JOYCE DUNCAN’S DECISION TO GO BACK WAS CRYSTALLIZED BY THE receipt of a letter from her mother, saying, in part, “Dear, your last letter sounded so lonely and sad; remember they say that whenever a woman feels low she can always cheer herself up by buying a new hat or a new dress, or both, so am enclosing a small check. Buy yourself something silly.” The check was just small enough not to matter enormously against the rent or the phone bill, and just large enough to make the trip a reality instead of the dim temptation it had been for so long.
“Jed,” she said, “I think I will go back. Just for a day or so.”
“It’s your money,” he said, not even lifting his head to speak to her.
Perhaps if I can explain somehow, she thought, relate it to something he understands; perhaps then when I come back there might be a way we can start to talk to each other, perhaps even start over … “You see,” she said inadequately, “everything is so wrong, somehow. Maybe if I went back to where I started from, just for a while …”
“Go ahead,” he said.
“Maybe I’d be happier if I tried it,” Joyce said. “You see,” she went on, not wanting to explain but hoping that somehow it might make him turn at last and look at her, “there’s a sort of mix-up that happened a long time ago that I’d like to straighten out. A … a lie.”
“I didn’t know one lie more or less mattered to you,” he said, and turned a page of his book.
She knew by now that if she let the tears come into her eyes or her voice, Jed would only take his book and go into the bedroom to read. Helplessly she said, “I can’t help feeling that if I go back and straighten things up there, maybe things here will be better. Maybe I’ve been off on a wrong track all these years just because of that one thing. Maybe when I come back, maybe you and I can …”
He stood up, his finger between the pages of his book. “Look,” he said tiredly, “maybe if you go back to that town, wherever it is, and un-lie yourself, you’ll cancel out every lie you’ve told since. You might even cancel out all the unkind things you’ve done since. But I doubt it.”
“If you’d try to understand—” she began, but he closed the bedroom door so gently that he might not have heard her. I’ll leave early in the morning, she thought; I’ll leave before he’s up and he can make his own stupid breakfast, and when I come back …
In the car the next morning, headed finally back exactly the way she had come here nearly ten years before, she found herself almost chanting, in a rhythm made up partly of the sound of the car wheels on the pavement, and partly the pulse of her own excitement: I’m going back, I’m going back. I should have done it much much sooner, she thought suddenly; things wouldn’t have been as bad as this if I’d gone back before. Once it’s done, she realized with triumph, I won’t ever need to go back again. She tried to imagine what Jean Simpson’s face was like, and found she thought instead about the pictures on the wall of the office; she thought she could remember Jean Simpson’s voice, but all she could hear when she tried to think about it was her own voice, level and positive, saying “I saw her, it was Jean Simpson. I recognized her.”
I will tell her, she thought, recognizing that although she was driving on a wide and nearly empty highway she was going very slowly; I will tell her that I am more sorry than I can say, that I was wrong, that I realize now the injustice I did her. I could offer a public apology, she thought, and then: No, why submit her to that?
Milltown. Seventeen miles to Prospect, and it was barely ten-thirty. Perhaps Jean Simpson had moved away? Her family could not have afforded to leave Prospect; the only way a girl like that could get out of town was to move into a worse environment, and Jean had never been—this thought was oddly reassuring—a particularly good girl, not at all the sort of person one might be concerned about for the past ten years. She was not, actually, worth a second thought, but nevertheless Joyce Duncan, scrupulously honest, was coming back after all this time to right an old wrong.
I’m being ridiculous about this, she thought, driving more slowly still past Milltown and East Milltown; I’m thinking in terms of a major disaster and it was only a trifle. Perhaps I ought to take her something, some small thing to show I hold no grudge, a pretty scarf, perhaps, or a box of candy? She could hardly expect me to give her money, but perhaps a couple of pairs of stockings? Better let it wait until I’ve seen her, she told herself; she may be angry still and not want anything from me.
She had thought she would not remember this town after ten years, but she turned automatically onto the street that led to her old house without recognizing anything strange about her memory of it. When she stopped the car, she found it hard to look at the old house and imagine that it could have changed. “So that’s it,” she said, half aloud. “Still here, after all.”
Until she stepped out of her car it was difficult to imagine herself as a stranger, trying to go back, but the minute she put her foot down onto the familiar sidewalk in front of her old house it was suddenly so surprising, so odd a combination of ten years gone and yet still present in her mind, that she had to turn and rest her hand upon the side of the car to steady herself. Joyce Richards, she thought, little Joyce Richards, not Mrs. Jed Duncan at all.
She felt wary of going too close to her old house, although she had been anxious to see it again; perhaps if she came within its reach it would capture her again, and never let her go this time. Or perhaps it was only because she was embarrassed about being seen by people looking out their windows and telling one another, “There’s Joyce Richards come back. Thought she was doing so well in the city?” The sight of the house had reminded her of Mrs. Random, so she turned on the sidewalk and started up the path to the house next door. Once on the overgrown little path with Mrs. Random’s house ahead of her, she realized at last that this was indescribably real, and it seemed to her for a moment that perhaps all this time she had been living in unreality, and waiting to awaken here again, where things were solid and the colors of the sky and the flowers and even the path were actual, real, unfaded. The door of the house was blue, and she thought that for years she had not known how blue that color could truly be.
Going up the path, she almost tasted the richness of color and form, and stopped—which she could never remember having done before—to look at, and finally touch, a rose, which bent slightly toward her and gave back to her touch a strong and soft pressure. She bent to see if it smelled as she remembered roses ought to smell, and it was heavy, rich, and lovely. Even the white doorstep amazed her eyes, and the knocker—had she ever seen another one like it?—was possessed of an actual weight of its own, so that it fell back from her hands and crashed loudly in the still morning.
Waiting on the shiny doorstep—was there city dirt on her shoes to soil its whiteness?—she listened to the odd, echoing house inside, and thought that within the city there was never any sense, even though people lived so close together, of that intimate knowledge of walls and floors and ceilings, and she remembered the distant sharp sound of voices in another room when she was a child and supposedly asleep in bed. She heard a footstep inside and then the door opened.
“Hello,” she said, wondering at the sound of her own voice, “it’s Mrs. Random, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” The eyes were not precisely suspicious; wary, rather, as of one who had dealt with personable salesladies and been taken in by supposed bargains.
“I’m Joyce Duncan. I used to be Joyce Richards.”
“Yes?”
“Don’t you remember me?”
“No.”
“I used to live next door.”
The information was taken in and discarded. “Did you?”
“I used to play in your yard.” Desperately, she was spending information she had meant to use sparingly, dwelling on each remembered moment, hoping Mrs. Random might help her reconstruct her lost childhood. “Don’t you remember?”
“So many people.” Mrs. Random waved vaguely at the house next door. “Can’t remember everyone, you know.”
“Well, I remember you.” She looked again at the clean housedress, pink imprinted with thousands of small flower sprigs, and thought that in that long-dead time Mrs. Random had worn either this, or one astonishingly like it, and that the same wisp of white hair had been lying against her cheek for all these years; had Mrs. Random, she wondered, then been this vague-eyed creature, hiding nervously behind her own door? “When my mother was sick you brought us a little roast chicken, and you came over when my father died,” she said, unwillingly. She was forced into this conversational coin; one had always collected news of deaths and miscarriages and broken legs for Mrs. Random’s pleasure. She thought deeply. “I had pneumonia,” she added.
Mrs. Random’s interest was caught and she frowned, trying to remember. “Williams?” she asked.
“Richards. I was Joyce Richards. My father was John Richards, and he was the clerk in the railroad station. You used to say that I could hardly wait to get away from town, the way I used to spend all my time at the station watching the trains.”
“Richards?” said Mrs. Random wonderingly. “You must have gone away at last, then,” she added intelligently. “I heard it said you were in the city.”
Joyce smiled, thinking that her smile, warm and proud and altogether the secret pleasant smile of a woman happy and secure, was not entirely a lie; by Mrs. Random’s standards she had certainly done very well for herself. “I’m married now,” she said, still smiling. “My husband’s a wonderful man.”
“Girls ought to get married,” Mrs. Random said, with a sudden odd, perceptive glance at Joyce. “Keeps them out of trouble. Your old house is still there,” she went on, “but no one’s living in it. Probably open.”
“I may still have a key to it,” said Joyce, ashamed to admit that she had carried it on her key ring all these years.
“Go on in, then,” said Mrs. Random generously, free with any invitation except one into her own house. “Been a lot of people in and out of there, all these years.”
Joyce lingered on the doorstep, even though Mrs. Random showed signs of wanting to withdraw and close the door. “Whatever happened to the Collinses, used to live on the other side of us?”
“Collins?” said Mrs. Random vaguely. “Can’t recall the name. It was Williams lived there.”
“The Cartwrights across the street?”
“Moved, I suppose,” said Mrs. Random.
“And Bob Cartwright?”
“Now,” said Mrs. Random, “I do recall a Bob Cartwright. Married that plain girl. Got a little grocery or some such down on Railroad Street.”
“I get my groceries at Wingdon’s,” Mrs. Random pointed out, as though it were necessary to establish this fact clearly and immediately. “Come back again sometime,” she said.
This time she closed the door flatly, obviously having concluded that otherwise there would be no end to this conversation, and perhaps feeling that there was no harm in closing the door against the face of someone she would probably never see again.
The roses turned slightly away from Joyce as she went down the path, and she wondered that she had ever felt free with them or if it could be true that she had once been punished for the desecration of picking one. She could see the house next door, but the hedge between had grown so dense that it did not seem likely her private path through it still existed. Nothing, she realized now, had been tended for years; she could see that on the house next door a second-story window frame sagged against the shingles, and bricks were gone from the chimney.
I certainly won’t go in there now, she thought, not with Mrs. Random peering out from behind her curtains to see if I’ll try to steal the doors or make off with part of the fence; I’ll come back later. Perhaps, too, if she visited other old acquaintances and checked on other landmarks, she might approach this house again, later in the day or perhaps even tomorrow, more in the spirit in which she had left it, less as a stranger whom Mrs. Random could not remember. She realized that she had not asked Mrs. Random about Jean Simpson, and wondered if there were anything about her that Mrs. Random might have remembered.
She got back into her car, aware of Mrs. Random’s critical eye from the downstairs window, and drove down the street, thinking, as she passed the streetlights and the curbs and the paths into gardens, of how many times, and always alone, she had walked and run and scuffled and skipped rope down this street. She would idle with one foot in the gutter and one on the curb, stepping gingerly in high-heeled shoes, hoping someone would notice her and speak to her, afraid sometimes, and sometimes elated, on her way to school, or to play alone in the park, and always thinking of the time when she would be rich and successful and would come back to walk with scorn past the people who had never noticed her then.
She had always come this way, because the street ended shortly beyond her old house and fell away into fields and trees, although it might be that they had put a road through there now, since there were certainly new houses farther down the street than she remembered. Even though she was driving, which she had never done here before, she found that she was turning the car along the same old ways. She watched along the sidewalk, as she drove slowly, for her old footprints, perhaps even expecting that—as though they had told her that the old Joyce had gone on ahead, and could probably be caught up with on the way—upon turning a corner she might see, halfway down the block ahead, herself in a pink sweater and a white linen skirt, on her way to the library, carrying a book or a white patent leather purse, striding along—was she not always a little bit late?—and not turning to look at cars passing by. “Joyce,” she wanted to call, “Joyce, wait a minute, I want to tell you something.”
Abruptly, because these streets were shorter and narrower and less alive than she had once known them, she turned a corner and found the high school facing her, and she felt swiftly, without at all wanting to, the old familiar dismay; was she late for class, were they all looking at her, was she being laughed at? Then, stopping the car and putting her chin down on the wheel, she looked the high school slowly up and down, half-smiling, as one whom it no longer had power to terrify. “So there you are,” she told it, “and I’m safe from you now, forever. I got away after all, didn’t I?” The high school stared back, square and blank and uncommunicative, as though even now what happened to Joyce Richards was unimportant.
Beyond the red brick and the wooden facings of the school building, she could see the straight lines of the goalposts on the football field, and the long wooden bleachers. She remembered walking quickly along the path alone, on her way to a game, knowing that she went to the games, even alone and without friends, because the mere sense of being where everyone else was made her feel somehow almost a part of the crowd. Names came into her mind, and she smiled again. Katharine, she thought, pretty Katie. Married some local boy, probably, and is sitting somewhere in this town today with a pack of children and lines in her face. … Dot, the most popular girl; had she stayed popular and successful, or failed miserably at some appealing career? … Was it actually possible that all these girls (Katie wearing her green skirt, Dot always a cheerleader, sarcastic Marian, and Wendy) had wandered off in different directions, and perhaps married and had children, and lived in different houses, unfamiliar and remote? Was it possible that those girls were no longer a source of laughing danger to Joyce Richards, that they were now powerless? Then what had they known, so long ago, that Joyce had not known? What power had they ever really had?
She shook her head, amused at her own silliness, and restarted the car. No sense parking in front of the high school, where everyone would only pass by and wonder what you were doing, and she did not think that she could safely sit here and watch the new Katies and Dots and Marians come arm in arm down the walk, staring at her briefly and curiously, before turning to go toward the village. Perhaps, though, it might be Jean Simpson who came down the walk, proudly and not turning her head; not, in fact, seeming to hear anything said to her, although it was always clear from her face that she had been crying.
Hastily, Joyce drove the car around the corner at what was almost a dangerous speed and turned onto the main street of the village; was it possible that in all these years the brightness of the Sunrise Dairy had not faded? She could see its sign halfway down the main street, past the jeweler’s, and she could see the railroad station beyond. “I should have come by train,” she told herself unreasonably, “like the way I left.” She parked the car halfway down the main street, directly in front of the Sunrise Dairy, and stepped out onto the hot, unshaded sidewalk, remembering as she did so that farther up the street, near the gas station, there was a handprint in the cement and the initials JRS. The younger children had always believed that the unknown JRS had been sent to prison for defacing the sidewalk, and the more sophisticated older children told one another cynically that he had later been elected the town’s first mayor.
The Sunrise Dairy, with its black and white tiles and its familiar smell of chocolate syrup and toast and strawberry ice cream, was for a moment loud with remembered voices, and then suddenly quiet with a late-morning silence. As she sat down at the counter she saw that actually she was alone in here, except for the counterman—could it still be Red, after all these years?—busy with something at the far end of the counter. “Lettuce and tomato and a chocolate shake,” she said, without thinking. Perhaps she had ordered these things in soda shops and drugstores and restaurants during the past ten years, but it was certain, as she said the words and then smiled reminiscently, that the correct inflection had been missing (“lettuce and tomato and a chocolate shake”), and she wondered if perhaps the general inferiority of lettuce and tomato and chocolate all these years had been due to that lost rhythm.
“Lettuce and tomato and a chocolate shake,” the counterman said in confirmation, and she knew that she could not have forgotten his voice with its faint lisp, so she said, “It is Red, isn’t it?”
“That’s right,” he said.
“I thought I remembered you. But I imagine you’ve forgotten me.”
He looked at her, his head to one side, frowning; she realized that she had remembered him as lean and young, but he was stouter now, as though the dairy had done well since she left, and his red hair was graying. “Mary?” he said. “Mary Something?”
“No,” she said, unwilling to let him guess names she perhaps would not like to hear. “I used to be Joyce Richards.”
“Joyce Richards.”
He shook his head and smiled. “Well, you know,” he said, “I guess a hundred people come in here every day. And all those kids from the high school—”
“I used to go to the high school.”
“Sure,” he said.
He turned away to make her sandwich, and because he was not looking at her she said boldly, “I’m trying to get in touch with a girl I used to know. Jean Simpson.”
He selected a piece of lettuce and looked at it thoughtfully. “Simpson,” he said, as though she had ordered something.
“Jean Simpson. Has she left town or anything?”
“I couldn’t say, I really couldn’t say.”
“You see,” she said, “she got into trouble once, and it was my fault, and I wanted to come back and sort of fix it up with her.”
He nodded approvingly, and laid another piece of tomato on her sandwich. “Right thing to do,” he said. “What kind of trouble was it?”
“Nothing important, just something I’d like to get straightened out.”
“Look,” he said, glancing up at her, “what do you mean, trouble? You fight over some fellow or something?”
“No, no,” she said.
He hesitated, pausing with her sandwich in his hand. “Nothing serious, I suppose?”
She thought that perhaps he would not give her the sandwich until she told him, so she said, “Well, she made a kind of mistake, and it turned out that I had to be the person who told on her.” That’s as much as he deserves to know, she thought, and it isn’t a lie if I don’t tell him the truth.
“I did hear,” he said elaborately, “that there was a girl couple of years ago got into trouble with some man out at that roadhouse.”
“It certainly wasn’t anything like that. Is that my sandwich?”
“Nothing serious,” she said. “If you don’t know her, it wouldn’t even interest you. It happened a long time ago.”
“Jean Simpson,” he said reflectively. “Now you mention it, it seems to me that I heard she did something pretty bad. Not killing anyone, you understand.” He looked at her eagerly. “I might just happen to know what it was, after all,” he said.
“You couldn’t know,” she said. “I don’t believe anyone knows anymore.”
He grinned unpleasantly. “Never mind,” he said. “She got into some kind of trouble and you’re back now to try and fix it up. What do you get out of it?”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “It’s a trifle, and all I want is to see that it’s straightened out.”
“Oh, sure,” he said knowingly, and set the sandwich down before her. “You wouldn’t be here trying to square it unless it was something pretty important,” he said.
“It’s a private matter,” she said, and tried to smile at him; surely it was not going to be necessary to discuss this with people like Red? If he did not remember Jean Simpson, was there any reason for telling him about old scandals? Why, after all, should she and Jean Simpson suffer because Red was curious? “You know how these things are,” she added stupidly.
“Sure,” he said. “Right. I know.” And he winked at her.
She lifted half of her sandwich; was not the lettuce faded and the tomato yellowed? “What do I owe you?” she asked, sliding off the stool.
“Ninety. Might be able to help you, after all, if you’d let me know what happened.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “Nothing happened. Keep the dime.”
“Thanks, lady,” he said ironically as she went toward the door. “I’ll be asking around for your Jean Simpson.”
Next time I’ll know, she thought, jabbing her key viciously at the car’s starter; next time I’ll know not to open my mouth and not to humiliate myself, and not to order lettuce and tomato, and next time I won’t even come back, and Jean Simpson can take care of herself. Next time, she thought, I hope Red is dead, or gone crazy or poor and starving or something.
Well, she thought further, in a moment of utter clarity, I’ve seen my old hometown and I’ve visited my old neighbor and my old school and Red’s, and there isn’t another soul in this town who’d remember me, and that’s what I came back for—to see a crazy old woman and a gossiping old man and a fallen-down old school, and I haven’t even told Jean Simpson I’m sorry.
There might be one more place to look, and she realized that she might have saved time and gone there earlier, as she turned the car toward the railroad station. A little grocery down on Railroad Street, Mrs. Random had said.
Trying to fix the probable location of the grocery in her mind, she found that although she could remember the station side of Railroad Street very clearly, she had only the dimmest picture of what the other side of the street looked like. She knew that the station offices and the post office should be on her right as she approached the station, but on the left she could remember only a row of dirty little houses and perhaps a bar and grill. Hadn’t Jean Simpson lived in one of those houses? It seemed reasonable, at any rate, to turn left when she reached the station, and as she swung her car around the corner she saw ahead of her a faded sign, stiff and colorless under the hot sun. SQUARE DEAL GROCERY, it said. MEATS.
Now, she told herself, sitting in her car in front of the grocery and staring straight ahead to where the railroad tracks disappeared between the quiet hills, now I am Joyce Duncan who used to be Joyce Richards, and I am twenty-nine years old and I live in the city with my husband. I am not nineteen, and I do not live in this town, or owe anyone here any kind of loyalty, and I do not have any crush on any Bob Cartwright, and all I am doing is trying to perform a generous act that nine people out of ten would never think about doing. I am here, she told herself, sitting in the car and not looking out at the grocery, because a long time ago I did a silly thing where I lost my head and said Jean Simpson took that money. She has every right to think I deliberately tried to get her into trouble just to save myself, and even if this is Bob Cartwright’s store he is probably married, and I am certainly married, and I am going inside only to see if he knows how I can find Jean Simpson.
I hope he isn’t in the grocery, though, she thought, deliberately fixing her mind on a picture of him in a white apron, holding a butcher’s cleaver, probably haggling over small change; I hope the store is closed for the day.
It was dark inside, and for a minute she hesitated just within the store, making out vague shapes, which were of course a counter and bins of fruit and vegetables, and rows of cans on the shelves. Then, as she let the screen door close behind her and moved toward the counter, a woman emerged from the back room brushing her hair out of her eyes and not looking up. “Yes?” she said.
What was there to say? I would like a can of corn, please; how much do you charge for hamburger? “I’m looking for Mr. Cartwright.”
The woman looked up at her and then away again. “He’s not here. I’m his wife.”
It was not possible to stop and think, to remember Bob Cartwright and how he had once been too proud to speak to Joyce Richards. It was only possible to stop for a second and look again at the woman, at her dull hair and her dirty dress. But the woman was waiting, and her stance suggested strongly that unless this business with her husband was legitimate, it might be better to hurry and do whatever purchasing was necessary and then leave at once. “I actually wanted to ask him,” Joyce said hesitantly, “that is—perhaps you could tell me—I want to know whatever happened to an old friend of mine, a girl named Jean Simpson.”
“My name used to be Jean Simpson,” said the woman. “Was it me you wanted?”
“I guess it was,” said Joyce Duncan, dazed. Although she had never really intended to run up and embrace her long-lost friend, the idea that they might not recognize each other had not, up till now, occurred to her. “I didn’t remember you,” she said, with a false little laugh.
“I don’t remember you.”
“My name is Joyce Duncan now. I used to be Joyce Richards.”
“That so?” said the woman indifferently. “Doesn’t come back to me.”
“I guess you’ll remember when I tell you what I came for.” Now it was surprisingly easy to say. “Before I left this town, ten years ago, I did something I’ve always been sorry for, and I’ve been hunting for you all day to try and fix it up.”
“What’s it got to do with me?” The woman glanced at the back room from which she had come, as though she wished this interminable conversation over and herself safely back in her rocking chair, or on her bed, or watching her soap operas on TV.
“You don’t remember? The money that disappeared during gym class during senior year, and I said I saw you take it?”
“I never took any money.”
“I know you didn’t,” said Joyce Duncan. “I took it. It was two dollars and seventy cents and I spent it on a pair of stockings and a box of candy and a cheap pearl necklace from the five-and-ten. I said I saw you take it because I was scared, and they almost expelled you from high school. It was the dues from the Girls’ Club.”
“We run an honest store,” the woman said. “Business is tough, but we’ve always been honest.”
“I know. What I mean is, I once accused you of stealing, and you didn’t, and even though it wasn’t important I wanted to come back and tell you I was sorry.”
“We give people a square deal,” said the woman dully, “and they mostly give us a square deal. That’s why we call it the Square Deal Grocery. Because we give—”
“Don’t you mind anymore? I mean, I remember how you must have felt that day in old Martinson’s office when you kept saying you didn’t and I kept saying I saw you, and they believed me because they knew you wanted the money more than I did.”
“I guess everyone wants money,” the woman said, with what was almost a smile.
“But I want to make it up to you,” Joyce said helplessly.
This time the woman did smile. “Seems as though I did remember your face there for a minute,” she said. “I remember once just seeing you come up to some other girls at some class party or something and they laughed and walked away and you were just standing there. I just remember your face there for that minute, just standing there.”
“Really?” said Joyce. “Well, of course, now …”
“Why worry about it?” said the woman. “I never did anything I’m sorry for, and me and Bob, we got our own little business here, and even though costs—”
“Well, I’m sorry anyway,” Joyce said irritably. “Will you give my regards to Bob—if he remembers me, that is?”
“I don’t suppose he would remember you,” the woman said thoughtfully. “Seems like he would of mentioned you sometimes if he did.”
Joyce hesitated, half turning away, and then thought that it was not enough to leave like this. “Are you sure you don’t remember?” she asked, and the woman, already turning toward the other room, said wearily, “Look, lady, we keep a grocery here. I already told you that whatever’s bothering you is your worry, not mine.”
“Well, perhaps I’d better get some cigarettes before I leave,” Joyce said. “I’ll take a carton, please. And one of those boxes of candy and a dozen oranges.” She watched silently as the woman put them into a bag. “How much is that?”
Looking around desperately, Joyce said, “Then give me—oh, say, eight—ten packs of gum.”
Without comment, the woman counted them out and put them into the bag with the candy and the cigarettes and set the bag next to the bag of oranges on the counter. “How much?” asked Joyce.
“Two-seventy-three, with tax.”
“Fine,” said Joyce. She gave the woman a five-dollar bill, and counted the change carefully, thinking, after all, a person who has once been accused of stealing doesn’t always worry afterward about being too careful.
“Will that be all?”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Come again,” said the woman tonelessly, and this time she moved purposefully toward the other room and waited in the doorway while Joyce went to the outer door and the street. Is she afraid that I’ll steal something?, Joyce wondered, and called back, “Don’t forget to give my regards to Bob.”
“I’ll tell him.”
She doesn’t even know my name any longer, Joyce thought, how could she ever tell him? She put the packages into the backseat of the car and sat down gratefully behind the wheel. “Well,” she said aloud, “that’s done.”
It was not until she was almost in Milltown, nearly seventeen miles from Prospect, that she recalled that she had not returned, after all, to look at her old house again. I’ll never see it now, she thought, knowing that she would never go back again, but everything’s all right anyway; I didn’t need to worry at all; I told that woman I took the money, but it was a long time ago and she doesn’t even remember my name. Lucky I didn’t take her any flowers or anything; she would have been suspicious.
Stopping the car in front of her own apartment and seeing the light upstairs that meant Jed was home, she laughed aloud, thinking of her triumph, and she ran upstairs because the elevator would be too slow.
“Jed,” she said, as the door opened before her, “it’s all right, I fixed it all.”
He raised his eyes calmly to regard her. “No more lie?” he asked.
“I saw her and I told her all about it and she said it was perfectly all right, and she wouldn’t take the money so I bought some cigarettes and things—she runs a little grocery, I forgot to tell you—and gave her the money back that way. And we can always smoke the cigarettes.”
“I hope you got our brand,” Jed said without humor.
“Of course, idiot. And what do you think? She married my old boyfriend, and I went back and saw my old high school and my old house and a few old neighbors, and I told everyone about how I was married and everything.”
She looked at him, at his serious eyes apparently waiting for her to say something more, and her voice faltered. “So now,” she said, “everything’s going to be all right—isn’t it?”