Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [121]
“Keep her? Hand me that cap, please.”
“You don’t think he can make us give her up or anything, do you? In some court of law?”
“Nonsense,” Morgan said, screwing the flashlight shut.
“Morgan, I don’t understand how he and I switched sides here,” Emily said. “He used to claim I tied him down. Now all at once he’s going to work in a bank, and I lead an unstable life, he says.”
“How can you have a more stable life than ours?” Morgan asked her. He dropped the flashlight into Gina’s trunk, closed the lid, and snapped the locks down.
But in the living room it seemed that everyone was conspiring to seem as unstable as possible. Gina was sitting on Leon’s knee, which she had not done in years. She looked awkward and precarious. Louisa was knitting her eternal scarf. The dog was asking to go out: he paced up and down in front of Leon, his toenails clicking on the floor. And Brindle had somehow worked around to her favorite subject: Horace. “I never thought we had much in common because he was a gardening man, always messing in his garden. He owned the row-house next to ours when I was just a girl. We only had a little puddle of a yard, but he had a corner lot, with roses and azaleas out back and some of those tiny fruit trees that you flatten to a wall—tortured, I always said. I never liked that kind of tree. And a real little fountain with a statue of a goddess. Well, not real; just plaster or something, but still. He came out every morning and watered his flowers, pruned his shrubs if the merest sprig was out of place. I laughed at him for that. Then he brought me fresh-picked roses with the dew and the aphids still on them and I would say, ‘Oh, thanks,’ hardly caring, but if he didn’t come I started noticing. What doesn’t leave an empty space, if you’re used to it and it goes? I think he was lonesome. He said I put him in mind of his plaster goddess, but that just made me laugh more. One of her bosoms was hanging out and she didn’t have a nipple. And he was an old fellow, really, or seemed old then, these knotted white legs in gardening shorts … but when he came calling he wore trousers, and a white shirt with one of those collars that spread wide, like wings. Oh, I sincerely miss him still,” she said, “and I suppose I always will. Now it’s me that’s bringing roses, when I go to visit his grave.”
“Everything’s packed,” Emily told Leon.
“Good.”
He set Gina aside and stood up.
“What’s funniest,” said Brindle, rising also, “is I’m older now than Horace was when he started courting me. Can you believe it?”
Leon gave Emily a long, stern look. It was plain what he was saying: Call this a fit life for a child? As if she understood, Louisa lifted her chin and fixed him with a glare.
“Usually,” she told him, “I would be in a much more elegant place, I want you to know.”
Then Brindle wheeled on her and said, “Oh, Mother, hush. Wouldn’t every one of us? Be quiet.”
Still Emily wouldn’t answer what Leon was asking her.
Leon and Morgan together carried the trunk through the hall. Harry led the way, in a joyful rush, and Gina followed with her sleeping bag. Emily had Joshua astride her hip. Already, so soon after his bath, he had a used look. Emily pressed her cheek to him and drew in his smell of milk and urine and baby powder. She trailed the others down the stairs.
“I brought my father’s Buick because I knew we’d need the luggage space,” Leon was telling Morgan. “But maybe still I’ll have to get a rope from somewhere. I’m not so sure the lid will close.”
“You want to keep a rope in your car at all times,” Morgan said. “Or better yet, one of those nylon-coated cords with hooks at either end. Simply go to any discount camping store, you see …”
Leon set down his end of the trunk and rummaged through his pockets for the keys. The sun gave his hair a hard blue shine, like bits of coal. Emily studied him from the doorway. The odd thing was that although she no longer loved him, she had the feeling this was only another step in their marriage: his opening his father’s Buick, Morgan helping him load the trunk in, Gina tossing