Jack (Gilead #4)(27)

She opened the door. That flinch. He saw tears in her eyes. She said, “So you remembered to come, after all. In the middle of the night. Liquor on your breath.” She said, “It’s after midnight. That makes you a day late.”

This was bad enough. He hardly knew her, and he’d almost made her cry. But at least he knew now that she had been expecting him, a remarkable thing. He handed her the little package with her book in it and said, “I happened to be in the neighborhood,” which was what he had planned to say if she seemed not to have remembered that invitation, or not to have meant it. He said, “My apologies. I mean that quite sincerely,” and tipped his hat, which he would have removed except for that fear of trying to seem ingratiating. He did look at her face, no harm in that. He might as well take what pleasure he could before the regret really set in.

So he left her porch and set out on the long walk home or somewhere. It struck him how foolish he’d been to tell himself he was living for her sake, and how lost he was already without anything at all to tell himself. But he heard her footsteps. She had come after him, and she put her hand in the crook of his arm. “I kept a drumstick for you, Mr. Boughton, and some stuffing, and a piece of pie. Lorraine took the rest over to the church. But there’s plenty here.” She said, “I just don’t want you to walk away looking so sad.”

A parlor, very warm after the street. A drab couch on a bright rug, a little bookcase with books stacked on both sides of it, an upright piano with a lace scarf and a crowd of family pictures, one of them Jesus. He sat down on the couch with his hat beside him, and she went into the kitchen to make up a plate for him. He heard the front door open and close and felt the cold from it. That woman, Lorraine, said, “I suppose you know there’s an old white man asleep on the sofa. I suppose you can explain that.”

And Della said, “Oh, leave him be. He’s just so weary.”





* * *





He woke up thinking that a pillowcase is a pleasant thing. This one was perfect, a little crisp with laundering but very soft with use. He was lying crouched on a sofa with his head on a pillow and a blanket over him. What! He sat up, bewildered, in a lamplit room, a black woman in a housecoat and slippers watching him from an armchair in the corner. Lenore. No, Lorraine. His hat was in arm’s reach. He said, “I should be going. Thanks for everything. Very much,” and picked it up.

She said, “You’re not leaving yet. You can’t go sneaking out of the house before the sun comes up.”

“I see,” he said, for some reason. He wanted to ask where Della was, but decided against it. He thought he might make an attempt at conversation. “I understand you teach with Miss Miles.”

“Algebra.” She dropped the word like a trump card, and that was the end of conversation. After a few minutes, she did say, “The washroom is there across the hall from the kitchen. You better clean up. She’s going to make you pancakes.”

This last she said in that tone of incredulous rebuke people use to announce a wholly unmerited kindness. He said, “Thank you,” on the grounds that the phrase seemed generally inoffensive, and went to find the bathroom. He pulled the cord, the light came on, and there he was, unshaven and scarred and haggard, in a little room that smelled like lavender. In the cabinet there were bottles and jars and curlers and pins, but no razor. He did find a wide-tooth comb. Tooth powder, which he put on the tip of his finger. It seemed very wrong to him that he should be looking at these things, touching them. But he did allow for a certain desperation in himself that had to be dealt with. He could hear Della in the kitchen. He washed his face again, gargled the water he could hold in his cupped hand, pulled the cord again, and stood there in the dark, feeling the overbearing innocence of strangers’ domesticity. He absolutely should not be there. He could not help having noticed the painted cup on the windowsill with its bouquet of artificial violets. In the dark he was still aware of it, the kind of tentative claim on a rented space people make without even thinking about it. He could slip the flowers in his pocket and no one would notice for weeks, probably. The flowers would be there, in quiet effect, until someone noticed they were gone. He pinched off just one little bloom. Then he made himself step out into the hall. And there was Della, turning from the stove to smile at him. Sweet Jesus, more domesticity. She was wearing an apron—a sky-blue dress he thought he had seen before and a yellow apron with flowers on it. The little room was very bright, probably cheerful to a less nocturnal eye, to someone not wearing the clothes he had slept in.

He said, “I should be going. You’ve been very kind. I—” He was about to say something complicated about wanting to return her book and regretting any inconvenience. Then he said, “I can’t be late to work,” which sounded so much like a lie that the truth of it startled him.

She said, “It’s five o’clock in the morning. I think you have time for a little breakfast.”

The hiss of pancake batter on a hot skillet, coffee percolating. Here he was, within three feet of a woman so lovely in his thoughts that he was afraid of her.

She laughed. “So here I am, cooking breakfast for the Prince of Darkness. How does he like his eggs?”

“Over easy.” Is that what people say? It sounded strange. I’m such a fool.

She said, “If you just sit down at the table—” Which meant, If you’ll just step out of the doorway— She was standing in front of him with a plate in each hand. He took one of them and let her pass. There was a small table by a window, and two chairs. Lorraine was in one of them. Della nodded at the other one, that he should sit down, which left her standing. He said, “You—” and she laughed.