"Four hundred?" his wife says.
"What we're going to do is put that on Visa, then Carl, you can pay it off a little at a time. I think that's fair. You can see if there isn't some kind of job at the lumberyard that you could have until wrestling season starts up again."
For just a second something goes over Carl's face and he looks like he's going to say no. It's so quick that neither of his parents see it, and when it passes he's just Carl again. "Sure," he says.
"You think that's fair?" Taft asks him.
"Sure."
"I went out to River Road with Don," Taft says. "You should just be glad it was dark last night so you couldn't see where you almost ended up."
They all stand there for a minute, looking at each other like somebody's going to say something. "Is that all?" Carl says.
Taft nods, even though he thought there would be more. "That's all."
Carl slinks off towards his bedroom.
"I don't want another four hundred dollars on the Visa card," Taft's wife says. "We made a promise, you remember? No more of that. Not for anything. You know good and well we can get it from Lily and Cal."
"No," Taft says.
"I know you don't like that." She puts a jar of peanut butter in the cabinet over the sink. "But it's not going to be the end of the world. They'd be perfectly happy to help us."
"I don't want to owe them anything," Taft says.
"It's not owing," his wife says. "It's family. Sometimes a person takes help from their family."
"It's not my family," he says. He goes back into the living room because he doesn't want to talk about it anymore. He wonders if the fishing program is still on.
At ten o'clock Taft gets dressed in his security uniform to go to the lumberyard. Carl has stayed in and Taft is glad. He didn't want to ground him on top of everything else. When he leaves for work Carl is lying on the floor of the living room watching television. "Maybe we'll get that deck finished up tomorrow," Taft says. They haven't worked on it for a while now. There's really not much left to do.
Carl shrugs. "Sure," he says, not looking up. They were going to do it today, but with everything else that was going on neither one of them had felt like it.
Taft says good night to his wife and tells her to call him if she needs him, just like he does whenever he goes out at night. Fay is already gone. She left with her date at eight o'clock and promised to be home by midnight. Her date had waited in the car for her and honked.
As soon as Taft gets to the lumberyard he's tired. He hasn't had more than a half dozen hours of sleep over the last three nights and now that he's alone it hits him hard. He would have called in sick tonight, something he's never done, but he knows how badly he needs the money. All he has to do is walk around, whistle, turn on some lights. It isn't a difficult job.
Time goes slower than he's ever remembered it. Slower than it had last night when he was waiting on Carl. He tries not to look at his watch and when he finally does only five minutes have passed. He goes back to the office and turns on the little black-and-white TV. Then he turns it off and puts his head down on the desk and goes to sleep. The sleep is easy. It comes deep and fast.
The minute Taft hears something his head jerks up. It isn't a dream. He stops to make sure he's really awake. He hears something. Voices, footsteps, something, a car door? Security guards who carry guns make seven dollars an hour and have to take a special training class. Taft would have been happy to take the class if it meant an extra two dollars an hour, but the lumberyard said they didn't need anybody with a gun. Just a person, a warm body walking around, that'll be enough to keep people away.
"What if somebody does break in?" Taft asked them. "Somebody who has a gun, then what do I do?"
"Just like you'd do at home," they said. "Call the police."
Taft looks at the phone, but he doesn't call. It could be nothing. It is almost definitely nothing. He doesn't hear anything now. Who knows? He was asleep. He shouldn't have been asleep. There's probably nothing there at all.
Taft rebuttons the button underneath his tie and puts on his cap. He walks out of the office and down through a row of soft pine two-by-fours that are stacked up over his head. There are so many corners. So many places for people to wait for him. Taft feels himself starting to sweat. He knows it's just because he's tired. If he wasn't so tired this wouldn't be bothering him at all.
"Daddy?" He hears a woman's voice. He stops and listens. "Daddy?" The voice sings the word. It stretches it out into a high pitched question and Taft answers.
"Fay?"
"Daddy?"
They call back and forth to one another, working their way through the maze of lumber in the dark, in and out of the occasional bursts of floodlights. Then suddenly Taft makes a turn and there she is, standing in a bright circle of light wearing a pale pink dress. A pink moth, that's the first thought that comes to his mind.
"You sure are hard to find," Fay says.
Taft just looks at her for another minute. He hadn't ever remembered her looking so pretty. He gestures to someplace behind him. "I was all the way in the back," he says.
"I bet you were sleeping," Fay says, and laughs because she doesn't mean it at all. As far as she knows, her father never sleeps.
"Maybe I was," he says, walking towards her. "What are you doing down here?"
"I was just down here," she says. "I'm out with Chip. Do you know Chip? We were driving right past here and I said, 'That's where my dad works,' and as soon as I said it I thought I should come over and say hi."
"Where's Chip?"
Fay walks over to him. "I left him in the car," she whispers. "Chip is really boring."
"Will he be all right?"
"He's got a radio," Fay says. And as soon as she says it Taft thinks he can hear music, just the slightest bits of some kind of music he wouldn't like at all if it were closer.
"It's late," he says. "You should be home. Your mother's going to be worried about you." But when Taft looks at his watch it's only eleven o'clock.
Fay laughs again. "You were asleep."
"I just thought it was later."
She looks around. It seems funny to see someone all dressed up in a lumberyard in the middle of the night. Her flat white shoes are nestled in sawdust. Her hair, which is nearly brown, looks gold in the bright light. "I've never been here before," Fay says. Her voice is full of reverence, like the place she is in is not a lumberyard at all.
"Do you want to see it?" Taft says. "Shouldn't you be getting back to your date?"
She waves her hand in front of her. "Let him wait," she says. "It's good for him." Taft is surprised that she would even think of such a thing. "I'm here to see you."
"Well," Taft says, taking her arm and walking her down the first row. "This is the soft pine. These are two-by-fours."
"Two-by-fours," Fay says.
"And these ones, over here, these are four-by-sixes."
"Bigger," she says.
"Exactly."
"It's like a garden," Fay says. "Except all the trees are laying down."
Taft is so happy she's here. With someone else it's easier to stay awake. He doesn't spend enough time with Fay, he thinks. That's because he doesn't understand her. The dresses and the lipstick confuse him. He can't keep the names of all the boys straight. Carl is easier for him. The weights and the wrestling make sense. Fay is smarter than her brother. Taft only realizes it just this minute. He should be paying more attention to her.
"I felt bad about the car," Fay says. "I know you're worried."
"These are the hard woods," Taft says. "All of this is special order, some rich guy building a house outside of town. These are the expensive ones. That's maple." He puts his hand on the wood. "Feel it."
Fay pets the wood like a sleeping cat. "Carl is stupid," she says. "I don't know, maybe he's not stupid. I feel kind of sorry for him too. He just doesn't think."
"That's why we have to keep an eye on him. Make sure he's thinking."
"That's a big job," Fay says, and laughs. It's a beautiful sound. "What's that wood there?"
"Walnut."
"That's awfully nice. How did you get to be so smart about wood?"
"That's what I do here all night," Taft says. "I walk through the stacks and I think about wood."
Fay looks around, down each of the dark alleys of lumber. "I never thought about it before, what you do when you're here."
He wishes she could stay all night. When she's here, right in front of him, he knows she's safe. Somewhere from far away there's the lightest beeping sound. A car horn.
"That's Chip," she says.
"You ought to get back. And go right home. Just because you've checked in with me doesn't mean you don't need to go home."
"I'm plenty ready," she says. "I've had enough of Chip."
Taft walks her back to the car. Fay leads the way, taking the turns like she's been through a hundred times before. Taft sees an old red GTO sitting on the other side of the fence. There's a tear in the wire where Fay walked in. Taft makes a note to report that.
"Okay," she says.
"You get home safe."
Fay hugs him. Puts her arms around his neck and goes up on her toes to be closer to him. She hugs him like she does on Christmas. She holds him there where Chip could see if he were looking and Taft puts his hands against her narrow back and presses her to him.
"Don't worry," Fay says, and then she lets go.
Taft smiles at her. "What makes you think I'm worried?"
W
HEN
I
SAW
M
ARION
the next day I had half a mind to tell her that Fay had asked me to marry her in Doe's. I wanted to tell her like it was a story, something that happened a long time before or to someone else. "You'll never believe what one of my waitresses said to me last night," I'd say. I wanted to see her not believe me, open up her mouth dumbstruck for a minute and finally say, "Get out of here." And then I would tell her it was true, every word of it. Marion and I had struck up a weird sort of friendship over the years, after we had loved each other and then hated each other. We were used to telling things. That was the way we fought. We didn't hold anything back.
And what would Marion say, after she had laughed and acted shocked? What she would say after everything settled down would be, "Well? Are you thinking about it?"
That's what I kept hearing over and over in my head.
Of course I wasn't thinking about it. There was nothing to think about. Where did I even start with the reasons? She was way too young and I had hardly known her for any time at all. She was looking for somebody to be her dead father and those weren't grounds to be happy. I had Franklin and she had Carl and neither of them would be so pleased about it. I was black and she wasn't and while that wouldn't have been enough to stop me if there was nothing else on the list, it deserved mention. I like black women, always have. I could see myself showing up at clubs with my eighteen-year-old white wife and all the boys nodding their heads at me when we came in the room, saying to each other, Well, would you look at that? Nickel's gone and got himself a piece of candy.
There were other reasons, hundreds of them, that made me so sure that all I was wondering was why I hadn't been more firm with her in the restaurant. I won't deny caring for her. I won't deny that the sight of her little hands folded over each other on the tabletop while she spoke thrilled me in a way I couldn't fully account for. But thoughts like that were not the kind that led a man to marriage. I was sure. I was flattered, but there was no doubt in my mind.
Yet as much as I tried I couldn't stop Marion's voice from playing in my head. Over and over again she was leaning back and looking at me and saying, "Well, are you thinking about it?"
"What're you chewing on this morning?" Marion said. "You've been quiet ever since you got here."
I was sitting at the Woodmoores' breakfast table and Marion was pouring some coffee. "I'm just not getting enough sleep," I said. "I forgot what it was like to work all night and have Franklin in the morning."
"Wears you down," she said and took a chair across from me at the table.
"Might be more fair if we split the load. Sometimes I get up too early, sometimes you get up too early."
She grinned at me. "Stop this," she said. "You're being terrible. I never should have told you I was even thinking about coming back."
"Just stating my case," I said. I took a sip of the coffee. Marion always did a good job with the coffee. When I made it, it was too weak or thick enough to stand a spoon up in. "How'd things go over at the hospital?"
"It's still there. I was sorry to see they'd been getting along so well without me."
"But they missed you."
She tilted her head and looked at me out of the corner of her eye. "They missed me enough, I guess. I've still got friends there. I talked to the head nurse, saw a couple of the doctors. The doctors here are nicer than they are in Florida. I don't know why that is. In Florida all the doctors think they're movie stars."
Just then Franklin came in, and when he saw me he came over and locked his arms around my neck and stood there.
"There's the doctor now," Marion said.
I twisted around to look at him, but he stayed behind me. "You going to be a doctor?"
"Drummer," he said quietly into the back of my neck. It gave me a chill the way he said it.
"A drummer?" I reached back and got him by the waist and pulled him onto my lap. He was getting too big, but that didn't stop me. "Since when are you going to be a drummer?"
"I don't want to hear about this," Marion said.
"When did you decide you were going to be a drummer?"
"Since always," Franklin said.
"He's just started talking about this," Marion said. "It's just a phase. I'm praying to God every night he grows out of it soon."
"I just told you about it," Franklin said to his mother. "I knew before."
"He's making all this up to get in good with you," Marion said. "I think maybe he's been talking to his aunt Ruth too much." She was making it sound like it was all a joke, but I was holding him in my lap. I was looking at his arms all of the sudden, his hands. I was thinking about the way he walked. My heart was beating faster.