Anne Tyler - If Morning Ever Comes

He crossed the scrubby little yard and climbed up to the porch. The wooden floor boards made a hollow sound under his shoes. At the door he knocked and waited, and then knocked again. One corner of the chintz curtain rose slowly. The door swung open.

“Lili Belle?” he said.

“It’s me , boy.”

It was her old mother standing in the shadows behind the door. Ben Joe had seldom seen her before. She was fat and puffing but very dignified, and she had kept out of sight for sheer shame ever since the day her daughter’s baby had been born. Now she closed the door sharply behind him and said, “What you want, anyway?”

“I want to see Lili Belle.”

“Hmm.” She crossed her fat arms under the shelflike bosom of her black crepe dress. “Lilian Belle is very tired, Benjamin,” she said. “Got troubles of her own. What you wanting to see her for?”

“Mrs. Mosely, I won’t stay long. I just wanted to see her a minute. It’s important.”

“Well, I’ll tell her. But I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

He followed her across the small, mousy-smelling hallway into the almost totally dark sitting room. Against the shaded window he could make out the outline of an unlit lamp, double-globed and beaded. Mrs. Mosely stood like a mountain barring the rest of the view; she called into the room, “Back.”

Lili Belle was in the shadows, sitting on a cane chair. She stirred a little and said, “You say something, Mama?”

“Back again to pester us.”

“Who?”

“Him.” She jerked a thumb behind her. “Ben Joe.”

“Oh, my goodness. Benjy, honey, come in!” She stood up and ran to the windows to raise the shades. In her right hand was a bowl of soup, which she shifted awkwardly to her left hand when she tried to maneuver the shade. The room was suddenly light again. With the light a feeling of relief came to Ben Joe; this wasn’t going to be as hard as he thought. He always forgot how easy Lili Belle made him feel the minute he saw her.

“It’s okay, Mama,” she was saying now. “You can go on now. Come on in, Benjy honey. I do apologize for sitting in the dark like this, but my eyes is strained.”

“It’s okay,” Ben Joe said.

He looked at her closely, noticing how tired she looked. It was hard to tell how old she was. Nine years ago, when his father had first met her, she had been about twenty. Now she could be any age. Her face seemed never to have resolved itself but stayed as vague and unformed as when she had been a girl. Her hair was straggly and colorless, and she was never anything but homely, but she had an enormous, bony frame that made people look a second time when they passed her on the street. There was not an ounce of fat on her. When she walked, her bones seemed to swing loosely, and she never hit hard upon the earth or seemed, for all her boniness, to have any sharp corners to her. Yet he could see the strain lines beginning around her eyes and mouth, and the way the skin of her face had grown white and dry.

“You sit yourself,” she was saying now. “Wait a minute …” She looked around among the straight-backed chairs, searching for the most comfortable. When she found it she pushed the bowl of soup into Ben Joe’s hands and ran to pull it up. “If we’d of known,” she said, “I’d of cleaned up house a little. How come they’ve not told us you were back?”

“Well, I only got here yesterday.”

“Sit, now. Oh my, let me take that soup bowl off your hands. What you think of New York?”

“I like it all right.” He sat down on the chair and stretched his feet out in front of him. On the table under the window, among the doilies and flower pots and bronzed baby shoes, sat a photograph of his father. It was taken when he still had his mustache, long before he had ever met Lili Belle, but he looked much the same as he had when he died — rumpled hair, black then with only the first touches of white, and crinkling gray eyes and a broad, easy smile. Except for Gram’s bedroom, where Ben Joe’s mother never set foot, this was probably the only place in the world that still had a picture of Phillip Hawkes. Ben Joe reached out and turned it a little in his direction, looking at it thoughtfully.

“You have to excuse Mama’s being so rude,” Lili Belle was saying. “She has gotten like that more and more. The other day this lodger of ours, he stopped to talk to me on account of wanting to know where the clean towels were kept, and Mama clunked him in the chest with the griddle-cake-flipper. Didn’t hurt him none, but I had a whole heap of explaining to do.”

“Was she right about your having some kind of trouble?” Ben Joe asked.

“I’d say she was. That’s why I was sitting in the dark like a spook. Little Phillip is in the hospital with pneumonia and I was resting my eyes from sitting up with him so much. I don’t know where he got it. Folks tell me I take too good care of him, so it can’t of been that he got too cold. Though he is right much of a puddle-wader, that could’ve done it. I told him and told him. When it was serious and I had reason to be worried I was just possessed by the thought of those puddles. I had it in mind, in this dream I had one night, to take me a vacuum cleaner and go vacuum all the puddles up. But the worrying part is over now. Doctors says another ten days or two weeks and he’ll be out.”

“How long’s he been in?” Ben Joe asked.

“Two weeks.”

“How’re you managing the bills?”

“I plan to make it up gradual. I been working at the mill part time since little Phil started school, but not a full day, because I like to be home when he needs me. Oh, Mama would take care of him — says she’s ashamed he was ever born, but I notice she’s right fond of him. But I’d rather it be me. I’ll work full time till the bill’s paid off and then go back half-days again.”

“We’ve got some money in the savings account,” Ben Joe said.

“No, honey, I don’t want it.”

“But we never even touch it. It’s the money Dad saved up and Mama won’t use it no matter what — says it’s only for emergencies. You’re right, you shouldn’t work when little Phillip’s at home.”

“I wouldn’t take it, Benjy. It bothers me to take what we do take offen you all. Your sister Jenny’s been bringing it real regular.”

“Been what?”

“You know — the once-a-month money. She’s not missed a time.”

“But I thought — Doesn’t she mail it?”

“Why, no.” Lili Belle stopped playing with the folds of her skirt and looked up at him. “Neither one of you’s ever mailed it,” she said. “What she said the first time she came was, she would bring it the same as you’d always done.”

“For Pete’s sake.” Ben Joe sat forward in his chair with his elbows on his knees. “I wonder how she knew.”

“Oh, girls’re smarter than you think.” She laughed, and then became quiet again and looked at her hands. “She’s a real nice little girl,” she said. “First time she came I was just merely polite, you know, figuring that what’s your mama’s is your mama’s and I didn’t want to seem to be trying to make friends of your mama’s own daughter. But she was so friendly — came in and taught little Phil how to play this game about scissors cutting rock and rock covering paper, or something. Real good with children, she is.”

“She is,” Ben Joe said. He sat quietly for a minute, and then he cleared his throat and said, “Lili Belle?”

“Hmm?”

“I’ve got something I want to talk to you about.”

“Well, I’m listening.”

“I thought I should get it said, in case I don’t come back to Sandhill for a good while again. I figured …”