“Did he say what for?” he asked, with mixed reactions.
Cathy said, “He told me he loaned it to you to buy something. I don’t want to pester you for it, but if you want to do something for him now that he’s gone, maybe you could give it to me.” She explained to him at great length how close she and Milt had been.
“Let me talk to my wife,” Bruce said. “Can I call you in a day or so or write you?”
With the obvious conviction that she would never see the money, Cathy said, “Anything you and Susan do is perfectly satisfactory with me. You understand there’s nothing written down about it.”
“Yes,” he said. He told her he was glad to hear from her, and then he hung up.
“Does she say you borrowed it?” Susan said. “He gave it to you, didn’t he?”
“He gave it to both of us,” he said. “As a wedding gift.”
“Do you suppose he told her it was just a loan? Maybe he forgot he gave it to us, or he changed his mind. You know how he was.”
Getting out the bills that had come in during the last week, he sat down and began figuring out their immediate financial obligations. “We can do it,” he decided finally. “But it would be a lot easier on us if we could divide it into two portions, a month apart. Two-fifty this month and the rest next month.”
“Do what you want,” Susan said, with a tremor of uneasiness. “If you feel it won’t put us in a bad situation. I’ll let you decide.”
“I’ll write her a check and stick it in the mail right away,” he said. That was the only way he could bring himself to hand out any money to anyone; in the last year or so he had picked up a stern habit of keeping a tight control on all expenses.
“She must need it,” Susan said, “or she wouldn’t have done a thing like that. Calling up and asking for it.”
In the end he mailed off a check to Cathy Hermes for the full five hundred dollars. But it brought him no sense of relief.
Death, he thought, has always been remote from me. My parents are both alive. My brother, too. The closest it ever came, in the past, was when Mrs. Jaffey became ill, left the Garret A. Hobart Grammar School, and finally passed on. And then of course we got this store in Denver because a man we never saw died in an auto accident. But it’s never had a decisive influence on anything affecting me.
For a moment he thought, Is it possible that Milt went around complaining about money? Complaining because I didn’t pay it back?
Anyhow, he thought, now it’s only a plain flat sum that somebody I barely know wants and that has to come out of our books, like any other five-hundred-dollar outlay. His reasons for giving it to me—those are gone. Vanished. I never knew; Cathy Hermes doesn’t care; and Milt himself is in no position to think about it one way or another.
But it’s too bad, he thought, that I’ll always have that hanging over me. Never having known what it was that Milt really meant or felt; whether he changed his mind, or whether he simply did not mean what he said. I didn’t understand him. There was not enough contact.
It occurred to him, then, that outside of Milton Lumky he had never had any friends at all, and certainly he had none now. Susan and the store made up his entire existence. Was that intentional on his part? Or had he allowed it to drift into that?
As far as I’m concerned, he decided, they’re enough. Whether it’s right or not. It’s what I want.
In the kitchen, washing the dinner dishes, Susan said, “Bruce. I want to ask you something. Don’t you miss him?”
“No,” he said.
“Are you sure?”
He said, “I’ve got too much to think about to miss anybody.”
“I’ll try to make it up to you,” she said. “Tying you down while you’re so young. It’s a dreadful thing when an older woman does that.”
He considered that.
“You could have plowed through one state after another, you and Milt in your cars,” she said. “Had different women; you know.”
“I know,” he said.
“And here you are, at twenty-six, with a wife ten years older than you, and a step-daughter, and a house and a business to manage. I woke up the other night and I had to get out of bed and go off by myself; I was shivering all over. I sat up for an hour or so. Did you notice that?”
“No,” he said. He had not awakened.
Susan said, “Do you still think you might walk off and leave me someday?” She gazed at him. “I don’t think I could stand that. In fact I know I couldn’t.”
“You mean,” he said, “am I going to die of a kidney ailment because I don’t go to the bathroom often enough during the working day?”
“When you drove down to Reno to sell the Japanese machines to Mr. von Scharf,” she said. “I was positive you wouldn’t come back.”
“Is that why you called?”
“Maybe,” she said.
He laughed.
“I was so glad to see you when you came back,” she said. “I didn’t care if you had the machines with you or not.”
“I see,” he said. But he did not believe her. But it wasn’t important. He had come back, and he was here now.
“I had my good times,” he said. “Before we were married. Or don’t you remember Peg Googer?”
Still gazing at him she said, “Are you happy with me?”
“Yes,” he said.
At that moment Taffy rushed into the kitchen in her bathrobe and slippers, pleading to be allowed to watch a television program to its end. And after that, she informed them, she would go to bed.
The program had to do with action aboard submarines, and he went in to look at it with her. They sat together on the couch, facing the television set. In the peacefulness of the living room he basked and relaxed and half-dozed. The adventures beneath the water, the submarine fighting for its life against dim sea monsters and Soviet atomic mines, and, later on, the cowboys and spacemen and detectives and all the endless thrilling noisy western adventures, retreated from him. He heard his wife in the kitchen and he was aware of the child beside him, and that brought him his happiness.
Book Info
Title: In Milton Lumky Territory
Authors: Philip K. Dick
Year: 2005-06-00
ISBN-10: 0-575-07465-5
ISBN-13: 978-0-575-07465-1
Publisher: Gollancz / Orion
Price: £7.99
Pages: 213
Binding: tp
Type: NOVEL
Title Reference: In Milton Lumky Territory
Cover: Chris Moore
Notes:
Data from Locus1
BLIC 013124732
OCLC 61259538