Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [66]
It was too hot for coffee, but he’d get a headache if he tried to do without it. He made instant, using water straight from the tap. Beneath the taste of Maxwell House and sugar he caught the thick, dark taste of beach water, but he drank it anyway, from a jelly-glass painted with clowns. Then he rinsed the glass. Then he took Bonny’s purse from the kitchen table and put it in the freezing compartment of the refrigerator. (Another folly of rich people was their belief that in resort towns, crime does not exist. Morgan knew better. He sensed danger all around, and would have felt more secure in the heart of Baltimore.)
He went back to the bedroom and found Bonny sitting against her pillow. “What are you up so early for?” she asked him. “And why was the radio on?”
“I wanted to hear the news,” he said.
It wasn’t true; he never felt the news had anything to do with him. What he’d wanted was to drown out the sound of the ocean. This was Tuesday. They’d been here three days. There were eleven days remaining. He sighed and sat on the edge of the bed to pull his socks on. “I’ll bring breakfast from the bakery,” he told Bonny. “Anything you want while I’m in town?”
“The bakery’s not open yet.”
“I’ll go and wait. I’ll buy a paper. It’s too quiet here.”
“Well, bring some of those bow-tie things with cherries, then …” She yawned and ruffled her hair. A pillow mark ran down her left cheek. “Lucky you,” she said. “You fell asleep right away, last night.”
“I had a terrible sleep.”
“You fell asleep instantly.”
“But the whole night long I dreamed,” Morgan said, “and woke, and checked the clock. I can’t remember now what I dreamed. A man in a tailcoat stepped out of the wardrobe. I think this house is haunted, Bonny.”
“You say that every year,” Bonny told him.
“Well, it’s haunted every year.” He pulled a striped T-shirt over his head. When he emerged, he said, “All these wakeful nights, peculiar thoughts … the most I hope for, from a vacation, is a chance to rest up once it’s over.”
“Today’s the day my brother comes,” Bonny said, climbing out of bed.
Morgan zipped his hiking shorts, which were new and full of pockets and flaps that he hadn’t yet explored. Attached to one pocket was a metal clasp. It was probably meant for a compass. “I don’t suppose you brought along a compass,” he told Bonny.
“Compass?”
He glanced at her. She was standing before the wardrobe in a short, plain nightgown that he happened to be fond of. He was even fond of the grapy veins in her calves, and her rumpled knees. He considered slipping up to kiss the pulse in her throat, but then he felt laden by the heat and the waves and the tongue-and-groove walls. “Ah, God. I have to do something about this life of mine,” he said.
“What about it?” she asked, sliding a blouse off a hanger.
“It’s come to nothing. It’s come to nothing.”
She looked over at him, and parted her lips as if about to ask a question. But then he said, “Bow-tie pastries, right? With cherries.”
He was gone before she could ask whatever it was she had planned.
2
With one hand under his mother’s elbow, he steered her along the boardwalk. It was nearly noon, and she wore a great black cartwheel of a hat to guard against sunburn. Her striped terry beach robe was long-sleeved and ankle-length, and it concealed not a bathing suit but an ordinary street dress, for she could no more swim than fly, she always said. Her face was pale and pursed, even in this heat, and her fingertips were cold when she touched his arm. She touched his arm to tell him to stop for a second. She wanted to look at a house that was under construction. “What an unusual shape,” she said.
“It’s called an A-frame,” Morgan said.
“Why, it’s practically all garret.”
Morgan summoned his thoughts together. At moments