Earthly Possessions - Anne Tyler [75]
“I’m sorry, honey, I didn’t know they were having it.”
“You should have looked ahead of time.”
“My idea of a perfect day,” I told him, “is an empty square on the calendar. That’s all I ask.”
“Well, then,” said Jiggs. He adjusted his glasses and ran his finger across the page. “In the month of March, you’ll have three perfect days.”
“Three? Only three?”
I looked down at the back of his neck—concave, satiny. Very slowly, I began to let myself imagine his mother. She would ride into town on a Trailways bus, wearing something glorious and trashy spun of Lurex. I would meet her when she arrived. I would bring Jiggs with me. I would at long last give him up.
That morning Linus and Miss Feather were helping at the church bazaar; I had the place to myself. I sent the children to school and gave the house a final cleaning, dispensing with all the objects that had sprouted in the night—rolled socks, crumpled homework papers, and a doll’s toy dollhouse no bigger than a sugar cube, filled with specks of furniture. (I didn’t check to see what kind of furniture; I feared to find another dollhouse tucked inside that one.)
Then I took a bath and dressed in a fresh skirt and blouse. The mirror showed me someone stark and high-cheekboned, familiar in an unexpected way. My eyes had a sooty look and you would think from the spots of color on my cheeks that I was feverish. I wasn’t, though. I felt very cold and heavy.
The dog seemed to know that I was going and kept following me too closely, moaning and nudging the backs of my knees with his nose. He got on my nerves. I unlocked my studio door and pushed him inside. “Goodbye, Ernest,” I said. Then I straightened and saw the greenish light that filtered through the windows—a kind of light they don’t have anyplace else. Oh, I’ve never had the knack of knowing I was happy right while the happiness was going on. I closed the door and passed back through the house, touching the worn, smudged woodwork, listening to absent voices, inhaling the smell of school paste and hymnals. It didn’t look as if I’d be able to go through with this after all.
But once you start an action, it tends to bear you along.
All I could hope for was to be snagged somewhere. In the sunporch, maybe, circling the phone, waiting for news that Jiggs had a sniffle and was being sent home early. In the kitchen, taking forever to make a cup of instant coffee. Absently pouring a bowl of cereal. Something besides cereal fell from the box—a white paper packet. I plucked it out and opened it. Inside was a stamped tin badge, on which a cartoon man walked swiftly toward me with his feet the biggest part of him. And along the bottom, my own personal message.
Keep on truckin’.
15
We drove slowly, looking for a bank that stayed open Friday nights. We left Perth behind, entered the next town and then the next. These places were strung together like beads, no empty spots between them but ravelings of Tastee-Freezes, sea-shell emporiums, and drive-in movies. It was dark enough now so I could see the actors’ faces on the screens. But all I saw of Jake and Mindy was the gold line edging each of their profiles, sometimes lit other colors by the neon signs we passed. Mindy was craning forward, searching the buildings, biting her lower lip. Jake was sunk low in his seat like someone sick or beaten, and he hardly bothered to look out the window.
“Maybe in this state, banks don’t have Friday hours,” Mindy said.
Jake didn’t answer.
“Jake?”
He stirred. “Sure they do,” he said.
“How do you know? What if we end up driving all night, Jake, ride right off the bottom of Florida. Shouldn’t we stop and get a store to cash this thing?”
“Well, stores, now, they might tend to make more of a to-do,” Jake said. “Be more apt to remember us later.”
“But I’m tired! I got a crick in my neck.”
Jake let his head turn, following a likely-looking office building.
“If I don’t eat by six I faint,” said Mindy. “And look, it’s almost seven.”
“Well,