Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [130]
“Sam?” the man asked.
“I’m not Sam. Please. You have the wrong number.”
He hung up. He looked around the trailer, and found it stable again.
Then he took his cap and jacket from the closet and put them on, and he wrote a note to Emily: Gone on an errand. Back soon. He let himself out the door and crossed the yard to his truck and climbed in.
It was a forty-five-minute drive to Baltimore, and all through it he talked steadily underneath his breath. “Silly damn Bonny,” he muttered, “damn meddler; stupid, interfering meddler, thinks she’s so—” He glanced in the rear-view mirror and swung out to pass a van. “Sitting there rubbing her hands together, laughing at me; thinks she got to me somehow. Ha, that’s how much she knows, yes …”
He wondered how she’d found out what town he lived in. He had never told her. He considered the possibility that she had put the item in every paper in the state of Maryland—every paper in the country, even. Lord, all across the continent, for anyone to see. He pictured her telephoning hundreds and thousands of editors, rushing into their offices, trailing balls of Kleenex and rough drafts on the backs of cash-register tapes—a woman with her accelerator stuck. She had always lived a headlong kind of life. Any mental image he had of her (he thought, honking at a wandering sports car) showed her breathless, with her hair in her eyes and her blouse untucked. Look how she’d thrown his clothes out, and his mother and his sister and the dog! Cursing to himself, slamming on his brakes, he forgot that she had thrown them out at different times. He imagined that she’d dumped them all at once. He seemed to remember Brindle and Louisa, deposited in front of the hardware store, waiting on little camp stools till he could collect them. Or, why camp stools, even? Lying on their backs, like overturned beetles, in an ocean of discarded costumes. He recalled that Bonny often seemed to be held together by safety pins. Safety pins connected a slip strap to her slip, a buttonhole to the thready place where a button should have been, and her watch to its black ribbon band. And the watch was almost never wound. And the gaps in her hems were repaired with Scotch tape that rustled when she walked; no, when she ran; no, when she galloped by. She had never been known to just walk.
This used to be all farmland, but now each town was linked to the others by a frayed strand of filling stations and shopping malls. Morgan sped along. The superstructure on his truckbed moaned. The padlock on its rear door clanked whenever he slowed down.
“Thinks she’s so clever, thinks I care. Thinks it matters what fool thing she does to me.”
He entered the outskirts of Baltimore. They’d put up more apartment buildings. You couldn’t turn your back, it seemed. At a traffic light a boy braked beside him in a long, finned Dodge that must have been twenty years old. All the windows were closed, but the music on his radio was so loud that it sailed out anyhow—the “Steadily Depressing, Low-Down, Mind-Messing, Working at the Carwash Blues.” In spite of himself, Morgan beat time on the steering wheel.
At least there was a little sun here—a pale, weak, late-winter sun lighting white steeples and empty sidewalks. He drove north on Charles, passing a stream of small shops and then the University, deserted-looking,