A Hole in the Universe - Mary McGarry Morris [113]
Delores took her into the kitchen and cut a slice from the coffee cake she found in the refrigerator. It was almost gone by the time Gordon came back down.
“What’re you doing here?” he demanded from the doorway. His face was flushed.
Jada tried to smile and for a moment seemed almost afraid, stammering how long it had been since she’d seen him and how sick she’d been, but then when she saw Delores’s car she’d just run over to say hello. “She gave me some cake.” Jada put the last forkful into her mouth and swallowed hard, as desperate to keep talking as Delores was to keep the moment from caving in on itself. “It’s good. It’s really, really good. Homemade’s always the best, don’t you think?” Jada’s voice weakened under his cold scrutiny. “Did you make it?” she asked him.
“It’s Entenmann’s,” Delores finally answered, and they both regarded her with almost identical expressions of strain and bewilderment.
“I have to do something.” He turned as if to go back upstairs.
“Go ahead. I’ll keep the coffee warm,” Delores said.
He looked at her. “That’s okay. It’s late. It’s too late now for coffee.”
Too late for Delores to be here. More than hurt, she was angry with herself for letting the girl in.
“Oh, I don’t want coffee,” Jada said. “Do you have any milk, though? I’d love some milk. I’m really thirsty.”
“There isn’t any milk,” he said.
“How about juice? You got any juice?” Jada’s eyes kept straying to the refrigerator.
“I think you better go,” he told her, and Delores didn’t know which bothered her more, his icy command or the easy forbearance of Jada’s shrug as she rose from the table. Was she so whipped, her threshold for rejection so high, that this one didn’t even matter?
“Do you want me to go, too?” she asked the minute the door closed behind the girl.
“No,” he said, but she knew he did.
“I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have let her in without asking you first.”
He rinsed Jada’s plate and fork, then scrubbed them with the soapy sponge. Impelled by his silence, she tried to defend Jada, excuse him, and explain herself. She could understand his irritation, but Jada hadn’t done anything wrong, at least not intentionally. Deprived of the most basic social skills and manners, she just didn’t know any better. Delores had been too startled by her appearance to turn the poor thing away, she tried to explain. “Next time I’ll know to ask you first.” She touched his arm.
“Well, don’t!” He spun around. “Because I don’t want her here. Ever!”
“My God, Gordon, she’s a poor kid. She was hungry! What’s the harm in giving her some food?” His indifference shocked her. Especially after all he’d been through.
“She’s not my responsibility.”
She looked at him. “Of course she’s your responsibility. She’s a kid, she’s all our responsibility.”
“I can’t take chances like that.”
“Chances? Every morning you get out of bed you’re taking a chance!”
“No, it’s different with me.”
“Why? Because you spent all those years in jail? So you’re going to keep living your life like that?” That’s exactly what he’d done this past week and a half, locked himself away from everyone.
“You don’t understand. I know she’s got problems. But I can’t get involved. I can’t even care.”
“You’ve got to care, Gordon. You’ve got to reach out. To people.” To me, she longed to say. “But especially to a child.”
His cold quiet triggered the old fear. She needed to coax him back from the precipice he had backed them both onto. The words came so fast, she felt breathless with their urgency. “We have to help one another. We only get so many chances, Gordon, just so many ways to save ourselves. But then after a while if we keep turning away, then they stop.”
“Well, so then they do.” He squeezed out the sponge.
“How can you do that?” Her voice rose over the running water. “How can you shut yourself off like that? I can’t imagine living like that. It’s like being dead.”
He turned off the water and began to clean the place where Jada had sat. Bent over the table and with the