Anne Tyler - If Morning Ever Comes

“What?” he asked suspiciously.

“Come on .”

He followed her to her own room. It was cluttered with Joanne’s odds and ends, and the old white crib had been moved down from the attic to a spot beside Joanne’s bed. Other than that, it was almost the same as when she had left it. Huge stuffed animals, won by long-ago boy-friends at state fairs, littered the window seat; perfume bottles and hair ribbons and bobby pins lay scattered on the bureau. She laid Carol carefully in the crib and said, “Where were you when Dad died?”

“Where — Oh, no,” Ben Joe said. “No, don’t you start that.”

“Why not?” She straightened up from kissing Carol good night and turned to face him. “That’s not fair, Ben Joe. Nobody’ll tell me anything about it. I even wrote a letter asking them to tell me. Nobody ever answered.”

“Well, you were away,” Ben Joe said.

“That doesn’t change anything.” She spread a blanket over Carol and began tying it down at the corners. “It happened just after Jenny began writing all the family’s letters,” she said. “Only Jenny didn’t write this particular one, I remember. She went through a stage when she wouldn’t write or speak the fact that Dad was dead. Susannah told me that. So the twins had to take over the letter writing. Jane and Lisa, they handled everything, although neither one of them will touch a pen ordinarily and you can tell it from their letters. But it was just as well, I guess — their writing the letters, I mean — because I suppose Jenny would just have sent a list of the funeral costs. Or would she, that far back? When did Jenny learn to be so practical? Anyway, there was this note from Lisa saying, ‘Dad just passed away last night but felt no pain’—as if anyone could know what he felt — and that’s all I ever heard. What happened, Ben Joe?”

“What difference does it make?” he asked.

“It makes a lot of difference. Who won makes a lot of difference.”

“What?”

“Who won. Mama or that other woman.”

“Well, that’s the—”

“I know.” She turned the lamp around so that it wouldn’t shine in Carol’s eyes and sat down on the foot of the bed. “It’s an awful thing to wonder. And none of my business, anyway. But it’s important to know, for all kinds of reasons.”

He began searching through his crumpled cigarette pack for the last cigarette, not looking at her.

“Here, take mine,” she said.

“Not menthol.”

“They won’t kill you.”

She threw the pack at him; it fell on the floor in front of him and he picked it up and leaned back against the bureau.

“Two weeks before he died,” Joanne said, “he was at home. I know he was. Jenny put it just beautifully, in this letter she wrote me. She said, ‘You’ll be happy to know Daddy has got back from his trip’—‘trip’; that’s an interesting choice of words—‘and he’s living at home now.’ Now, where was he when he died? Still at home?”

“At Lili Belle’s,” Ben Joe said.

“At — Oh.” She shook her head. “Lately I’ve stopped thinking about her by her name,” she said. “What with Gram calling her ‘Another’s House’ all the time.”

“Well, he didn’t mean to go and die there,” said Ben Joe. “He’d just been drinking a little, is all. Went out to get ice cubes and then forgot which home he was supposed to be going back to. Mom explained that to Lili Belle.”

“Mom explained it to Lili Belle?”

“Well, yes. It was her that Lili Belle called soon as he died. He got to Lili Belle’s with a pain in his chest and died a little after. So Lili Belle called Mom, and Mom came to explain how it was our house he’d really intended going back to and not hers; just a mistake. And Lili Belle hadn’t really won after all.”

“Looks like to me she had.”

“But it was by mistake he went there.”

“Oh, pshaw,” Joanne said. She turned to see how Carol was and then faced Ben Joe again. “What about their little boy, his and Lili Belle’s? That was named after Daddy? That’s more’n you were named for. I don’t see that your name is Phillip. Do you think he would have walked off and left a baby named Phillip for good?”

“That’s beside the point. You know, Joanne, sometimes I wonder whose side you’re on.”

She smiled and ground out her cigarette and stood up. “Don’t you lose sleep on it,” she said. “Come on, we’re keeping Carol awake. I’m going to do my nails and I reckon you have people you’ll want to visit.”

“I don’t know who.”

But he straightened up anyway and followed Joanne out of the room. In the hall she gave him a little pat on the arm and then turned toward the bathroom, and he started for the stairs. He stopped at the hall landing, which looked down over the long stairway, and put one hand on the railing.

“You know where the emery boards are?” Joanne called from the bathroom.

He didn’t answer; he leaned both elbows on the railing and stared downward, thinking.

“Oh, never mind. I found them.”

He was remembering one night six years ago; this spot always reminded him of it. He had been studying in his room and at about ten o’clock he had decided to go downstairs for a beer. With his mind still foggy with facts and dates, he had wandered out into the hallway, had put one hand on the railing and was about to take the first step down, when the noise began. He could hear that noise still, although he always did his best to forget it.

First he thought it sounded like an angry bull wheezing and bellowing in a circle around the house. But it was too reedy and penetrating to be that; he thought then that it must be an auto horn. Kerry Jamison had an auto horn like that. Only Kerry Jamison was a well-bred boy and didn’t honk for Ben Joe when he came visiting him. And he certainly didn’t drive on the Hawkes’s carefully tended lawn.

All over the house the girls had come swarming out of the various rooms, asking what the racket was. Tessie, who was scarcely more than a baby then and should have been asleep for hours, inched her bedroom door open and peeked out to ask Ben Joe if she could come downstairs with the others, because there was a trumpet blowing outside that wouldn’t hush for her. She spoke in a whisper; their mother was reading in bed in the room next to Tessie’s and would surely say no if she heard what Tessie was asking. But what neither Ben Joe nor Tessie realized at the time was that their mother was answering the telephone in her room, listening to Lili Belle Mosely tell her her husband was dead. Right then she wouldn’t have cared if Tessie never went to bed again, but Tessie couldn’t know that and she went on in her whispery voice: “Can I, Ben Joe? Say yes. Cani?”

“No , “ said Ben Joe. “I’ll go down and shut it up, whatever it is. Get back in bed, Tessie.”

“But it’s so scary , Ben—”

Their mother’s door opened. Tessie popped back into her room just as Ellen Hawkes flew out of hers; they were like the two figures in a weather house. Ellen had on a pair of blue cotton pajamas and her hair was rumpled and she was struggling into a khaki raincoat of her husband’s as she ran.

“Your father’s dead,” she said, and rushed down the stairs.

Ben Joe put both hands on the railing and leaned down. His mother had passed the little landing at the curve of the stairs and now she was directly below him, still running down; he could see the top of her head, and the curls lifting a little as she came down hard on each step. “Your father’s dead,” she repeated to the girls downstairs. Above her voice came the eerie sound from outside, wheezing and bellowing its way around to the front of the house.