Jack (Gilead #4)(28)
“We don’t have company very often. There’s another chair in the kitchen. Eat your breakfast.”
“Company,” Lorraine said. “You know, people around here have a name for him. They call him That White Man. It’s short for That White Man That Keeps Walking Up and Down the Street All the Time.”
Flinch. Della put her hand on his shoulder so he wouldn’t stand up. “Do you really want him to leave now, Lorraine? Is that the idea now? It wasn’t five minutes ago.”
“I never wanted him here in the first place. Nobody asked me.”
“No reason to be unkind. This wasn’t his idea, either, remember.”
“He might as well leave and be done with it. The whole neighborhood is going to know he spent the night no matter what.”
He wanted to find his handkerchief to wipe his face. When he blushed, he sweated. Of course people noticed him, walking past her house however many times it was. He actually hadn’t thought of that. Fool. But it would look a little abject to be mopping his brow with that monogrammed rag he had in his pocket. It wasn’t even his monogram.
“Then let him eat his pancakes. If it doesn’t matter when he leaves, anyway, he can leave in an hour.”
Lorraine said, “This is just ridiculous. I sat up the whole night so I could keep an eye on him. Now I just want him gone. I’m going to go get some sleep, and he better be gone when I wake up. If anything goes wrong, it’s your problem!” She said this last as her chair scraped back, and she left the room.
Della said, “She’s a really nice woman, most of the time.” She sat down across from him, her head in her hands.
He said, “This is all very embarrassing. You should have waked me up.”
“And sent you out into the dark and the cold. I know. Not that it would have solved anything.”
He couldn’t stay and he couldn’t leave. So there he was. The story of his life.
“If the world had ended that night,” she said, “I could let you fall asleep on my sofa and give you breakfast in the morning, and no one would say a word about it. They might say it was nice. How could I wake you up so you’d be walking home in the cold? In the middle of the night.” An earnest question.
“I’ve done that. Any number of times. I’m not exactly fragile.”
She shook her head. “Nobody wants to wake up like that. You didn’t even have your dinner.”
“My fault.”
She nodded. “True enough. I’ll forgive you for it if you eat your breakfast.”
“Seriously, though. It might be better if I left now. In an hour more people will be awake. It might be getting light by then.”
“Yes, I think it would be better to wait two hours, so you won’t seem to be sneaking away.”
He laughed. “I believe I always seem to be sneaking away. My boss calls me Slick. She hadn’t known me five minutes before she started calling me that.”
She looked at him. “I can see what she means. It’s kind of a compliment.”
“No, it isn’t. But she’s all right. We talk a little baseball.”
“Good,” she said. She had taken her hands away from her face. “You’re all right, then.”
Solicitude. So he said, “Sure I am. I guess you better find yourself another stray.” That sounded rude. It was the flinch speaking.
“Oh.”
He said, “All I mean is that I’m trouble. I might do you real harm, never meaning to.”
She said, “I know that.”
“I can’t leave and I can’t stay.”
“Then you might as well stay.”
“For those two hours you gave me. Maybe an hour and a half by now.”
She said, “I make food for you and you don’t touch it.”
“I just thought I should talk to you first. I’m sorry about last night.”
“I know that.”
“It was hard for me to give up that book. I should have brought it back weeks ago. Months.”
“I’ll lend you another book.”
He laughed. “I’d appreciate that. And I want you to know I didn’t figure out some nefarious scheme to come across you in the cemetery. That was so—unexpected. I’m sure you must wonder about it.”
“No, I’ve never wondered.”
“All right, then. I was grievously at fault—no, let me make my confession. If you had just spoken to the guard, he’d have let you out. He’d have unlocked a gate for you. You probably didn’t have to go through the whole night there.”
“Do you think I didn’t know that?”
Well.
She said, “I bring problems on myself. Some of them are worth it.” She looked at him calmly, candidly.
He said, “You loosened my tie.”
She nodded. “I unbuttoned your collar.”
He felt himself blush. After a minute, he said, “You know, the world didn’t end that night. Nice idea, but nothing came of it.”
“I noticed.”
“I’m just saying what your father would say. Don’t take in strays.”
“My father would never say that.”
“Mine either.”
“They always talk as though the world has ended. Turn the other cheek. Welcome the stranger. All right. Then they say, Well, you do have to exercise a little common sense.”