Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [71]
“What roses? He never brought roses.”
“Of course he did.”
“No, he didn’t.”
“I remember he did.”
“Morgan, please,” said Bonny. “Can’t you let this be?”
“Oh, very well. But sweeping you into his arms … remember?”
“It was all an act,” said Brindle.
“An act?”
“If he’d been halfway truthful,” she said, “he’d have swept my graduation photo into his arms. And kissed it on the lips. And given it a sports car.”
Her chin crumpled in again, and she pressed the damp knot of Kleenex to her mouth. Bonny gazed over Brindle’s head at Morgan, as if expecting him to take some action. But what action would that be? He had never felt very close to Brindle; he had never understood her, although of course he loved her. They were so far apart in age that they were hardly brother and sister. At the time of her birth he already had his school life, and his street life, and his friends. And their father’s death had not drawn them together but had merely shown how separate they were. They had mourned in such different ways, Brindle clinging fiercely to her mother while Morgan trudged, withdrawn and stubborn, through the outside world. You could almost say that they had mourned entirely different people.
He sat forward slowly, and scratched the crown of his sombrero. “You know,” he said, “I was certain he brought roses.”
“He never brought roses,” Brindle said.
“I could swear he did: red ones. Armloads.”
“You made those roses up,” said Brindle. She tucked the Kleenex into her bathrobe pocket.
“What a pity,” Morgan said sadly. “That was the part I liked best of all.”
6
For lunch he made spaghetti, which was Brindle’s favorite dish. He put on his short-order-cook’s clothes—a dirty white apron and a sailor cap—and took over the kitchen, while Bonny and Brindle sat at the table drinking coffee. “Spaghetti à la Morgan!” he said, brandishing a sheaf of noodles. The women merely stared at him, blank-faced, with their minds on something else. “I had hints from the very beginning,” said Brindle, “but I wouldn’t let myself see them. You know how it is. Almost the first thing he said to me, that first day he showed up, was … he pulled back from me and took both my hands and stared at me and, ‘I can’t understand it,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why I’ve kept thinking of you. It’s not as if you’re a beauty, or ever were,’ he said. ‘Also I’m getting older,’ I told him, ‘and my dentist says my teeth are growing more crooked every year.’ Oh, I never held anything back from him. I never tried to be what I wasn’t.”
Bonny clicked her tongue. “He doesn’t properly appreciate you,” she said. “He’s one of those people who’s got to see from a distance before he knows how to feel about it—from the past or out of other people’s eyes or in a frame kind of thing like a book or a photo. You did right to leave him, Brindle.”
Morgan felt a little itch of anxiety starting in his temples. “But she didn’t leave him; she’s just taking a little holiday from him,” he told Bonny.
Bonny and Brindle gazed into space. Probably they hadn’t even heard what he said.
Last spring Bonny’s old college roommate had divorced her husband of twenty-seven years. And of course there were those wives of Billy’s (every one of whom had left him, some without so much as a note) and Morgan’s own daughter Carol, who just one week after her wedding had returned, in very good spirits, to settle back into the apartment she’d been sharing with her twin sister. Also, Morgan knew for a fact that two of Bonny’s closest friends were considering separations, and one had actually spoken with a lawyer. He worried that it was contagious. He feared that Bonny might catch the illness; or it was more like catching a piece of news, catching on; she would come to her senses and leave him. She would take with her … what? Something specific hung just at the edge of his mind. She would take with her the combination to a lock, it felt like—a secret he needed to know that Bonny knew all along without trying. When Bonny came back from lunch with a friend, Morgan was always