Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [109]
She wrung out a sponge, wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist, and then looked over at him. “Morgan? What is it?” she asked.
He said, “Emily’s pregnant.”
In the second it took her to absorb it, he saw he had worded it wrong. She could easily misunderstand. She might say, “Why, isn’t that nice! They must be thrilled.” But no, she understood, all right. Her mouth dropped open. She took on a white, opaque look. She reared back and threw the sponge at him. It skimmed his cheekbone, wet and warm and rough like something alive. Partly, he was impressed. (What a woman! Direct as some kind of electrical charge—undiffused.) But he had never been able to tolerate being hit in the face. He felt bitterly, gloriously angry, and free. He turned and walked out of the house.
At the hardware store he pushed past Butkins and went to use the phone. “Emily? Can you talk?” he asked.
“Yes, Leon’s loading the car.”
“Well, I told her,” he said.
“What’d she say?”
“Nothing, in fact.”
“Was she very angry?”
“No. Yes. I don’t know,” he said. “Emily, have you talked to Leon?”
“No. I’m going to.”
“When?”
“Soon,” she said. “Right now we’ve got a show at the library. I have to wait till after it’s done.”
“Well, I don’t know why,” Morgan said.
“Maybe I could tell him tonight.”
“Tonight? Sweetheart, you’d better get this over with,” he said.
“It’s just … you know, just a matter of finding the proper moment.”
After he had hung up, Morgan had a sudden fear that she would never tell Leon. He pictured having to sleep on the couch in his office forever—a man unkempt, uncared for. Like someone who had fallen between two stepping stones in a river, he’d let go of Bonny without yet being certain of Emily. He could not imagine life as a bachelor.
He sat a while drumming his fingers on his desk. He had an urge to write letters. But whom would he write to? He wondered how he could get hold of his cardboard file box. Surely Bonny wouldn’t do anything rash with it, would she?—burn it? set it out for the trashmen? She knew how much it meant to him.
Finally he rose and went downstairs. Butkins was outdoors, helping a customer. In the spring they put some of their merchandise on the sidewalk—flats of seedlings, giant bags of mulch and fertilizer. Morgan peered through the window and saw Butkins tenderly fitting a marigold plant into a brown paper bag. He turned away and went into the stockroom. There were cartons of garden tools here, waiting to be unpacked. He opened one and pulled out trowels, dozens of them, which he heaped on the floor. He opened others and pulled out hedge trimmers, then cultivators, then shiny-toothed wheels for edging lawns. The stockroom became a tangle of chrome blades and painted wooden handles.
Butkins came in and said, “Um …”
Morgan surveyed all he had unpacked. Then he pried up another flap and reached for a pair of grass shears in a cardboard sheath.
Butkins said, “Mr. Gower, there’s some things of yours on the sidewalk.”
“Things?”
“It looks like … belongings. Clothing. Also a dog.”
“How’d they get there?”
“Mrs. Gower, ah, dumped them there.”
Morgan straightened up and followed Butkins through the store and out onto the sidewalk, which was a sea of hats and clothes. An elderly woman with a cane was trying on a pith helmet. Harry, who had never been much of a watchdog, was smiling at her with his tongue hanging out. He was sitting on Morgan’s red-and-white-striped, ’twas-the-night-before-Christmas nightshirt. “I’m sorry, Mr. Gower, I didn’t know what to do,” Butkins said. “It happened so fast. She threw them, like. Knocked over half the seedlings.”
“Yes, but why the dog?” Morgan asked.
“Pardon me?”
“The dog, the dog. It’s not my dog; it’s my mother’s. I never even liked him. He dribbles. Why did she send me the dog?”
“Well, and there’s some