Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [132]
No one came.
Her bed was unmade and her nightgown was a spill of soiled ivory nylon across the rug. All the bureau drawers were open. So was the closet. He tiptoed to the closet. How unlike itself it seemed: so much space. You couldn’t say it was bare, exactly (those clothes of hers she never would give up, skirts with the hemlines altered a dozen different times, Ship ’n Shore blouses from the fifties with their dinky Peter Pan collars), but certainly it was emptier than it used to be. The shelf where he’d kept his hats now held a typewriter case, a hairdryer, and a shoebox. He opened the shoebox and found a pair of shoes, the chunky kind so out of date they were coming back into fashion.
He opened the drawer in her nightstand and found a tube of hand cream and a book of Emily Dickinson’s poems.
He opened the drawer in his nightstand (once upon a time) and found a coupon for instant coffee, a light-up ballpoint pen, and a tiny leather notebook with Night Thoughts written in gilt across the cover. Aha! But the only night thoughts she’d had were:
Woolite
Roland Park Florist
Todd’s birthday?
Something clamped his wrist—a claw. He dropped the book. “Sir,” said Louisa.
“Mother?”
“I’ve forgotten the number for the police.”
“Mother,” he said, “I’ve only come to … pick up a few belongings.”
“Is it 222-3333? Or 333-2222.”
She still had hold of his wrist. He couldn’t believe how strong she was. When he tried to squirm away, she tightened her fingers. He could have struggled harder, but he was afraid of hurting her. There was something brittle and crackling about the feel of her. He said, “Mother dear, please let go.”
“Don’t call me Mother, you scruffy-looking, hairy person.”
“Oh,” he said. “You really don’t know me.”
“Would I be likely to?” she asked him.
She wore her Sunday black, although she never attended church—a draped and fluted black dress with a cameo at the throat. On her feet were blue terrycloth scuffs from which her curved, opaque toenails emerged—more claws. She encaged his wrist in a ring of bone.
“I said to the lady downstairs,” she said, “ ‘There’s burglars on the second floor.’ She said, ‘It’s only those squirrels again.’ I told her, ‘This time it’s burglars.’ ”
“Look. Ask Brindle if you don’t believe me,” said Morgan.
“Brindle?” She considered. “Brindle,” she said.
“Your daughter. My sister.”
“She told me it was squirrels,” Louisa said. “At night she asks, ‘What’s that skittering? What’s that scuttling? Is it burglars?’ I say, ‘It’s squirrels.’ Now I say, ‘Hear that burglar on the second floor?’ She says, ‘It’s only squirrels, Mother. Didn’t you always tell me that? They’re hiding their acorns in the rafters in the attic.’ ”
“Oh? You have rodents?” Morgan asked.
“No, squirrels. Or something up there, snickering around …”
“You want to be careful,” Morgan told her. “It could very well be bats. The last thing you need is a rabid bat. What you ought to do, you see, simply take a piece of screening—”
His mother said, “Morgan?”
“Yes.”
“Is that you?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Oh, hello, dear,” she said serenely. She let go of his wrist, and kissed him.
“It’s good to see you, Mother,” he said.
Then Bonny said, from the doorway, “Get out.”
“Why, Bonny!” said Morgan.
“Out.”
She was carrying her sack from the bakery, and gave off the mingled smells of cinnamon and fresh air. Her eyes had darkened alarmingly. Yes, she meant business, all right. He knew the signs. He edged away from his mother. (But there was only one door, and Bonny blocked it.)
“I was just leaving, Bonny,” he said. “I only came to ask you something.”
“I won’t answer,” she said. “Now go.”
“Bonny—”
“Go, Morgan.”
“Bonny, why’d you put that piece in the paper?”
“What piece?”
“That … item. What you call … obituary.”
“Oh,”