When Meg was a baby, Justine had realized for the first time that it was possible to die. She had felt suddenly fragile under the responsibility of staying alive to raise her daughter. (In those days, she expected to do it perfectly; she thought no one else could manage.) She developed a fear of fire that was so unfounded she couldn’t even tell Duncan because of course he would laugh at her. Over and over again she imagined the salty smell of smoke in the air, or a flickering red glow reflected on the wall. If Duncan were home he could get them out of anything, but what if it happened in the daytime while he was at work? By herself she was so young and skinny and incompetent. Then gradually, she developed an escape plan. They were living in Uncle Ed Hodges’s garage apartment at the time. If fire broke out she could snatch up the baby, climb out on the kitchen window ledge, and make a long, desperate leap to the roof of Uncle Ed’s back porch. Once she had pictured all this she relaxed, and eventually she forgot her fear completely. It was not till years later, returning to Uncle Ed’s for a visit, that she saw that such a leap would have been insane. It was not only too far, it was also upward. She would have had to soar through the air like some surrealistic figure in a painting by Chagall, feet set neatly together and arms primly clasping the baby. But in those days, she might have managed anything. She was so necessary. Even when Meg had left infancy, given up first Justine’s breast and then her lap and finally gone to play in other rooms altogether, Justine had to be there. She had to be the feeder, the fixer, the sounding board for an endless stream of announcements. “Mama my dress is dirty, Sammy hit me, the violets are out. Mama there’s a spider in my chocolate milk, a moth in my bath, a ladybug on the windowscreen. My stomach aches. My mosquito bites itch. Janie has a hamster, Edwin’s in the asparagus, I broke the handle off my teapot, Melissa has a music box you can watch right through the glass.” Justine nodded, barely listening; the only answer required was, “Yes, dear.” Then Meg was satisfied, as if things came into existence only when she was certain her mother knew about them. And now what? Justine had raised her daughter without dying after all; she was freed from her fears. But at night she woke up shaky and sad, and she pressed her face against Duncan’s chest and said, “I’m not necessary any more.”
“To me you are,” he said.
He didn’t see what she meant. He hadn’t had that feeling of being essential to Meg in the first place; he couldn’t know how it felt to lose it.
She wandered to other rooms, to hers and Duncan’s with its unmade bed and scattered clothing, to the hall where she tripped over a stack of lumber. Everything looked dusty and stale. She hung out the living room window to be revived by Ann-Campbell, who was taunting a playmate among the cucumber vines:
She returned to the kitchen, feeling more cheerful. “Grandfather, let’s take a trip,” she said.
“A what?”
“A trip.”
“But we don’t have any leads right now, Justine.”
“Why wait for leads? Oh, why won’t anyone do anything? Are we just going to sit here? Am I going to get rooted to the living room couch?”
Her grandfather watched her, with his eyes wide and blank and his hands endlessly drying an Exxon coffee mug on the corner of his apron.
Justine took her grandfather to an afternoon concert in Palmfield, although she did not like classical music and her grandfather couldn’t hear it. The two of them sat rigid in their seats, directing unblinking blue stares toward the outline of a set of car keys in the violin’s soloist’s trouser pocket. Then they went home by bus with Justine as dissatisfied as ever, bored and melancholy. Each time strangers rose to leave she mourned them. Who knew in what way they might have affected her life?
She took Duncan, her grandfather, and Ann-Campbell Britt to the funeral of a chihuahua belonging to an old lady client. “What is this? Where are we going?” her grandfather kept asking. “Don’t worry, just come,” said Justine. “Why do you care? Just grab up your hearing aid and come, Grandfather. If you want things to happen you have to run a few blind errands, you know.” So he came, grumbling, and they sat on folding chairs in a cow pasture that had recently been turned into a pets’ memorial garden. “The casket cost one hundred and forty-five dollars,” Justine whispered to Duncan. “It’s all metal. But they could have settled for wood: thirty-two ninety-eight. Mrs. Bazley told me. She selected the hymns herself. The minister is fully ordained.”
“Oh, excellent,” said Duncan. “I wonder if he needs an assistant,” and after the service he went up and offered Arthur Milsom’s address to the minister. But Grandfather Peck wandered among the wreaths and urns looking baffled. Why had he been brought here? Justine could no longer tell him. She rode home beside Duncan without a word, swinging one foot and rapidly chewing coffee beans that she had taken to keeping in a tin container at the bottom of her bag.
On Sundays she drove her grandfather to Plankhurst for Quaker meetings, which used to be something she tried to get out of because she didn’t like sitting still so long. Now she would go anywhere. Grandfather Peck was not, of course, a Quaker and had no intention of becoming one, but he resented regular church services because he claimed the minister wouldn’t speak up. It made him feel left out, he said. Even the Quakers would sometimes take it into their heads to rise and mumble, perversely keeping their faces turned away so that he couldn’t read their lips. Then he whispered, “What? What?”—a harsh sound sawing through the air. He made Justine write everything down for him on a 3 × 5 memo pad he kept in his breast pocket. Justine would click the retractable point of his ballpoint pen in and out, in and out, waiting for a five-minute speech to be over, and then she wrote, “He says that God must have made even Nixon,” or “Peace is not possible as long as neighbors can still argue over a lawn mower.”
“That took him five minutes?”
“Ssh.”
“But what was he up there working his mouth all that time for?”
“Ssh, Grandfather. Later.”
“You must have left something out,” he told her.
She would hand back his pen and pad, and sigh, and check the Seth Thomas clock on the mantel and run her eyes once more down the rows of straight-backed radiant adults and fidgety children lining the wooden benches. After twenty minutes the children were excused, rising like chirping, squeaking mice to follow the pied piper First-Day School teacher out of the room, breaking into a storm of whistles and shouts and stamping feet before the door was properly shut again. She should have gone with them, she always thought. The silence that followed was deep enough to drown in. She would plow desperately through her straw bag, rustling and jingling, coming up finally with her tin container of coffee beans. When she bit into them, she filled the meetinghouse with the smell of breakfast.
Once her grandfather wrote on the pad himself, several lines of hurried spiky handwriting that he passed to her. “Read this out when no one else is talking,” he whispered. She struggled to her feet, hanging onto her hat. Anything to break the silence. “My grandfather wants me to read this,” she said. “ ‘I used to think that heaven was — palatable? Palatial. I was told it had pearly gates and was paved with gold. But now I hope they are wrong about that. I would prefer to find that heaven was a small town with a bandstand in the park and a great many trees, and I would know everybody in it and none of them would ever die or move away or age or alter.’ ”