Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [60]
“Not as much as you might expect.”
“He’s going to move the truck.”
“Of all the damn-fool, ridiculous—”
“Never mind, it could happen to anyone,” Emily said, patting his back.
“I was talking about the mailman.”
“Oh.”
The mailman released his brake. The truck gave a grinding sound and inched backward. “Oof!” said Morgan. He rolled free. He sat up and inspected his leg. A dusty, wedge-shaped mark ran down the green fabric.
“Is it broken?” Emily asked him. “I don’t know.”
“Rip his pants,” the woman with the paintbrush suggested.
“Not the pants!” said Morgan. “They’re World War Two.”
Emily started folding up the cuff, working gingerly, tensed for what she might have to see. By now, two old ladies with shopping bags had joined them, and the mailman was telling them, “I could report him for illegal parking, if I was that bad of a guy.”
“There’s nothing here,” Emily said. She was inspecting Morgan’s pale, hairy shin. “Can you wiggle your toes?”
“Yes.”
“Can you stand?”
He attempted it, with an arm around Emily for support. He was heavier than he looked, hard-muscled, warm, and he gave off the harsh gray smell of someone who’d been working for a very long time. “Yes,” he said, “I can stand.”
“Maybe he just ran over your trousers.”
He drew back from her. “That’s not true at all,” he said.
“But there’s no blood, the bone’s not broken …”
“I felt it. I felt the pressure, a pinch, so to speak, at one side of my calf. You think I don’t know when I’m hit? Not all hurts show up from outside. You can’t just stand outside and pass judgment on whether I’ve been injured or not. You think I don’t know when a U.S. Government mail truck pins me flat to the pavement?”
“Jesus,” said the mailman.
The two old ladies went on their way, and the woman returned to her painting. The mailman unlocked the mailbox. Morgan held up a hand; something glittered. “But at least I’ve got the key,” he told Emily.
“Oh, yes. The key.”
He opened the door on the passenger side. “Quick. Jump in,” he said.
“Me?”
“Jump in the car. What if the thief comes? All this racket, this hullabaloo …”
He waited till she’d climbed in, and then he closed the door and came around to the driver’s side. “I’ve had too much excitement lately,” he told her. “I don’t know why things can’t go a little more smoothly.” He settled himself with a grunt and leaned forward to fit the key in the ignition. “Now look,” he said. “Another difficulty.”
The key wouldn’t go. A second key was already there, and a dangling leather case. “What are these?” he asked Emily.
“They must have been locked in the car,” she said.
“I’m always amazed,” Morgan said, “by how incompetent your average criminal is.”
“But maybe the car wasn’t stolen at all,” Emily told him.
“How could that be?”
“Maybe you just thought you parked in that other block.”
“No, no,” he said impatiently. “That would be ridiculous.” He started the motor, veered out around the mail truck, and headed up the street. It sounded as if he were in the wrong gear. “Come back with me and meet Bonny,” he said.
“Oh, Leon will be wondering where I am. And anyway, don’t you have to go to work?”
“I can’t work today; I only had an hour of sleep last night. It was Brindle, this business with Brindle. Have you ever heard of such a thing? Robert Roberts, after all these years!”
Emily hoped he wouldn’t start on Robert Roberts again. She felt exhausted. It seemed to her that those few blocks from Gina’s school had taken hours, days; she’d expended years’ worth of energy on them. The sight of Morgan beside her (humming “I’m Walkin’ ” and tapping the steering wheel, fresh as a daisy, without a care in the world) made her head ache.
But then her apartment building approached. Crafts Unlimited was just opening, and its fluorescent lights were fluttering on and off as if unable to gather strength. The windows above it were dark.