Morgan's Passing - Anne Tyler [91]
In Baltimore it was a crowded, clamorous morning in the middle of the week, with the sun flashing off a sea of metal and everyone honking and darting in and out of lanes. Emily turned down Crosswell Street and parked somewhere, anywhere, she didn’t know. She flew from the car and ran inside the building and up the stairs, and then couldn’t find the proper key and was jingling her way through a ring of them when Leon opened the door. He stood there looking down at her, holding a book in one hand, and she threw her arms around him and pressed her face to his chest. “Emily, love,” he said. “Emily, is something wrong?” She only shook her head, and hung on tight.
5
Almost daily she had letters from Morgan, whether or not he came in person. Dear Emily, Am enclosing this Sears ad, you really need a pipe wrench and Sears are better than any Cullen Hardware sells … For he had taken over the care of their apartment, moving in on the disrepair that lurked in all its corners; he clanked blithely among the mysteries beneath the kitchen sink. Dear Emily, Came across a hint last night that just might solve that trouble with your toaster. Simply cut a piece of heavy paper, say a match-book cover, 1″ x 1″ …
He was the Merediths’ own personal consumer advocate, composing disgusted notes to Radio Shack on his tinny, old-fashioned typewriter, storming into auto-repair shops—solving whatever little discontent Emily mentioned in passing. She began to rely on him. Sometimes she said, “Oh, I really shouldn’t ask you to do this—” but he would say, “Why not? Who would you rather ask instead? Ah, don’t hurt my feelings, Emily.”
Once she had a problem with her tape recorder, the portable recorder she’d bought to use in their shows. Morgan didn’t happen to be around, and while Emily fiddled with the buttons she caught herself wondering, irritably, where was he? How could he leave her alone like this, to cope without him when he’d led her to depend on him? She grabbed up the recorder and ran the several blocks to Cullen Hardware. She arrived breathless; she slapped the recorder on the counter between Morgan and a customer. “Listen,” she said, jabbing a button. In blew the trumpet for “The Brementown Musicians”—but blurred and bleary, with some kind of vibration in the speaker. The customer stepped back, looking startled. Morgan sat on his high wooden stool and nodded thoughtfully. “It’s driving me crazy!” Emily told him, switching it off. “And if you think it sounds bad now, you ought to hear it when the volume’s up, in the middle of a show. You can’t tell if it’s a trumpet or a foghorn.”
Morgan went to a revolving rack for a paintbrush, and he came back and took the recorder onto his lap and slowly, tenderly, brushed the plastic grooves that encased the speaker. Grains of something white flew out. “Sugar, perhaps. Or sand,” he said. “Hmm.” He pressed the button and listened again. The trumpet sound was clear and pure. He gave the machine back to Emily and returned to adding up the customer’s purchases.
Like a household elf, he left behind him miraculously mended electrical cords, smooth-gliding windows, dripless faucets, and toilet tanks hung with clever arrangements of coat-hanger wire to keep the water from running. “It must be wonderful,” Emily told Bonny, “to have him with you all the time, fixing things,” but Bonny just looked blank and said, “Who, Morgan?”
Well, Bonny had her mind on other matters. She was helping one of her daughters through a difficult pregnancy. The baby was due in February but kept threatening to arrive now, in early November; the daughter had come home to lie flat on her back for the