Jack (Gilead #4)(30)

“Thank you,” he said. “And for the pancakes. And the good night’s sleep.”

She said, “Just trying to keep you alive.”

“You don’t have to do that. Try, I mean. You keep me alive already. Just the thought of you. I didn’t mean that.” It was much more than he meant to say. So he stepped out the door and put on his hat and then lifted it to her, that odd little gallantry, skipped down the steps, and walked away. He did turn once, and he saw her stooping gracefully in the faint morning twilight, gathering roses.





* * *





After two weeks a letter came for him, for Mr. Jack Boughton. The desk clerk read the name out slowly and squinted at him, then read the name again, as if studying the discrepancy between the written name and Jack’s person. When Jack reached for it, he held it away from him. He said, “We used to have a Boughton here, but he’s two weeks behind on his rent. As of yesterday. So I guess that means he doesn’t live here anymore.”

Jack had paid his rent. He had stayed sober, kept his job, bought a new razor and a decent aftershave. This may have been what threw him off. Normally he had to grant that he had made himself vulnerable to what might be called ridicule. He had no idea how many times he had been talked into paying his rent more than once. Then, before he knew it, he was all out of money, and after a few days the clerk was letting him off again, after threatening to throw his little hoard of shirts and socks and pilferings, his effects, as they say, out into the street. It was a kind of joke, he believed, when he was too fuddled to take a harsher view. There were always dishes to wash. So his life was not much affected, all in all. He drew a kind of resignation around himself, as if it were dignity.

Now he had, so to speak, waked up sober. The preposterous fellow with dirty yellow hair just the color of the tobacco stains on his fingers and greasy yellow-tinted spectacles was treating him like a fool. Jack grabbed his arm and took the letter out of his hand, which, he thought with some satisfaction, was probably normal in the circumstances.

On the flap of the envelope were written D. Miles and her address. So he put it in his pocket. He tipped his hat to the clerk, just to keep him off balance, and strode into the street and down the street until he was out of sight of him. I strode, he thought, still pleased with himself. But why would Della have written to him? The fact was that he had written his address on the back cover of her book, in tiny letters along the spine. She might never have seen it was there in faint pencil. He had sharpened one of Mrs. Beverly’s pencils, then rubbed the point of it against a newspaper until it was so fine it cut into the paper if he was not very careful. He had gone out on the pavement to look up at the number of the house he had lived in, slept in, for at least two years. It was a long time since he had thought of himself as having an address. He had written, in the tiniest hand he could manage, 11N15th. And she had found it and known what it must be, and sent him a letter. He had hardly dared hope.

He would have to sit down somewhere to read it. Somewhere private. It did not say, “Stop walking past my house,” because he had stopped, with some effort. Of course, two weeks was not long enough to demonstrate his resolve, which was considerable, though she couldn’t know that. She was not asking him to return anything he had pocketed. That one tiny flower.

The door to Mrs. Beverly’s shop opened. The bell rang. He had gone to work, never having decided to. This must be what most people do, the explanation of the city, day after day itself. Mrs. B. said, “Morning, Slick. I’m going to need help with some shelving.” She was a short woman afflicted with a fear of heights, rueful at the thought of climbing a stepladder.

“Glad to oblige.” So the letter would wait in his pocket until noon. He put the stepladder against the wall of shelves in the back room, climbed up, and pulled down a dusty box. Brogans, he decided. One was brown and one was oxblood. He put the box aside, on the assumption that there must be another box like it, mutatis mutandis. Six boxes were saddle oxfords, but the seventh held a brogan and an oxford, a size twelve and a size eleven, not that this mattered, except that it made him check through the shoes that apparently matched. Among the oxfords he found a box containing a nine and a twelve. None of the other boxes contained a twelve and a nine. He put that box aside also. The next box contained one shoe, a nine, a wing tip. He set it aside. Ten boxes were matching pairs. In the eleventh he found two Christmas ornaments in bunched newspaper. Plain red balls with nothing particular about them to explain their being shelved here. The box said tasseled loafers, white, eleven. He noticed that the ornaments were a matched pair as to size and color. When he noticed that he had noticed this, it brought tears to his eyes. The wall of identical boxes began to look to him like something weirdly insoluble, like an algebra test in a dream. When Mrs. B. brought him his sandwich, he was actually sitting on the floor among these unaccountable boxes, dozens of them.

She nodded and said, “Bad inventory can do a lot of damage. I wouldn’t take it too much to heart.”

“Yes,” he said. “My thought was that if we could make them into pairs, they’d be easier to sell. Possible, at least.”

“I appreciate that. Might as well burn them, otherwise.”

He imagined a reeking, smoldering heap. Surely she wouldn’t. Why did he seem to know exactly what a burning shoe would smell like? He realized he was suffering a little slippage, losing ground to self-doubt. Sweet Jesus, he thought, just a plain sandwich, the usual ingredients. And so it was, peanut butter and jelly. He realized he had suppressed an impulse to tell Mrs. B. that this confusion was not his fault.