Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [68]
“No, dear, she’s his present wife.”
“But didn’t Billy marry her another time, earlier?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I know he did,” he said. “He married her and brought her here; it was the same time of year.”
Bonny straightened up from the oven. She looked hot; the hair around her temples was damp. She said, “Morgan, I am not in the mood for any of your jabs at my brother.”
“Jabs? What jabs?”
“Just because he may have a fondness for one particular type of girl—” Bonny said.
“I’m not talking types, Bonny. I mean this. He brought her here several years ago and she had that little dog Kelty, Kilty, … why deny it? There’s nothing wrong with marrying her twice. Lots of people go back, retrace, try to get it right the second time around. Why cover it up?”
She only sighed and returned to the living room. Morgan followed her. He found Billy and Priscilla on the wicker couch, talking with Morgan’s mother. Billy looked old and foolish in his vivid clothes, with his bald pink skull, his pale hair straggling behind his ears. He had hold of one of Priscilla’s hands and was stroking it, like something trapped, in his lap. Priscilla was pretending the hand did not belong to her. She leaned forward earnestly, listening to Louisa discuss the drive to Bethany. “I took along a thermos of Lipton tea,” Louisa said, “and two nice, juicy nectarines, and a box of arrowroot biscuits that Bonny sometimes buys for my digestion.” Priscilla nodded, her face alight with interest and enthusiasm. She was very young. She couldn’t possibly have been married several years ago; several years ago she would still have been a schoolgirl in a royal-blue Roland Park Country School jumper. Morgan felt confused. He sat down in a rocking chair.
Louisa said, “Traffic was held up on the Bridge, so we stopped and I got out and sat in the grass by the side of the road. There was a little boy there, just a tot, and I shared one of my nectarines with him and he gave me a nice speckle pear.”
“Seckel pear,” Morgan murmured. He could not bear to have her laughed at.
“A speckle pear, this one was. I finished half of it and put the other half in a Baggie. Then we got back in the car and drove across the Bridge, but in Delaware we stopped again where the Kiwanis Club was barbecuing chickens and I had half a chicken, a Tab, and a sack of potato chips. They were out of bread-and-butter pickles. At Farmer John’s Vegetable Stand …”
Priscilla’s purse was one of those button-on things with a wooden handle. Bermuda bags, he believed they were called. You could button on an infinity of different covers to match different outfits. He would bet that her suitcase was full of covers—seersucker pink, yachting blue … he lost his train of thought. He wondered what had possessed him to leave his camera at home, hanging by its leather strap in the downstairs closet. For the first time in twenty years he would not have pictures of their vacation. On the other hand, what was the use of such pictures? They were only the same, year after year. Same waves, same sunburns, same determined smiles …
“After we reached Bethany, I started feeling a little peckish, so I walked to the market with Kate and picked out a watermelon. It was a wonderful melon, really fat and thumpy-sounding, and once we got it back to the cottage all we had to do was touch a knife point to it and it crackled all the way open. But it had no taste. Can you believe it? Had no taste whatsoever. Such a lovely color and not a scrap of taste. I just don’t understand that,” Morgan’s mother said.
Morgan suddenly remembered another of last night’s dreams. He’d been standing on a lawn beside a beautiful, graceful woman he’d never seen before. She led him toward a child’s swing hanging from a tree limb. They settled on it—the woman sitting, Morgan standing, enclosing her with his feet. They started swinging over a cliff. Tiny yellow flowers dotted a field far below them. Morgan knew that when they were swinging high enough, they would leap. He would die. He wasn’t upset about it. Then the woman tipped her head back