“A what’s that?”
“Surely they must have some, wouldn’t you think? We could leave our name and the next time the police arrest somebody they could bring her to us. I mean the house seems so—”
“Well now, wait a minute.”
But she would be off to something new, picking up merchandise and putting it down. “Oh look, a locket like Aunt Bea’s almost. And Aunt Sarah’s dinner ring but the stone’s a different color. Isn’t it funny they call these antiques? They’re only what our aunts wear every day of their lives. What’s this thing, Duncan?”
“A Victorian slide pendant,” Duncan said glumly. “If you ask me, it’s junk. All this stuff is junk. Yesterday Silas brought in a whole carton full, he’d been to some flea market. ‘Here, take this,’ he said, ‘and get rid of that mess on the table, it doesn’t look nice.’ Do you know what he called mess? A genuine chromatrope I bought from old Mrs. Milhauser, and a Boston bathing pan with a pump that still works . . . where is it now? I wanted to show you. He dumped it in some corner or other. He doesn’t like tools and things with moving parts, he says they clutter the shop. We spend all our time shifting each other’s merchandise into hiding places and out again, in and out. Look at that chair! He likes it. He wants me to ask a hundred and fifty dollars for it.”
Justine looked at a chair with a curved spine that was all pointed leaves and flowers and little sharp berries. On one of its finials Duncan had impaled a liniment ad. “I’ve a good mind to quit this job,” he said, but she didn’t bother answering that. He would never quit in the middle of a fight.
She wanted him to come with her somewhere. “Maybe we could take a trip,” she told him.
“All right.”
“Just spur of the moment.”
“All right.”
“We might even stop and see Meg.”
But then his face grew cold and stubborn. “Not a chance. Not until we’re asked, Justine.”
“But she said. She said in her letters.”
“ ‘We’ll have you over sometime soon,’ is what she said. Pay attention.”
He knew Meg’s letters by heart, the same as Justine. It was all an act, his unconcern. (“Duncan,” she had told him, “Meg has gone to marry Alfred, I mean Arthur,” and he had grown motionless for one split second before continuing to close up shop.) “As long as we don’t come for a meal,” she said now, “why do we have to wait to be invited?”
“We’re not going till we are, I tell you.”
“Oh, that’s ridiculous. She’s our daughter.”
“So what?”
“Remember when she was colicky, all those evenings you walked up and down with Meggie on your shoulder? You sang ‘Blues in the Night.’ Her head was straight up and wobbling, her forehead would get all wrinkled from trying not to miss a word.”
“Merely singing ‘Blues in the Night’ to someone does not obligate me to pay them an uninvited visit seventeen years later.”
“Eighteen,” said Justine.
“Eighteen.”
“You used to take her to the circus when she was too little to hold down a spring-up seat. For three straight hours you leaned on it for her so she wouldn’t pop right up again.”
“There was an intermission.”
“Even so.”
“Merely leaning on a spring-up seat for someone—”
“And she’s not just someone. She’s not just any old person that you would treat so formally the minute she hurt your feelings.”
“Who’s hurt?” Duncan said.
“Look at Grandfather. Do you know what I found him doing the other day? He was at the kitchen table all hunched over with his head in his hands. I thought something was wrong. Then he sat up and I saw he’d been studying this world map in the Hammond atlas. Not Maryland, not the United States, the world, Duncan. That’s how far he let Caleb run before he would go after him. Are we going to do that too?”
“We’re never going to forget that man, are we,” Duncan said. “The one that got away.” He set down a crimping iron. “However, we’re wandering off the subject here. Meg has not vanished. We know exactly where she is. She writes us a letter once a week. All I’m saying is don’t repeat history, give her a little breathing space. Let her ask us first.”
“Oh, there’s always some excuse.”
“I’m just telling you what I think.”
“Do you wish I hadn’t come after you, when you left home?”
“No.”
“Well, I wish it sometimes, Duncan Peck.”
“No doubt you do,” said Duncan.
“And if you ever walk off again, you realize I won’t follow. I’ll have them declare you legally dead, I’ll remarry right away.”
“Of course,” he said serenely.
There was no way to win a fight with that man.
She stormed out of the shop and then stood on the sidewalk, wondering what to do with herself. Everything seemed irritating. The sunlight was too sharp for her eyes. The traffic was too noisy, a swarm of gigantic glaring station wagons. She hated the way the women drivers were poised at the Main Street traffic light, all lifting their arms simultaneously to orchestrate their hairdos. She turned in the other direction, toward home, which was not where she wanted to be but she couldn’t think of any place else.
In the kitchen, her grandfather was washing the dishes. Periodically he had these spells of trying to make the house look cared for. He wore around his waist a striped linen dishtowel with an enormous charred hole in its center. He bent over the sink, unaware of Justine’s presence, doggedly scrubbing a saucepan with a piece of dried gourd that Duncan had grown two years ago after reading about its scouring properties. The gourd looked like a chunk of hardened beige seaweed. From time to time he stopped scrubbing and examined it, frowning, as if he found it difficult to believe. Then he rinsed the saucepan and plodded over to the table with it, head bowed, shoulders hunched. “Hello, Grandfather,” Justine said. “Grandfather?”
He started and looked up. “Eh?”
“You don’t have to wash the dishes.”
“I’d like to know what we’d eat off tonight if I didn’t.”
“We could always go to the diner,” Justine said.
“Ha.”
He dried the saucepan on a corner of his apron. Then he set it on a stack of meticulously cleaned, polished plates and trudged back to the sink. He was so stooped that, from behind, his head seemed to disappear. All Justine saw was his rounded shoulders, the elastic X of his suspenders in the hollow of his spine, and his trousers draped and formless as if he had no seat. Nowadays, everywhere Justine looked she found something to make her sad.
She would have liked to write Meg another letter, but she had sent one just this morning. So she went instead to Meg’s bedroom, to open her closet and stare at the row of shirt-dresses that seemed to be leading a gentle muted life of their own. Someday soon, Meg said in her letters, she would stop by for the rest of her things or her parents could bring them when they came to visit. But Justine felt comforted by what was left behind and she would be sorry to see the room stripped. She took a deep breath of Meg’s clean smelclass="underline" Ivory soap and fresh-ironed fabric. She stroked the collar of the nearest dress, with its precise top-stitching, and then she lifted the cover of the sewing machine to admire Meg’s mastery of such a complex, wheeled invention. She would have opened bureau drawers, but Meg was particular about her privacy.