Anne Tyler - If Morning Ever Comes

“Sure,” Ben Joe said. “I’ll be by at—”

“Hush!” She frowned toward where John was standing talking with Joanne and then turned back to Ben Joe. “Will you hush?”

The urge to tease came over him again. He grinned down at her and said, “Don’t tell me he doesn’t know I’m coming! Why, Shelley Domer, that amounts to outright two-timing. I swear if you’re not—”

“I mean it, now!” Her face was white and miserable; Ben Joe immediately felt sorry. “He is a steady boyfriend, after all,” she said. “I don’t want to—”

“Okay, okay.”

He reached around to help her with her coat, and then raised one hand in Horner’s direction.

“See you,” he said.

“So long.”

When they were outside, Joanne stopped to button up her coat. “It’s getting kind of chilly,” she said. “Shelley hasn’t changed much, has she?”

“I don’t know.”

“I mean, she’s still sort of quiet and drifty. You always did alternate between two extremes, come to think of it — first a dreamy girl and then a shrieky, dancing one.”

“Well.”

“That all you got to say?”

He watched the traffic light patiently, not hearing her. “What you got on your mind, Ben Joe?”

“I don’t know. Joanne?”

“What?”

“Would you say about ten dollars a day is enough to pay for a stay in a hospital?”

“That depends on the circumstances.”

“Well, I don’t know the circumstances, really. It’s just this friend of mine. I’m worried about how much money he’d need.”

“Light’s changed.”

She pulled him impatiently into the street, but once they had crossed she walked more slowly, studying the question.

“It sounds like a fair guess,” she said. “Yes, I’d say so.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said Ben Joe. “I keep thinking it should be more, somehow.”

“That’s your problem,” said Joanne.

Overnight the weather turned much colder. The wind howled and rattled at the bones of the house, and dry leaves scraped along the sidewalk. In the evening, when Ben Joe began dressing for his date with Shelley, his whole family pounced on him out of sheer boredom and wanted to know where he was going.

“Just out,” he said.

He was in the living room, buttoning up the shirt Jenny had just ironed.

“I thought you might take me to see Jamie Dower tonight,” Gram said.

“In this weather?”

“Well … it’s Sunday. Good visiting time.”

“I’ll take you tomorrow,” he said. “I don’t know why we can’t get synchronized on this Jamie Dower thing. If I’m ready to go you’ve got an iron-bound excuse not to, and now that I’m busy you’re almost out in the car honking for me. Where’s Susannah? I bet you anything she took my cuff links.”

“She’s in the attic,” said Tessie. “Hunting squirrels.”

“Oh.”

“She took the only gun of mine that really shoots and she’s been up there since suppertime. Got a whole soup can full of B-B’s beside her.”

“Funny way for a grown woman to spend her time. You notice if she’s wearing my cuff links?”

“The squirrels have been nesting there,” his mother said. “Someone has to get rid of them. Besides, your shirt has button cuffs.”

“Oh. Well, then, it’s the wrong shirt. I asked for the one with the French cuffs on it.”

Jenny, sitting on the rug with a book, looked up and made a face at him. “Serve you right if I’d made you iron it yourself,” she said.

“That one looks just as nice, Ben Joe.”

“Okay, okay. How can she hunt squirrels in the dark?”

“She’s got the extension lamp,” Tessie said. “She’s really made at them.”

“She’ll never shoot one.”

“Ben Joe, your shirt tail is out.”

“I know it.”

He jammed it into his trousers and went to the hall mirror to put his tie on. In the wavy glass he saw his face, sullen and heavy with the boredom of a long day at home. Behind him a part of his family was reflected, looking just as bored as he did. His mother sat in the rocking chair, absently glancing through a newspaper; her neck was made funny and crooked by a flaw in the mirror. Beside her sat Tessie, doing nothing at all but looking admiringly at her new shoes and occasionally wetting one finger and bending down to wipe at an imaginary scuff. The shoes were not reflected, but he had been asked to give an opinion of them so many times in the last day and a half that he thought he would be seeing them in his sleep forever — clumsy, too-white oxfords that were still new enough to look enormous on her feet. Also in the mirror were Jenny’s legs, but not the rest of her. He thought even her legs looked bored.

He finished knotting his tie, made a ferocious face in the mirror to see if his teeth needed brushing, and went back into the living room for his jacket.

“I’m going,” he said.

“Are you going to be anywhere near the drugstore?”

“Or the newsstand?”

“Nope,” he said. “Not going anywhere near anything.”

“Well, it’s hard to believe when you’re dressed up so handsome,” Gram said. “Come kiss me good night.”

He bent down and kissed her cheekbone, and then kissed the tops of Tessie’s and his mother’s head for good measure.

“I won’t be late,” he said.

“All right, Ben Joe.”

At the doorway he turned to look at them again. He was in one of those faraway moods when everything he saw seemed to be inside a shining goldfish bowl, and he suddenly saw how closed-off his family looked. They went peacefully on with what they were doing; Ben Joe, having vanished, might as well not exist. When he stepped outside he gave the door an enormous slam, just to make himself exist a minute longer.

The wind bit at this face and his bare hands. It was very dark, without a moon, but he could see the white clouds swimming rapidly past the house tops. And before he had even reached the front gate, the cold had begun to seep in all over. He didn’t care. He was glad to get out in the fresh air after the long, stuffy day, and he was glad to be going to Shelley’s, although he couldn’t say why. There were times when even Shelley’s shyness and her slowness seemed to be exactly what he needed. And he would like the way she greeted him at the door, with her face so formal.

He hurried on, making his arms hang loosely instead of huddling them close to his body, because the cold air still felt good. A twig from one of the trees along the sidewalk stung across his face. He ducked and then turned in, whistling now, to climb the long steps to Shelley’s house.

She answered almost as soon as he knocked. He saw the outline of her behind the mesh curtain, running in order to let him in quickly. The minute the door was open she tugged at his arm with both hands and said, “Get in, Ben Joe, aren’t you frozen?”

He nodded, smiling at her, and stepped inside so that she could shut the door behind him.

“Come on in,” she said, “come in. I declare, I think you’re just frozen stiff and silent. Take off your coat, now. That’s right.”

She took the coat from him and smiled into his eyes. It had been a long time since he had seen her looking so pretty. Her hair was down, the way she had worn it when she was in high school, and it was well brushed and shining. There was something besides lipstick on her face — rouge, he thought — that made her look excited and bright-eyed, and she was watching him with that half-scared expression.

“I sure am glad to see you,” he said suddenly.

“Well, thank the Lord you’ve said something. I thought maybe you were going to be speechless all evening.”