Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [14]
He felt he was riding something choppy and violent, fighting to keep his balance, smiling beatifically and trying not to blink.
“See that? He’s barefoot,” Liz said.
“Hush and pour that coffee back,” Bonny told her. “You know you’re not allowed to drink coffee yet.”
The youngest, Kate, came in with a stack of schoolbooks. She was not quite eleven and still had Bonny’s full-cheeked, cheery face. As she passed behind Morgan’s chair, she plucked his hat off, kissed the back of his head, and replaced the hat.
“Sugar-pie,” Morgan said.
Maybe they ought to have another baby.
With everyone settled around this table, you couldn’t even bend your elbows. Morgan decided to retreat. He rose and ducked out of the room backward, like someone leaving the presence of royalty, so they wouldn’t see the comics section he was hiding behind him. He padded into the living room. One of the radios was playing “Plastic Fantastic Lover” and he paused to do a little dance, barefoot on the rug. His mother watched him sternly from the couch. She was a small, hunched old lady with hair that was still jet black; it was held flat with tortoise-shell combs from which it crinkled and bucked like something powerful. She sat with her splotched, veined hands folded in her lap; she wore a drapy dress that seemed several sizes too large for her. “Why aren’t you at breakfast?” Morgan asked.
“Oh, I’ll just wait till all this has died down.”
“But then Bonny’ll be in the kitchen half the morning.”
“When you get to be my age,” Louisa said, “why, food is near about everything there is, and I don’t intend to rush it. I want a nice, hot English muffin, split with a fork, not a knife, with butter melting amongst the crumbs, and a steaming cup of coffee laced with whipping cream. And I want it in peace. I want it in quiet.”
“Bonny’s going to have a fit,” he said.
“Don’t be silly. Bonny doesn’t mind such things.”
She was probably right. (Bonny was infinitely expansible, taking everything as it came. It was Morgan who felt oppressed by his mother’s living here.) He sighed and settled next to her on the couch. He opened out his paper. “Isn’t this a weekday?” she asked him.
“Yes,” he mumbled.
She crooked a finger over the top of his paper and pulled it down so she could see his face. “Aren’t you going to work?”
“By and by.”
“By and by? It’s seven-thirty, Morgan and you don’t even have your shoes on. Do you know what I’ve done so far today? Made my bed, watered my ferns, polished the chrome in my bathroom; and meanwhile here you sit reading the comics, and your sister’s sleeping like the dead upstairs. What is this with my children? Where do they get this? By and by you say!”
He gave up. He folded the paper and said, “All right, Mother.”
“Have a nice day,” she told him serenely.
When he left the room, she was sitting with her hands in her lap again, trustful as a child, waiting for her English muffin.
2
Wearing a pair of argyle socks that didn’t go at all with his Klondike costume, and crusty leather boots to cover them up, and his olive-drab parka from Sunny’s Surplus, Morgan loped along the sidewalk. His hardware store was deep in the city, too far to travel on foot, and unfortunately his car was spread all over the floor of his garage and he hadn’t quite finished putting it back together. He would have to take the bus. He headed toward the transit stop, puffing on a cigarette that he held between thumb and forefinger, sending out a cloud of smoke from beneath the brim of his hat. He passed a row of houses, an apartment building, then a little stream of drugstores and newsstands and dentists’ offices. Under one arm he carried a brown paper bag with his moccasins inside. They went with his Daniel Boone outfit. He’d worn them so often that the soft leather soles had broken through at the ball of the foot. When he reached the corner, he swerved in at Fresco’s Shoe Repair to leave them off. He liked the smell of Fresco’s: leather and machine