Duncan looked up from polishing a Cinderella pastry cutter and found Justine staring at him through the plate glass window, directly beneath his hand-lettered sign, ANTIC TOOLS WANTED. She was wearing her fanciest church bazaar outfit and there was a chain of safety pins dangling from the tip of her left breast. When he waved she waved back, but she kept on standing there. He rose and came close to the glass, popping his mouth like a goldfish. She smiled. “Come in!” he shouted.
So she came, leaving the door swinging open behind her. “I was just passing,” she told him.
“You want to hear about my movie?”
“Yes.”
“I’m going to buy a camera and walk around filming to one side of things, wherever the action isn’t. Say there’s a touchdown at a football game, I’ll narrow in on one straggling player at the other end of the field. If I see a purse-snatcher I’ll find someone reading a newspaper just to the right of the victim.”
“What’s the point?” Justine asked.
“Point? It’ll be the first realistic movie ever made. In true life you’re never focused on where the action is. Or not so often. Not so finely.” He stopped and looked at her. “Point?” he said. “You don’t usually ask me that.”
“Duncan, I wish I knew what we should be doing about Meg.”
“Oh. School called. She cut all her afternoon classes, they said. Is she sick?”
“Why, I don’t know. I haven’t been home.”
“Every day this week she’s had a headache.”
“See there? No wonder I worry,” Justine said. “I ought to go look in on her.” But instead she sat down on a knobby piano stool he had been trying to get rid of for months. “I am forty and one-third years old,” she said.
Duncan blew on the pastry cutter and started polishing it again.
“Doesn’t it seem to you that things are going by very fast?”
“I have always thought everything moved too slowly,” he said. “But I know I’m in the minority.”
“How did we get here?”
But when Duncan looked up, she had her eyes fixed on the opposite wall as if she didn’t want an answer.
He set down his work and rose to walk around the shop, passing his rows of polished tools and utensils. They did his heart good. He ignored what Silas had brought in from his tours of the auction sales — the china and scrolled furniture, which he allowed to pile up in dim corners. He paused beside a nineteenth-century pressure scale and laid his hand upon it gradually, delighting in its intricate, precise design. Behind him he heard the familiar plop, plop of Justine’s cards. What would she be asking, all alone? But when he turned he saw that she was laying the cards absent-mindedly, the way another person might doodle or chew a pencil. Her eyes were on something far away; she smoothed each card blindly as she set it on the sewing chest beside her.
While he watched, she frowned and collected her thoughts. She looked down at what she had laid out. “Why, Duncan,” she said.
“What is it?”
“Why—”
“What is it, Justine?”
“Never mind, don’t worry. Don’t worry.”
“Who says I’m worried?”
But she was already out the door, running down the street with her hat streamers fluttering. It was the first time Duncan had ever known her to leave her cards behind.
Daniel Peck was on the front porch, rearranging a sheaf of correspondence, when Justine came dashing up the walk between the rows of sprouting vegetables. She looked wild-eyed and flustered, but then she often did. “Grandfather,” she called, “have you seen Meg?”
He tried to think.
“Meg.”
“Well, now I wonder where she could be,” he said.
“What time is it?”
He fumbled in his pocket and hauled out lengths of gold chain hand over hand, raising his eyebrows when his fingers met up with a watch. “Ah! Five twelve,” he said.
She spun past him, into the house, clattering the screen door behind her. He felt the noise rather than heard it. He felt his bones jar. Then there was peace, and he returned to a letter dated April 10, 1973. He squinted in the twilight at a ragged blue script.
Dear Mr. Peck:
In response to your query of March 17, I am sorry to say that I do not recall my grandmother’s ever mentioning a Caleb Peck or, for that matter, any other young man she used to dance with. I was not aware that she danced. However my cousin Amabel Perce (Mrs. John M.) of Duluth, Minnesota may know more. I myself was never at all close to my grandmother and am certainly not the one to . . .
He sighed. Long white fingers entered his vision, fluttering another letter on top of the first.
Dear Mama,
I have gone to be married in Arthur’s church. We will be living with Arthur’s mother. Don’t worry about me, I’ll finish school in Semple. I will keep in touch.
Love,
“Eh? What’s this?” he asked Justine.
She merely lifted an arm and dropped it, as if she couldn’t speak.
“Why,” he said, “I didn’t know it was proper for ministers to elope.”
Justine went down the porch steps, back through the vegetables toward the street, drifting along slower than he had seen her in years.
“Justine? Wasn’t that fellow a minister?”
She didn’t answer. In the end he simply filed the letter away among his other correspondence and went on with what he had been doing before.
10
By May the whole front yard was a tangle of cucumber vines and little green stalks of corn. Neighbors began knocking on the door. “Justine, of course, it’s your lawn to plant as you please although frankly it seems . . . but never mind, what is that smell? What we want to know is, that smell!”
“Oh, just things from the blender.”
“The—? When you turn down this street it’s the first thing you notice. It smells like a zoo. A city dump. A slaughter-house.”
“I’ll mention it to Duncan,” Justine said. But her face was lit up and her eyes all curly, she was so happy to see somebody. She would reach out to touch visitors on the wrist or shoulder, drawing them in. “Since you’re here, why don’t you stay?”
“Oh, well . . . ”
“We can sit out back. You won’t smell a thing.”
“Oh, well, maybe for a minute.”
“I’ll make you lemonade, or coffee. Anything. What would you like?”
The fact was, Justine hated to be alone. She had felt so restless and unhappy lately, wandering from room to room, trying to start up conversations with her grandfather when he was too busy with his own thoughts to answer. “Grandfather, isn’t there any place you’d like to go?”
“How’s that?”
“Do you want to go somewhere, I said.”
“No, no.”
She sank back and twisted a piece of her hair. It was impossible to drive off on her own; a car was so private. Like a sealed black box. She would end up speeding just to get her isolation over with, or she would run a stop sign because even horns and curses were better than silence. So instead of driving she walked to Duncan’s shop, missing no opportunity to speak to passers-by. “Hello, Mr. Hill, did you get the money I said you would? Where’s Mrs. Hill? Wait, Red Emma, I’ll walk along with you,” and she would run to catch up and travel three blocks out of her way, pausing at each house while Red Emma delivered the mail. She parted from people with difficulty, dragging it out, loitering on the sidewalk fiddling with a button and finding new things to say to them. She dreaded walking even half a block with only her own thoughts for company. And when finally she arrived at the Blue Bottle she would be full of pent-up words that exploded from her before she was fully in the door. “Duncan, Red Emma told me . . . Bertha Miller asked . . . oh, Duncan, I just had a thought, can we borrow a wayward girl from the police station?”