If Morning Ever Comes

7

The next day was Saturday. Ben Joe awoke with a hollow, bored feeling; he dawdled over his breakfast until it was cold and then went back to his room to read a detective novel upside-down on an unmade bed. Halfway through the morning one of the girls knocked on his door and said, “Ben Joe?”

“Mm-hmm.”

“It’s me. Lisa. Can I come in?”

“I guess so.”

She stuck her head in the door and smiled. She was much calmer than her twin; it was the way Ben Joe had first learned to tell them apart. She was wearing a neat blue suit and high heels. “We’re going downtown,” she said. “Want to come?”

“You have to dress up that much just to go downtown?”

“Never can tell who you’ll meet.” She grinned, and crossed to his bed to hand him a postcard. “Mail,” she said. “Who’s Jeremy?”

“My roommate. Do you have to read all my mail?”

He looked at the picture on it — the Guggenheim Museum, in an unreal shade of yellowish-white — and then turned the card over and began reading the large, rounded handwriting: Dear Ben J.,Hope you are thawing out down there. I borrowed your dinner jacket. That frizzly-haired girl keeps calling wanting to know when you’ll be back, and I said Monday or so, right? Pack one of those sisters of yours in a suitcase and bring her along.

Jeremy.

“Which one are you going to pack up?” Lisa asked.

“What?”

“Which sister?”

“Oh. I don’t know. Why — you feel like leaving home?”

“I surely do,” Lisa said. She sat down with a little bounce on the foot of the bed and looked at her shoes. “I’ve used up all the boys in this town, that’s what.”

“What about those two you and Jane were with last night?”

“I’m getting tired of them. I keep thinking maybe I could start new someplace else, in another town.”

“Well, I know the feeling,” said Ben Joe. He turned the card over again and looked at it, frowning. “I wonder if I’ve missed any quizzes. Jeremy’s right — I’ve got to get started back there pretty quick.”

“Well, do you want to come to town or don’t you?”

“No. I guess not.”

Lisa stood up and left, and Ben Joe looked after her thoughtfully. “Don’t you worry,” he said when she reached the door. “New boys’re always showing up.”

“I know. Yell if you change your mind about coming downtown, Ben Joe.”

“Okay.”

He stared at the closed door for a few minutes and then got up and padded over to his bureau in his stocking feet. The top drawer looked like Jeremy’s had in New York — stuffed with postcards and envelopes and canceled checks. He threw the postcard on top of the heap and then idly leafed through what was underneath. At the bottom was a stack of Shelley’s letters from Savannah, neatly rubber-banded together. And a few postcards from the times his father had gone to medical conventions. They were dry and formal; his father had trouble saying things in writing. He stacked everything carelessly together again and was about to close the drawer when he saw something pink lying in the right-hand corner. It was a unique shade of pink — a deep rose that was almost magenta and never should have been used in writing paper — and it was one that had stuck in his mind for some six years now. Even when he saw something nearly that color in a dress or a magazine ad, even now, it made him wince. He pulled the envelope up and made himself examine it. Large, slanted pencil writing ran in a straight line across it, addressed to his father at his office on Main Street. Only his father had never seen it; Ben Joe had taken it from the box when he had gone to bring his father home for supper one day. He had seen the “L.B.M.” on the upper left-hand corner and quietly stuffed it in his pocket. Now he stood staring at it without opening it, letting it lie flat in the palm of his hand. When he had stared at it so long that he could see it with his eyes shut, he suddenly slapped it into his shirt pocket, grabbed up his sneakers from the floor in front of the bureau, and slammed out of his room.

“Lisa!” he called.

His grandmother was on the landing, polishing the stair rail and singing only slightly more softly than usual, because she was intent upon her polishing:“When I was si-ingle,

I wandered at my e-ease.

Now that I am ma-arried,

Got a flat-heeled man to please …”

“Gram,” Ben Joe said, “has Lisa gone downtown yet?”

She refolded her cloth and smiled at it, still singing, because she was at the loudest part and no one could stop her at a loud part:“And it’s oh, Lo-o-ord,

I wish I was but one lone girl again …”

“Oh, hell,” Ben Joe said. He galloped on down the stairs, two at a time, with his sneakers still in his hands. “Lisa!”

“What do you want, Ben Joe?”

He stepped over Carol, who was sticking toothpicks upright into the nap in the hall rug. Lisa was in the living room arguing with Jenny and Joanne over the grocery list.

“If she wants all those outlandish things,” Jenny was saying, “she can darn well go get them herself, that’s what I think.”

Joanne took the list from her and ran her finger down it. “Well,” she said finally, “I don’t reckon it would hurt us any to start drinking burgundy with our meals—”

“But I’m the one Ben Joe left in charge of the money. What’s the matter with Gram lately? Ben Joe, I want you to look at this.”

Ben Joe sat down on the couch and began putting his sneakers on. “I’ve decided to hitch a ride downtown with you,” he said.

“Look, will you, Ben Joe? Now Gram’s making me go out and buy all her silly notions. Burgundy my foot. And her upstairs singing loud on purpose, been singing all morning without taking breath so that no one can interrupt and ask her what she wants with burgundy and oyster crackers and kippered herrings—”

“Oh, she’s just tired of the same old things,” Ben Joe said. “You going right away? Because if not, I’ll just walk instead of—”

“No, we’re coming. Come on, Joanne.”

Jenny led the way, looking sensible and businesslike in her open trenchcoat. At the front door she took the car keys off a hook on the wall and stuck them in her pocket. “Where’s Tessie?” she asked Lisa.

“In the car. Says you and she are going shoe shopping and she’s in a hurry to get started.”

“Okay. Close the door behind you, Ben Joe.”

They crossed through the weedy grass to the driveway beside the house where the car was parked. Inside, on the front seat, Tessie bounced up and down in a short-sleeved plaid dress.

“Where’s your jacket?” Jenny asked as she opened the door.

“In the house.”

“Well, better go get it.”

“Aw, Jenny—”

“Jenny, for Pete’s sake,” Ben Joe said. “I’m in a hurry.”

“Well, I can’t help that. Run on and get it, Tessie.”

Tessie slammed out of the car, and Jenny turned the motor on to let it warm up. She seemed resigned to all these hindrances; she sat patiently waiting, while Ben Joe, squeezed between Joanne and Lisa, drummed his fingers on his knees and squirmed about irritably. When Tessie came out of the house, dragging her feet slowly as she worked her way into an old corduroy jacket, Ben Joe leaned forward and shouted, “Come on, Tessie!”

“What’s the matter with you?” Jenny asked. She leaned across to open the door for Tessie. “What you suddenly in such an all-fired hurry for?”

“I’ve got a lot to get done.”

“Ten minutes ago you were going to stay home all day,” said Lisa.

“Well, not any more.”

“Where you going?”

“Just around.” He leaned back with his hands between his knees and stared out the window as the car slipped down the driveway into the street. “Got a couple of things I want to attend to,” he said. “And Jeremy’s postcard reminded me I don’t have all year to do them in.”

“Better go see your old music teacher,” Lisa said. “And Miss Potter, the one that taught you third grade. She asks about you every time she sees me.”

“Okay.”

“She wants to know if you’re a famous poet yet. Says you wrote your first poem in her class.”

“I don’t remember that.”

“Well, she does. Says it went, ‘My fish, my cat, my little world,’ and she’s keeping it still for when you get famous.”

“My land,” Ben Joe said. “Jenny, how far downtown are you going?”

“Just to the A & P.”

“And the shoe store,” Tessie reminded her.

“And the shoe store. Why you want to know?”

“Not past that?” asked Ben Joe.

“Well, no. What is past that?”

“Where is it you’re going, anyway?” Joanne asked him.

He scowled at her and remained silent, and Joanne turned back to the window. They were still among lawns and houses; Jenny drove so slowly that a man walking at a brisk pace could keep up with her. At one point Joanne said, “Was that the Edmonds’ house?”

Ben Joe leaned forward to see where she was pointing. Between two houses was a charred space with only a set of cement steps and a yellow brick fireplace left intact.

“It was,” he said. “Burned down the year you left.”

“Nobody told me about it.”

“You used to date their son, I think.” He had come upon them kissing in the den one night; Bobby was hugging her and kissing the hollow in her neck, and Ben Joe had left the room again without a sound.

“I’d forgotten that,” Joanne said.

Sometimes he thought his sisters had been born senile.

When they reached the A & P on Main Street, Jenny parked the car. “We’ll be in here awhile and then to Barton’s for Tessie’s shoes,” she said. “If you’re back in the car by then I’ll drive you home. Otherwise you can just walk back whenever you’re ready. Hurry, Ben Joe, you’re holding Lisa up.”

Ben Joe was sitting forward but not getting out. Lisa nudged him impatiently. “Come on, Ben Joe. I thought you were the one in such a rush.”

“Okay, okay.”

He climbed slowly out of the car and then just stood on the sidewalk beside Joanne with his hands in his pockets.

“Well,” he said.

Joanne looked at him curiously. Jenny and Tessie were already heading toward the A & P, and Lisa was staring at a sweater in the window next door.

“Maybe I’ll go wherever you’re going,” said Joanne.

“No.”

“Well, where is it you’re going?”

“Um. To call on Miss Potter, for one thing. You go on and do your shopping. Maybe I’ll meet you in Stacy’s for a cup of coffee later.”

“All right.”

She stood there still looking at him with that little half-smile. He wished she weren’t so nosy. The others didn’t know the meaning of privacy, they were continually bursting into his room unannounced or reading his postcards, but at least they didn’t go ferreting around to see what he was thinking about, the way Joanne did. Sometimes he thought she had even succeeded in her ferreting — like today, when she remained absolutely motionless and smiled her knowing smile. He scowled back at her.

“So long,” he said.

“So long.”

When she still stood there, he whirled around abruptly and headed for the drugstore at a businesslike pace. Once inside, he peered out the glass door and saw that her back was to him now; she was calmly waiting for a car to pass before she crossed the street.

The drugstore smelled like his house did when all the girls were getting ready to go out on dates at once. It was spicy and perfumey, with several different kinds of scents that were mingled together and made him want to sneeze. He headed toward the back, where the toilet articles were kept. From the rack on top of the counter he chose a pack of razor blades, taking a long time to compare prices and brand names, and then he turned to the magazine counter and picked out a crossword-puzzle book that was made of dull comic-booklike paper, which would depress him before he finished the first puzzle. These he paid for at the cash register; he counted out the exact change to pay a white-haired man he had not seen before.

“Don’t bother about a bag,” he said.

He dropped the razor blades into his shirt pocket, next to the pink envelope and his cigarettes. The crossword-puzzle book he rolled up carelessly and stuck into his back trouser pocket. Then he looked out toward the street again. This time there was not a sister of his in sight. He smiled good-by to the man at the cash register and headed outside.

Beyond the A & P, which was the last real store on Main Street, the millworkers’ houses again. At first they were the big old houses that had been built by well-to-do families but had turned gray and peeling with “Room for Rent” signs on them. Their side yards, once grassy and shaded with oak trees, were now cement squares where Esso stations sat. And beyond these were smaller, grayer houses, most of them duplexes. Dirty-faced children played on the porches in skimpy sweaters; the yards were heaped with old tires and rusty scrap metal. Behind the houses, barely visible above the tar-paper roofs, were the tall smoking chimneys of the textile factory where all these people worked. They made blue denim, day in and day out. It was toward these chimneys that Ben Joe headed. He crossed a vacant lot, knee-high with weeds and brambles, and stumbled over a rusted-out potbellied stove that lay smack in the middle of the field. Then he was on the gravel road that ran down to the muddy little river where the factory was. Opposite the factory was Lili Belle Mosely’s house.

He had been here before, many times. The first time was when his father was still alive, living at Lili Belle’s as if it were his home and having his patients call him there in the night if they needed him. He had first rented a room there; people said that one night he had finished mending a millworker’s arm and was setting out for home when it suddenly hit him that he couldn’t bear to go home again, so he had stopped here and rented a room. His wife, hearing about it, clamped her mouth shut and said that was his lookout, nothing she could do about it. She said the same when she heard that he had taken to sharing a room with the landlady’s daughter; and the same when she heard about little Phillip’s being born. But Ben Joe, who never could resign himself to the fact that it was his father’s lookout alone, had come to see his father at Lili Belle’s one night with his heart pounding and his eyes wide with embarrassment. They had fed him supper — green beans cooked with fat back, hash-brown potatoes in a puddle of Mazola, pork chops coated with grease that turned white when he let the chops cool on his plate. Everyone laughed a lot, and his father ate more than Ben Joe had seen him eat in years. And Ben Joe had not been able to say a word to his father about coming home. He hadn’t tried.

As he stood now, facing the long, squat house with its dingy front porch, he could almost see how he must have looked coming out of it. His head down, his face puzzled, his feet dragging. Not just once, but many times, because he had gone back again and again. First he had gone to see his father. Then his father died and left a request that Lili Belle and her son get a little money each month, which Ben Joe’s mother could have contested but didn’t; she said it wasn’t worth her bother. So Ben Joe took Lili Belle her money in person once each month. And once each month his mother said, “Ben Joe, have you mailed off all our bills for this month?” and Ben Joe said, “Yes’m,” not ever letting on he had taken it in person. Every month he had taken it, up until he had left for New York and turned the money matters over to Jenny. Now Jenny mailed the money, as she was supposed to, in a business envelope. She wouldn’t have that feeling Ben Joe always had, looking at his mother with pure guilt on his face and wondering why he kept on lying to her and visiting a woman whose name was never mentioned in the house. He couldn’t have given a reason. When he was a senior in high school, his father came home for an hour one day (after he’d been gone a year) to say that all his life he had been saving the money for Ben Joe to go to Harvard and now there was enough. Ellen Hawkes said that unless he came home she wouldn’t take a penny, and he said, well, he didn’t see that it would really matter to her if he never came home again. Ellen Hawkes didn’t answer that. So Ben Joe went to Sandhill College. But even so, even knowing that Lili Belle was the reason he had to go there, he still came to sit in Lili Belle’s house and talk to her about the weather and he still threw little Phillip up in the air and caught him again, laughing.

He crossed the scrubby little yard and climbed up to the porch. The wooden floor boards made a hollow sound under his shoes. At the door he knocked and waited, and then knocked again. One corner of the chintz curtain rose slowly. The door swung open.

“Lili Belle?” he said.

“It’s me, boy.”

It was her old mother standing in the shadows behind the door. Ben Joe had seldom seen her before. She was fat and puffing but very dignified, and she had kept out of sight for sheer shame ever since the day her daughter’s baby had been born. Now she closed the door sharply behind him and said, “What you want, anyway?”

“I want to see Lili Belle.”

“Hmm.” She crossed her fat arms under the shelflike bosom of her black crepe dress. “Lilian Belle is very tired, Benjamin,” she said. “Got troubles of her own. What you wanting to see her for?”

“Mrs. Mosely, I won’t stay long. I just wanted to see her a minute. It’s important.”

“Well, I’ll tell her. But I don’t know, I don’t know.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

He followed her across the small, mousy-smelling hallway into the almost totally dark sitting room. Against the shaded window he could make out the outline of an unlit lamp, double-globed and beaded. Mrs. Mosely stood like a mountain barring the rest of the view; she called into the room, “Back.”

Lili Belle was in the shadows, sitting on a cane chair. She stirred a little and said, “You say something, Mama?”

“Back again to pester us.”

“Who?”

“Him.” She jerked a thumb behind her. “Ben Joe.”

“Oh, my goodness. Benjy, honey, come in!” She stood up and ran to the windows to raise the shades. In her right hand was a bowl of soup, which she shifted awkwardly to her left hand when she tried to maneuver the shade. The room was suddenly light again. With the light a feeling of relief came to Ben Joe; this wasn’t going to be as hard as he thought. He always forgot how easy Lili Belle made him feel the minute he saw her.

“It’s okay, Mama,” she was saying now. “You can go on now. Come on in, Benjy honey. I do apologize for sitting in the dark like this, but my eyes is strained.”

“It’s okay,” Ben Joe said.

He looked at her closely, noticing how tired she looked. It was hard to tell how old she was. Nine years ago, when his father had first met her, she had been about twenty. Now she could be any age. Her face seemed never to have resolved itself but stayed as vague and unformed as when she had been a girl. Her hair was straggly and colorless, and she was never anything but homely, but she had an enormous, bony frame that made people look a second time when they passed her on the street. There was not an ounce of fat on her. When she walked, her bones seemed to swing loosely, and she never hit hard upon the earth or seemed, for all her boniness, to have any sharp corners to her. Yet he could see the strain lines beginning around her eyes and mouth, and the way the skin of her face had grown white and dry.

“You sit yourself,” she was saying now. “Wait a minute …” She looked around among the straight-backed chairs, searching for the most comfortable. When she found it she pushed the bowl of soup into Ben Joe’s hands and ran to pull it up. “If we’d of known,” she said, “I’d of cleaned up house a little. How come they’ve not told us you were back?”

“Well, I only got here yesterday.”

“Sit, now. Oh my, let me take that soup bowl off your hands. What you think of New York?”

“I like it all right.” He sat down on the chair and stretched his feet out in front of him. On the table under the window, among the doilies and flower pots and bronzed baby shoes, sat a photograph of his father. It was taken when he still had his mustache, long before he had ever met Lili Belle, but he looked much the same as he had when he died — rumpled hair, black then with only the first touches of white, and crinkling gray eyes and a broad, easy smile. Except for Gram’s bedroom, where Ben Joe’s mother never set foot, this was probably the only place in the world that still had a picture of Phillip Hawkes. Ben Joe reached out and turned it a little in his direction, looking at it thoughtfully.

“You have to excuse Mama’s being so rude,” Lili Belle was saying. “She has gotten like that more and more. The other day this lodger of ours, he stopped to talk to me on account of wanting to know where the clean towels were kept, and Mama clunked him in the chest with the griddle-cake-flipper. Didn’t hurt him none, but I had a whole heap of explaining to do.”

“Was she right about your having some kind of trouble?” Ben Joe asked.

“I’d say she was. That’s why I was sitting in the dark like a spook. Little Phillip is in the hospital with pneumonia and I was resting my eyes from sitting up with him so much. I don’t know where he got it. Folks tell me I take too good care of him, so it can’t of been that he got too cold. Though he is right much of a puddle-wader, that could’ve done it. I told him and told him. When it was serious and I had reason to be worried I was just possessed by the thought of those puddles. I had it in mind, in this dream I had one night, to take me a vacuum cleaner and go vacuum all the puddles up. But the worrying part is over now. Doctors says another ten days or two weeks and he’ll be out.”

“How long’s he been in?” Ben Joe asked.

“Two weeks.”

“How’re you managing the bills?”

“I plan to make it up gradual. I been working at the mill part time since little Phil started school, but not a full day, because I like to be home when he needs me. Oh, Mama would take care of him — says she’s ashamed he was ever born, but I notice she’s right fond of him. But I’d rather it be me. I’ll work full time till the bill’s paid off and then go back half-days again.”

“We’ve got some money in the savings account,” Ben Joe said.

“No, honey, I don’t want it.”

“But we never even touch it. It’s the money Dad saved up and Mama won’t use it no matter what — says it’s only for emergencies. You’re right, you shouldn’t work when little Phillip’s at home.”

“I wouldn’t take it, Benjy. It bothers me to take what we do take offen you all. Your sister Jenny’s been bringing it real regular.”

“Been what?”

“You know — the once-a-month money. She’s not missed a time.”

“But I thought — Doesn’t she mail it?”

“Why, no.” Lili Belle stopped playing with the folds of her skirt and looked up at him. “Neither one of you’s ever mailed it,” she said. “What she said the first time she came was, she would bring it the same as you’d always done.”

“For Pete’s sake.” Ben Joe sat forward in his chair with his elbows on his knees. “I wonder how she knew.”

“Oh, girls’re smarter than you think.” She laughed, and then became quiet again and looked at her hands. “She’s a real nice little girl,” she said. “First time she came I was just merely polite, you know, figuring that what’s your mama’s is your mama’s and I didn’t want to seem to be trying to make friends of your mama’s own daughter. But she was so friendly — came in and taught little Phil how to play this game about scissors cutting rock and rock covering paper, or something. Real good with children, she is.”

“She is,” Ben Joe said. He sat quietly for a minute, and then he cleared his throat and said, “Lili Belle?”

“Hmm?”

“I’ve got something I want to talk to you about.”

“Well, I’m listening.”

“I thought I should get it said, in case I don’t come back to Sandhill for a good while again. I figured …”

He was silent.

“I’m right here listening,” she said. Her face was gentle and interested; Ben Joe wondered if it would become angry by the time he was through talking. Did Lili Belle ever get angry?

“I’ve got this letter,” he said miserably.

“This …?”

“Letter. Letter.” He touched his pocket, where the rim of the pink envelope showed. “This, um—”

“Oh, yes.”

“Ma’am?”

“Letter.”

“Yes. And I wanted, wanted to show it to you because—”

“Well, I seen it before, Benjy honey.

“I know you have. That’s what I’m trying to—”

“No, I mean I seen it on you before.” She laughed gently, startling him. “Sure. First time you came after your daddy died, I seen it. Little piece of pink in your pocket, just like now. You’d not been to see me for two whole months, and then you came by but never said nothing about the letter. I figured you had found it in your daddy’s office and read it, all about how I was asking him to come back to me and little Phillip. I was afraid you’d come to taunt me with it.”

“Why to taunt you?”

“Account of the spelling, of course.”

“The what?”

“The spelling. I never spelled too good.”

“Oh,” he said. He could think of nothing else to say; he was too surprised. For a moment he sat staring at her blankly and then he had to smile back at her.

“When you never did mention it,” she was saying, “I figured you had just brought it along that one time to show me you had it safe. To show me you had took it from his office after he died so that no one else could see it. That why you brought it, Ben Joe?”

“No, ma’am,” he said.

“No?”

“No, I took that letter before he ever died. What I came to tell you is, I took it before he even saw it.”

He was afraid to look up at her. When he finally did, when she had been silent so long that he had to look, he saw that she didn’t seem shocked or angry but was just absorbing the news still, shaking her head a little and trying to fit all this in with what she already knew.

“Lili Belle, I am awfully sorry,” he said. “It’s bothered me for so long I couldn’t see any way to get rid of it now but to tell you, and say how sorry I am.”

“Well, that’s all right, Ben Joe.” She licked her lips nervously, still frowning off into space. “That’s all right — it didn’t make no difference, did it? Everything would’ve happened the same, I reckon, letter or no letter.”

“But I—”

“You didn’t do nothing wrong, Benjy. Why, it seems to me your family is kind of queer-like sometimes. Meaning no offense. It’s not natural to come see me and all, not even to speak to me on the street, but you do, and I reckon it’s even a little relief, maybe, having you do something on your mother’s side like most would do.”

“Well—” Ben Joe stopped, not certain what to say. “What bothered me,” he said, “is that maybe Dad would have gone back to you soon as he got your letter. And then, who knows, not had that heart attack a week later. Old Gram, she’s blamed herself forever for forgetting to refill the ice-cube trays. Says that’s why he died — going downtown to get ice. Though Mom says he could have stepped next door if he’d been sober enough to think of it. But sometimes when Gram gets on those ice-cube trays I’m almost tempted to show her the pink envelope, to prove it’s not she that’s to blame.”

“Well, it surely ain’t you,” Lili Belle said. She bent forward to rub her eyes, tiredly, and then leaned her head back again and smiled at him. “I don’t guess my letter would of made any change in him one way or the other. If your mother’d said one word he’d have stayed with her, always would have. He was just wanting her to ask him. But she didn’t. He waited two weeks, and I guess he would have waited that long if I’d sent fourteen letters, even. Then he came back to me, not even planning to but just drunk and tired, and I took him in.”

“But you can’t say for sure,” Ben Joe said.

“What?”

“You can’t say for sure your letter wouldn’t have made him come back earlier, you can’t say—”

“Benjy honey, don’t you worry. Can’t say nothing for sure, if it comes to that. Don’t you worry.”

Both of them were silent for a minute, Lili Belle rocking steadily in her chair and filling the silence with slow creaks. Then she sat up straight again and said, “Well, how long you going to be here?”

“I don’t know yet. Not too much longer, I guess.”

“I heard your older sister’s in town.”

“That’s right.”

“Well, it’ll work out. Her husband’ll come and get her, you just watch. She’s a right pretty girl — I seen her downtown before — and he’ll come claim her. You just wait.”

“Well, maybe so.”

“Uh, you know my brother? Freeman? Well, Freeman he—”

“I thought his name was Donald.”

“No, he changed it. That’s what I was about to tell you. He said he was sick of this town and sick of blue denim and wanted to be free, so he changed his name to Freeman and went to work in a diner in New York. He likes it right much, I hear. Sent us this picture postcard saying, ‘This here New York is a right swinging town.’ That’s what he said, ‘a right swinging town.’ You being in New York reminded me of it.”

Her head was against the back of her chair again, lolling wearily. There was no telling how many nights she had sat up with little Phillip.

“You’re tired,” Ben Joe said. “I’ll be going, Lili Belle. Here’s the letter.”

He pulled out the pink envelope and put it in one of her hands. She took it listlessly, stopping her rocking to frown down at it.

“Oh, land,” she said. “Land.”

She didn’t go on speaking, though Ben Joe waited. She dropped the letter in her lap and went on rocking.

“I’ll find my own way out,” he said finally. “And I’m going to take care of that hospital bill, Lili Belle. Soon as I get it from the bank.”

“No, Benjy, I don’t—”

She was up on her feet now, wanting to protest, but he pulled on his jacket and left hurriedly. “You tell little Phil hey!” he called back.

“Well—”

He ran down the porch steps and into the yard. The sky above the river had grown churned and dark, and a cold wind was rising. As he walked he stuck his hands deep into his trouser pockets and hunched up his shoulders against the cold.