward the end in this family.”

“She’s plenty bright,” said Gram.

“Well, maybe. But not like Joanne and Ben Joe were — not like them.”

“Rubbish,” said Gram. She began reaching for the plates and scraping them while she sat at her place. “Too much emphasis on brains in this family. What good’s it do? Joanne quit after one year of college and the others, excepting Ben Joe, never went. And Ben Joe — look at him. He just kept trying to figure out what that all-fired mind of his was given him for, and first he thought it was for science and then for art and then for philosophy and now what’s he got? Just a mishmash, is all. Just nothing. Won’t read a thing now but murder mysteries.”

“Neither one of you knows what you’re talking about,” Ben Joe said cheerfully. He had been through all this before; he listened with only half an ear, tipping back in his chair and watching his grandmother scrape plates. “And pooh, what do the girls want to go to college for? I say they’re smart choosing not to—”

“Well, sure you do,” his mother said. “Sure you do, when all you’ve got to judge it by is Sandhill College. Might as well not have gone at all, as far as I’m concerned—”

“No fault of his,” Gram said.

“Well, it’s no fault of miner

“If my son’d had his say,” Gram said, “Ben Joe’d have gone to Harvard, that’s where.”

“Your son could’ve had his say. If he’d come back he could’ve had his say and welcome to it, but what’d he do instead?” She was sitting up straight now, with one hand clasping her fork so tightly that the knuckles were white.

“Who made him like that?” Gram shouted. “Who made his house so cold he chose to go live in another’s, tell me that!”

Ben Joe cleared his throat. “Actually,” he said, “if I’d made better grades I’d have gotten a scholarship to Harvard. I don’t see how it’s anyone’s fault but my—”

“And who didn’t give a hoot when he left?” Gram shouted triumphantly above Ben Joe. “Answer me that , now, answer me—”

“That will do , Gram,” said Ellen Hawkes.

She unclasped her hand from the fork and rose, suddenly calm. “I’ll be home by six,” she said to Joanne and Ben Joe. They nodded, silently; she pushed her chair in and left. Joanne was staring at the tablecloth as if it were impossible to drag her eyes away from it.

“Cracker,” Carol said.

Ben Joe handed her one. She seized it and immediately began crumbling it over her tray.

“I am sorry,” Gram said after a minute. “There was no call to act like that. I didn’t mean to bring it up.”

Joanne nodded, still staring at the tablecloth. “I thought you’d have settled that,” she said.

“Oh, no. No, just let it slip from being uppermost in my mind, is all. You missed the worst of it. Things went on like before even after you up and left home over it, though you’d think some people might try and change a little. Ah, well, least said soonest …”

She sighed and rose to take the stack of dishes to the sink. “Ben Joe, honey,” she called over her shoulder, “you reckon Jamie Dower might like a visitor?”

“I don’t know why not, Gram.”

“You and me’ll go, then, sometime this week. I’ll start thinking about it.”

Joanne rose to help Gram, with her face still pale and too sober. For a while Ben Joe watched them, following their quick, sure movements around the kitchen, but then Carol began blowing cracker crumbs at him and he turned back to her and lifted her out of the high chair.

“Does she get a nap?” he asked Joanne.

“Well, yes. But I’m reading this book that says the same person has got to put her to bed all the time. You better wait and let me do it.”

“All right.” He headed for the living room, with Carol snuggled in the crook of his arm. “Wouldn’t want to make you maladjusted,” he told her. She smiled and sucked on a corner of her cracker.

In the living room he sat down in the rocking chair. He pried the soggy mass of cracker from Carol’s hand and put it in the ash tray, and then he began absent-mindedly rocking. Carol’s head dropped heavily against his chest; her red hair was tickling a point just under his chin. He could feel the small dead weight of her, but he remained unconvinced of her realness and for a long time he just rocked silently, frowning above her head at the faded wallpaper.