The old house must have been beautiful at one time, Maggie thought, but the garden out front was now strangled by rampant weeds, and the painted trim was peeling off in strips around the windows. Maggie grabbed the pharmacy bag and approached the back door. She opened the outer door, and her coat snagged on the ragged edges of a hole in the screen. She jerked the fabric free, then rapped lightly on the wooden door.
Through the dusty windowpanes and the limp voile curtains she could see into the kitchen. There was a light on, and the table appeared to be set for dinner. Maggie knocked again, but there was no answer. Tentatively, she tried the doorknob. The door opened. Maggie stuck her head into the room. The strong smell of cooking fish assaulted her nostrils.
“Hello,” she called out.
From the next room she could hear the sound of a voice, or maybe two voices, speaking in low, insistent tones. She considered placing the bag on the table and just leaving quietly, but instead she forced herself to call out again. “Anybody home?”
Abruptly the speaking stopped. Maggie stepped into the room and turned to close the door behind her. When she looked back, Evy was standing in the doorway. She wore a blue terry cloth bathrobe, which had lost most of its nub, and scuffed slippers. Her hair was mussed, as if she had been lying down, and her pale eyes widened at the sight of Maggie in her kitchen.
“Hi,” said Maggie uncomfortably.
Evy stared at her. “What are you doing here?” she asked flatly.
Maggie held out the druggist’s bag to her. “I brought you this. You forgot it when you left the office. I thought you might need something in it. The pills, or something.”
“I didn’t need it,” said the girl, ignoring the bag in Maggie’s extended hand. “Where’d you find it anyway?”
Maggie put the bag down on the table. “It was under your desk.”
“What were you doing looking under my desk?”
“I was passing by it. Look Evy, I didn’t have to bring it all the way out here…”
“Nobody asked you to,” the girl snapped.
“But,” Maggie continued, ignoring the rebuke, “I wanted to. I wanted to see how you were feeling.”
“I’m beginning to feel sick again,” said the girl. “I think you should go.”
Maggie eyed her steadily, but the girl tossed her
head. Maggie plunged on. “Evy, I also came because I thought we should have a talk. Away from the office. Maybe we could clear up a few things…”
“I don’t want to talk,” the girl replied. “I don’t feel well.”
“Look, I know this might not be the best day, but I just wanted you to know something. I’m sorry about what happened this afternoon.” She paused, but Evy did not respond. Maggie stumbled on. “I think you probably misunderstood what you overheard today”— Maggie corrected herself—“
if
you overheard.…” She stopped in mid-sentence, her attention suddenly diverted by a whirring sound that emanated from another room and was coming toward them.
Evy broke in impatiently. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I don’t really care. I just think you’d better go.”
Evy was staring at her defiantly. Maggie shook her head and groped around for another approach to her. “I just think…”
“Will you please go?” the girl whispered angrily, a vein in her temple throbbing visibly.
The whirring sound came closer to the kitchen and then stopped. Maggie looked curiously around Evy’s shoulder and saw that an old woman in an electric wheelchair had just entered the room.
Evy addressed herself to the old woman without turning to look at her. “It’s okay, Grandma. It’s nothing. Just go back to the parlor.”
“Is this your grandmother?” Maggie asked.
“Of course it’s my grandmother,” the girl said angrily.
“Couldn’t I just say hello to her?” Maggie asked.
“She’s sick,” said Evy.
Maggie felt a growing anger at Evy’s insolent tone. She could see that the woman in the wheelchair was feeble, her frame bent and her head dropping on her chest. “Is that any reason to ignore her?” Maggie asked.
Evy glared at her but did not reply.
Maggie approached the woman and put her fingertips lightly on the knotty hand curved around the chair arm. “Mrs. Robinson?” she whispered.
“That’s enough,” Evy insisted. “Let her be.”
Maggie could see the purple veins, thick and close to the surface of the woman’s faded, wrinkled skin. Her gray and white hair was sparse and wispy, and she stared at a spot on the floor a few feet from Maggie, her large but fragile-looking head nodding of its own volition. She wore a pink bed jacket, its ruffled neckline tied in a neat bow around her scrawny neck, and there was a multicolored afghan wrapped around her legs.
“Mrs. Robinson,” Maggie repeated, leaning closer to her face. “I work with Evy. My name is Maggie Fraser, and I’ve just come here to work on the newspaper. Maybe Evy’s told you.”
“She doesn’t know a thing you’re saying,” Evy interrupted scornfully. “What are you talking her ear off for? Leave her alone.”
The old woman blinked, then slowly lifted her shaking head. Her rheumy eyes were pale blue like Evy’s. She focused them with difficulty on Maggie’s face, as if she were trying to understand an explanation, but had
forgotten how to concentrate. Maggie stifled her feelings of revulsion and smiled encouragingly at her. She was about to straighten up when she saw the old woman’s lower lip begin to tremble. Then, deep within the aged eyes, Maggie saw an expression of clarity flutter, then drop into place like a tumbler snapping back at the insertion of the right key.
She stared at Maggie, her eyes widening grotesquely. A look of terror surfaced from their depths and contorted her whole face. Her crippled fingers clawed impotently at the arms of her chair, and she worked her mouth violently, as if straining to speak. Suddenly, a cry, harsh and piercing, burst from her throat, and her cracked lips formed a string of unintelligible words.
Maggie’s heart pounded in her ears, but she could not tear her eyes from the old woman’s horrified gaze. Suddenly Evy, who was temporarily immobilized by the exchange, jerked to alertness. “All right,” she shouted at Maggie. “That’s enough.”
Maggie looked helplessly from her to the old woman. “What’s wrong?”
“You’ve upset her,” Evy accused her.
Bewildered, Maggie began to protest. “But I didn’t do anything…”
Evy turned on her, enraged. “I told you this would happen. I told you to go, before.”
“I don’t understand.” Maggie sputtered. “I didn’t…”
“Get out!” Evy commanded shrilly over the cries of the old woman, which had begun again.
Maggie hesitated a moment, then backed out the door, slamming it behind her as she fled toward the car.
“And don’t come back!” she heard Evy shrieking after her.
For a while Maggie drove aimlessly, barely aware of the roads, trying to still the racing of her heart which had resulted from the scene at Evy’s. She did not want to go home. She knew that. She could not bear to face the empty house. Her feeling of total isolation would only be intensified by those silent rooms.
Even as she drove along the deserted country roads she felt exposed and humiliated. It seemed as if everything she did alienated her from these people. And Evy. Evy was so furious with her. The one person, besides Jess, who had been relatively friendly to her.
Before she was conscious of what she was doing, Maggie had driven back to town.
I’ll just go back to the office,
she thought.
I’ll just stay there for a while.
She parked the car outside the
News
building.
There won’t be anyone there. Maybe I can get some work done.
But as she got out of the car and walked up the sidewalk, she knew what she was really hoping for.
The light from Jess’s office spilled out into the hallway. Her heart caught in her throat as she spied it when she opened the front door. She knew she should be avoiding him. But she needed someone to talk to. Someone who would not look at her with suspicion and hostility. She stood in the vestibule, her hand clutching the doorknob like an aerialist about to go out on the wire.
A moving shadow blotted out the light on the floor. Jess stood in the doorway, a pencil behind his ear. He squinted into the darkened hallway. “Who is it?”
“It’s me,” Maggie breathed.
“Maggie?”
“Yes.”
His face relaxed into a smile. “What are you doing here?” He came toward her.
She was about to lie. A forgotten folder. An unfinished column. The excuses formed in her mind and then dissolved. She looked up at him helplessly. “I was hoping to find you here,” she said.
He reached out a hand and grasped her elbow. “You found me,” he said.
7
“More coffee?”
Maggie agreed, and the waitress poured the steaming brew into her china cup. Maggie raised it to her lips, then balanced its ribbed surface between her fingertips, examining the delicate, flower-sprigged pattern in the flickering candlelight.
It tasted different, she thought, when you had to plead for it, like a beggar, holding out a dented metal mug. She took another sip. The day she was sprung they had all pressed up against their cell doors to jeer as she walked down the tier. Then, one of them had started with the cup. In a minute they all caught on, rolling and banging them against the bars, metal on metal. The clangor attacked her. She could feel it everywhere—in her armpits, behind her knees, in her genitals. She wanted to clap her hands over her ears, but she couldn’t give them the satisfaction.
“You’ll be back,” they screamed over the din. Her eyes iced over the memory.
Never,
she thought.
“This place is a find, isn’t it?” Jess asked, gesturing around the intimate dining room. “A little out of the way, but it’s always good.”
“It’s perfect,” Maggie murmured, recovering quickly.
“Our waitress is one of the owners. She and her husband keep the place open all winter because they love good food, and there’s nowhere better to eat.”
Maggie cocked her head and smiled at him. “You know, you’re really quite a guide.”
“Quite a guy, did you say?” he asked, pretending to have misunderstood.
“That too,” she said quietly.
“I fished for that,” he admitted, pleased. He reached into his jacket pocket and extracted a pipe and his tobacco pouch. “Well,” he said, “I feel as if this dinner has been a great success.”
Maggie raised her eyebrows. “Oh?”
“I finally know a little more about you.”
Maggie smiled ruefully. The conversation had run a perilous course. But despite two glasses of wine and the fact that she was still shaken by the encounter at Evy’s, she had managed to steer it away from sensitive areas. Safe anecdotes about growing up on the farm and some stories from high school seemed to have satisfied him. He’d listened with pleasure, interrupting her with an occasional question. His interest and the sound of her own voice had reassured her, and the need to tell him about the incident at Evy’s receded. Just being near him made it seem unimportant.
“However,” he went on, “I still haven’t heard what I came here for.” He lit the pipe and drew on it.
Maggie looked at him sharply.
“There was something on your mind when you came looking for me,” he said. “What was the problem?”
Maggie shook her head. “It was nothing much, really. I guess I was just feeling a little lonely, a little down. It’s much better now.”
“Well, I’m glad,” he said. He knew she was evading the question, but he was letting her get away with it. He frowned at his pipe, which had gone out, and relit it. “Lost my good one,” he said.
Deliberately, Maggie took a sip of coffee and sat back. The intimacy between them was making her uncomfortable. She searched for a neutral subject.
“That’s a very nice sweater you have on. It’s a good color on you,” she said pleasantly.
“Oh, thanks,” said Jess, plucking at an invisible pull on the sleeve.
“It looks handmade. A great-aunt, perhaps?” she teased him.
“It is,” Jess agreed shyly. “As a matter of fact, Evy made it for me.”
“Evy?” Maggie drew in a sharp breath.
Jess regarded her quizzically. “Yes. Why?”
Maggie felt a stab in her stomach,
Is there something between them after all?
she wondered. Perhaps that explained why Evy was so angry with her. Maggie chose her words carefully, trying to keep her voice even. “It just seems like a rather personal gift. That’s all. I mean, more like something one would give a close friend than a boss.”
Jess sucked reflectively on the stem of his pipe. “I suppose we are friends. I’ve known her for years, long before she worked at the paper. She was still a little girl when I first knew her.”
Maggie chewed over this explanation in her mind.
Drop it,
she thought to herself. But she could not dispel the image of Evy, furiously ordering her out of the house over her grandmother’s inchoate wailing. “She seems to be very attached to you,” Maggie said finally.
“I guess she is,” he said.
“I mean in other than a friendly way,” Maggie persisted. “I was beginning to get the impression that you two… That there was more to it than friendship.”
“Between me and Evy?” he asked incredulously. “Oh, maybe she’s got a little crush on me. That’s not unusual for girls her age,” he dismissed it.
“She’s not exactly a child. She must be over eighteen.”
“Just barely,” said Jess.
“She’s a woman, really.”
“So?”
“So, I just wondered if the two of you might be involved in some way.”
“What gives, Maggie?” Jess asked impatiently. “Did Evy tell you that?”
“No,” Maggie admitted. “It was just a feeling I had.”
“Did you have a falling out with Evy?”
Maggie sat silently for a moment. “I don’t know if you’d call it a falling out,” she said at last.
Jess watched her expectantly.
“I think she’s pretty angry with me.”
“Why?”
“Well, I think it has to do with you,” Maggie replied, trying to speak calmly. “I went over to her house after work, to bring her a package she left behind, and she ordered me out.”