Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [129]
He washed his hands in the tiny bathroom and returned to the kitchen. Emily was dishing out breakfast. He sat down at the table and watched her lay two strips of bacon on his plate. “Come eat, Josh,” she called.
Josh was running a tin trolley car along the edge of the couch. He brought the trolley to the table with him, swaggering along in his rocking-horse gait, studiously silent. (He was the quietest, most accepting child Morgan had ever known.) In his layers of shirts and sweaters he seemed to be having trouble bending his chunky arms. Emily picked him up and set him in his chair. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing to his cup.
“It’s orange juice, Josh.”
Josh took a bite from a strip of bacon, fed another bite to the front window of his trolley car.
“Did you mail my letter?” Emily asked Morgan, sitting down across from him.
“What letter?”
“My letter to Gina, Morgan.”
“Oh, yes,” Morgan said. “I took it to that box in front of the Post Office.”
“It’ll reach Richmond by Tuesday, then,” Emily said.
“Well, or Wednesday.”
“If she writes me back the same day, I might get a letter on Friday.”
“Mm.”
“She hardly ever writes the same day, though.”
“No.”
“I wish she were a better letter-writer.”
He said nothing. She looked up at him.
“Is something wrong?” she asked.
“Wrong?”
“You seem different.”
“I’m fine,” he said.
She went back to buttering her toast. Her hands were white with cold, the nails bluish. The curve of her lashes cast faint shadows on her cheeks. It struck him how unchanged she was. Year after year, while everyone around her grew older, Emily kept her young, pale, unlined face, and her light-colored eyes gave her a look of perpetual innocence. She wore the same clothes. Her hair was the same style, piled in braids on top of her head with a few stray tendrils corkscrewing at her neck to give her a hint of some secret looseness—always possible, never realized—that could stir him still.
Well, he would go to the editors. Of course he would. He’d go storming in with the paper. “See here, what’s the meaning of this? Don’t you people ever check your facts? Morgan Gower, Hardware Store Manager! Where’s your sense of responsibility? I am Morgan Gower. Here I stand before you.”
But they would say, “Aren’t you that fellow Meredith? One that works for young Durwood?”
In fact, he had no case.
2
Emily zipped Josh into his jacket for a walk, but Morgan decided not to go with them. “Don’t you feel well?” she asked him.
“I’m fine, I tell you.”
“Did you pick up those coughdrops?”
“Yes, yes, somewhere here …” He slapped his pockets and beamed at her, intending reassurance. She went on frowning. “Don’t forget we have that show tonight,” she told him.
“No, I haven’t forgotten.”
After they left, he watched them through the living-room window—Emily a fragile little thread of a person, Josh in his fat red jacket trudging along beside her. They were heading north, across a field, toward the scrubby pine woods that ran along the highway. The field was so lumpy and rutted that sometimes Joshua stumbled, but Emily had hold of his hand. Morgan could imagine her tight, steady grip—the steely cords in her wrist, like piano wire.
He turned away from the window a fraction of a second before the phone rang, as if he’d been expecting it. Maybe he just wouldn’t answer. It was sure to be someone pushing in, someone who’d found him out: “So! I hear you died.” But, of course, no one had any way of knowing. He made himself go into the bedroom, where the phone sat on the bureau. It rang six times before he reached it. He lifted the receiver, took a breath, and said, “Hello.”
“Is that you, Sam?” a man asked.
“Yes.”
“It is?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t sound like yourself.”
“I’ve got a cold,” Morgan said.
Morgan grinned into the mirror.
“Well, I guess you heard what happened to Lady.”
Then a strange thing happened. It felt as if the floor just