Marilynne Robinson - Home

“It’s no trouble,” she said. “I’m just glad you’re here.”

“Thank you. Glory. That’s good to know.”

He hesitated over her name, maybe because he was not absolutely certain which sister he was dealing with, maybe because he did not wish to seem too familiar. Maybe because familiarity required an effort. She started putting water in the percolator. But he said, “I’m sorry about this — could I lie down for a little while?” He put his hand to his face. That gesture, she thought. “This shouldn’t have happened. I’ve been all right for a long time.”

“Sure, you go rest. I’ll get the aspirin.” She said, “It seems like old times, sneaking you upstairs with a bottle of aspirin.” She had meant this as a joke of sorts, but he gave her a startled look, and she was sorry she had said it.

Then they heard bedsprings and their father calling, “Do we have company, Glory! I believe we do! Yes!” And then the slippered feet and the cane.

Jack stood up and brushed his hair off his brow and shook down his cuffs and waited, and then the old man appeared in the door. “Ah, here you are! I knew you would come, yes!”

She could see her father’s surprise and regret. His eyes brimmed. Twenty years is a very long time. Jack offered his handand said, “Sir,” and his father said, “Yes, shaking hands is very good. But I’ll put down this cane — There,” he said, when he had hooked it on the table’s edge. “Now,” he said, and he embraced his son. “Here you are!” He put the flat of his hand on Jack’s lapel, caressingly. “We have worried so much, so much. And here you are.”

Jack put his arms around his father’s shoulders carefully, as if he were frightened by the old man’s smallness and frailty, or embarrassed by it.

His father stepped back and looked at him again. He wiped his eyes. “Isn’t it something!” he said. “Here I’ve been wearing a necktie for days, waking and sleeping as Glory will tell you, and you’ve caught me in my nightshirt! And what is it? Almost noon! Ah!” he said, and laid his head against Jack’s lapel for a moment. Then he said, “Glory will help me out a little. I’ll get my shoes on and comb my hair, and pretty soon I’ll be something you can recognize! But I knew I heard your voice and I couldn’t wait to get a look at you! Yes!” he said, and took his cane and started toward the hallway. “Glory, if you could help me a little. After you put the coffee on.” And he set off toward his room.

Jack said, “After all these years I guess he still knows when I’m hungover.”

“Well, the coffee will help. He’s excited now, but he’ll rest after lunch and you’ll be able to get some sleep.”

Jack said, “Lunch.”

Twenty years was long enough to make a stranger of someone she had known far better than this brother of hers, and here he was in her kitchen, pale and ill at ease and in no state to receive the kindness prepared for him, awaiting him, even then wilting and congealing into the worst he could have meant by the word “lunch.” And what an ugly word that was anyway.

“I’ll help Papa shave, and then I’ll bring you the razor. The cups are where they always were, and the spoons. So help yourself when the coffee is done.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I will.” He was still standing, still hat in hand. That’s how he was, all respectfulness and good manners when he knew he ought to have been in trouble. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. She had heard someone say that about him once, a woman at church. He cleared his throat. “Has any mail come here for me?”

“No, nothing.” She went off to help her father put his socks on and shave and get his shirt buttoned, and she thought, as she often did, At least I know what is required of me now, and that is something to be grateful for. She helped him on with his tie and his jacket and parted his hair and combed it straight to one side, which is how he had always combed it himself. Well, no matter, there wasn’t much left of it anyway.

When she was done, her father said, “Now I’ll just look at the newspaper for a little while. I know Jack will want to get cleaned up, too.”

She could smell that the coffee had gone a little past ready, and the thought struck her that he might have left, but there he was, washing up at the kitchen sink with a bar of laundry soap. The house had always been redolent of lavender and lye. She wondered if he remembered. He had hung his jacket and tie over the back of a chair and loosened his collar and was scrubbing his face and his neck with a tea towel, one of those on which their grandmother in her old age had embroidered the days of the week. No matter.

He wrung out the towel and began drying himself down with it. And then he realized she was in the room and turned around and looked at her, embarrassed that she should see him so undefended, she thought, since he rolled down his sleeves and buttoned them and pushed his hair off his brow.

“That’s a little better,” he said. Then he shook out the tea towel and hung it on the bar above the sink. It said Tuesday.

“You should drink this coffee if you’re going to.”

“Yes. I forgot the coffee, didn’t I.” He put his jacket back on and slipped the tie into his pocket.

They sipped bad coffee together while their father sat by the window in his Morris chair reading about the world situation. There were five years between them, and Teddy and Grace, and he had never shown much interest in her beyond tousling her hair now and then. It wasn’t her fault that she was the one to have been at home when everything happened. He seemed embarrassed, this man who began to remind her more of her brother as she looked at him. It was hard for her to look away from him, though she knew he would have liked her to. He held his cup in both hands, but it trembled anyway. He spilled coffee down his sleeve and winced with irritation, and she thought how kind her father was to give him time to recover himself. She said, “You couldn’t be more welcome here, Jack. You can’t know what it means to him to have you here.”

He said, “It’s good of you to say that, Glory.”

“It’s just the truth.”

There now. Her thought was that she might be able to worry a little less if an edge crept into her voice or if she lost patience for a minute.

He said, “Thanks for the coffee. I’ll go shave.”

HE HAD TAKEN HIS BAG UPSTAIRS, AND HE CAME BACK down with his jaw polished and his hair combed and smelling of her father’s Old Spice. He was still buttoning his cuffs. He nodded at the towel. “Is it Tuesday?”

“No,” she said, “that towel is a little fast. It’s still Monday.”

He reddened, but he laughed. And from the other room the newspaper crumpled and then they heard the cane and the hard, formal shoes that took a good shine and would not wear out in this world. Their father appeared, a roguish look in his eye, as there always was when he felt at the top of his form.

“Yes, children, lunchtime, I believe. Glory has been so busy getting things ready. She said you hated cream pie, but I was certain I remembered you had a special fondness for it, and she made it on my say-so, despite her reservations.”

“It’s pretty leathery by now,” she said.

“You see, she’s trying to prejudice you against it! You’d think we’d made a wager of some kind!”

Jack said, “I like cream pie.” He glanced at her.

“It’s for supper, in any case,” she said, and she thought he looked relieved. “Jack’s probably too tired to be hungry. He spent last night on the bus. We should give him a sandwich and let him go rest.”

“I’m fine,” he said.

His father looked at him. “You’re pale. Yes, I see that.”