"P ass the salt, Ma," Edna Grimes said, and Nellie Jacobs did. Her daughter sprinkled it on a drumstick. "This is awful good fried chicken." She took a big bite.
"Sure is, Mother Jacobs," Merle Grimes agreed. He turned to Edna. "You all right, honey? Everything staying down?"
Edna nodded. "Couldn't be better, Merle. Stomach isn't bothering me at all this time around." She yawned. "I still get sleepy a lot, though." She was three months pregnant; the baby would be born somewhere around New Year's Day, 1933. Suddenly, she pointed at her son. "For God's sake, Armstrong, I'm not too sleepy to miss you stuffing half a pound of mashed potatoes into your face all at once. Show some manners, or you'll find out you're not too big to paddle. Ten years old, and you eat like that? Jesus!"
"Sorry, Ma," Armstrong said, most indistinctly-maybe it hadn't been half a pound of mashed potatoes, but it hadn't missed by much. Across the table from him, Clara smirked. Aunt and nephew (which seemed silly, when only two years separated them) had never got along, not even when they were tiny.
Merle Grimes raised his glass of beer. "Here's hoping Cal sweeps the Socialists out of Powel House," he said. The Democrats wouldn't hold their convention for another month-they'd scheduled it for the Fourth of July-but Governor Coolidge's nomination now looked like a foregone conclusion.
"Amen," Nellie said, and drank. So did Edna. So did Hal Jacobs. Armstrong Grimes raised his glass of milk in imitation of the grownups. Clara made a face at him.
"That will be enough of that, young lady," Nellie said. Clara subsided. Armstrong laughed.
Edna said, "We're all Democrats, and it doesn't do us or Coolidge a bit of good. Hardly seems fair."
"It isn't fair," her husband said. "This is what we get for living in Washington, D.C. We're not a state, so we don't get to vote. Most of the government's been in Philadelphia for the past fifty years, but they can vote for president there and we still can't. There ought to be a law."
"It's been this way forever." Hal Jacobs paused to cough.
"You've lived here all your life," Merle said. "You're used to not voting. I grew up in Ohio. I like having my voice count for something. Losing my vote was the hardest thing about coming to live here."
"A lot of places, Ma and me wouldn't have had a vote up till a few years ago anyway." Edna had to raise her voice, because Hal coughed again. "Summer cold?" she asked sympathetically.
He shrugged. "I do not know." He lit a cigarette, took a drag, and coughed yet again. "I am having trouble shaking it, though, what ever it is."
Merle lit up, too. He blew a smoke ring, which made Clara and Armstrong laugh. Despite what he was doing, he said, "Maybe you ought to cut back, Father Jacobs. I always cough worse if I smoke a lot while I've got a cold-I know that."
Hal blew a smoke ring, too. With another shrug, he said, "I have been smoking since before the Second Mexican War-more than fifty years now. Cutting back is not that… easy." The interruption was for more coughs yet.
Merle Grimes' laugh was rueful. "Oh, I know. I always feel like I've been steamrollered if I don't smoke my usual ration."
"You're cross as a bear, too," Edna said.
"Blow another smoke ring, Pa," Clara said. He needed two tries before he could; a cough in the middle ruined the first one.
"You have been coughing a lot lately," Nellie said. "Maybe you ought to see a doctor, get yourself looked at."
"What will he tell me, dear?" her husband replied, taking a last drag at the cigarette and then stubbing it out. "He will tell me I am not so young as I used to be. I already know this, thank you very much. I do not need to pay a doctor money to find out what I already know."
Even at the start of the Great War- eighteen years ago now, Nellie realized with no small surprise; where had the time gone?-Hal's hair and mustache had been gray, his face lined. He hadn't seemed to change much in all the time since. Now, though, Nellie tried to see him as if she were just meeting him. He was close to seventy, and looked every year of it. His skin sagged on his face. He was a sallow color he shouldn't have been.
She actually blinked, wondering if she was seeing things that weren't there. But she wasn't. She looked at her husband again. It wasn't just that the changes had sneaked up gradually and she hadn't noticed. She was sure it wasn't. They'd come on lately. She didn't care for any of the thoughts following from that.
"Hal," she said, "I think maybe you really ought to see a doctor."
"Nonsense," he told her, and sounded very firm. He seldom talked back to her; in that (as in most ways, she had to admit), he made a most satisfactory husband. She decided not to push it, especially not at the supper table. Maybe it was just a summer cold, and he would get better.
But he didn't. The cough went on. He lost more flesh, and he'd never had that much to spare. His appetite dwindled. A couple of times, Nellie started to tell him to go to a doctor's office. Each time, she held back. She didn't want to be a nag, especially where he'd dug in his heels.
Then, just before the Fourth of July, he had another coughing fit, and she saw red on his handkerchief. "That does it, Hal," she declared, trying her best not to show how alarmed she was. "You get yourself to the doctor right this minute, do you hear me?"
If he'd argued, she would have dragged him by the heels. But he didn't. He only sighed and nodded and said, "Yes, maybe you are right. All the pep has oozed right out of me the past few months, feels like."
He made the appointment. Nellie made sure he kept it. When he got back, she said, "Well? What did he tell you?"
"Nothing yet, not really," he answered. "He took an X ray of my chest. I have to go back in a couple of days, after he gets the photograph developed. He will not charge me anything extra for the second visit."
"He'd better not, not when it's his fault," Nellie said, and then, anxiously, "Do you want me to come along with you, dear?" She didn't use endearments with Hal very often; that she did now showed how worried she was.
"Thank you, Nellie. You are very sweet." He was, as usual, polite-almost courtly-but he shook his head without hesitation. "I hope I am by now a grown man. Whatever the news may be, you can trust me to bring it home to you."
"You know I trust you," Nellie said. And that was true. She could rely on him absolutely. That was the rock on which they'd built the past going on fifteen years. Some people had passion at the bottom of their marriage. Nellie was pretty sure Edna and Merle did-and yet that marriage had almost come apart when Merle found out the soldier Edna had nearly married before him wore C.S. butternut, not U.S. green-gray. Trust mattered in any marriage.
What if Hal knew I killed Bill Reach? Nellie shoved that question down, as she always did. The only way two can keep a secret is if one of them is dead. That fit her and Hal's former spy boss-her former client in her much, much younger days in the demimonde-to a T. Edna's secret had got out, as Nellie had thought it would sooner or later. She would take her own to the grave with her.
Considering Hal's cough, she wished she hadn't thought of it like that.
When the day for the new doctor's appointment came, he put a CLOSED sign in the window of the cobbler's shop where he'd worked so long and walked on over: it was only three or four blocks to the office. Across the street in the coffeehouse where she'd worked so long (though not as long as Hal), Nellie watched him go. Her eyes kept coming back to the CLOSED sign. She didn't like the look of it. And she kept missing customers' orders, either not hearing what they wanted or bringing them the wrong thing even though she'd written down the right one.