“Was she mean to you in Houston?”
“No. That’s what I was going to tell you. She actually seemed shy when she introduced herself. Shy! And so I said, Oh, Carol, how nice to see you. And she waited for me to sign her book—what could I sign for her? So I just wrote ‘Best wishes,’ and then I gave her the book, and she leaned down toward me and said quietly, ‘I’m really proud of you, Lucy.’ And I said, ‘Oh, thank you, Carol.’ I don’t know, Petie, I think she’s grown up and probably feels a little bad. I’m just saying that’s the impression I got.”
“Was she married?” Pete asked.
Lucy held up a finger. “I don’t know,” she said slowly. “No man was with her, but maybe she had one at home.” Lucy looked over at her brother. “Don’t know.” She gave a little shrug. Then she patted the lumpy couch next to her and said, “Petie, tell me everything, please tell me how you are! Here I am, just two minutes inside the house, blab-blab-blabbing about myself.”
“That’s okay. I like hearing it.” And he did. Oh, he was happy.
“Petie, why don’t you get a dog? You always liked animals.” Lucy looked around, as though really looking for the first time. “Have you ever had a dog?”
“No. I’ve thought about it, but when I go to work it would be alone all day and that makes me too sad.”
“Get two dogs,” Lucy said. “Get three.” Then Lucy said, “Pete, tell me more what you mentioned on the phone. You work at a soup kitchen? Tell me more about that.”
“Yeah, okay,” Pete said. “You remember Tommy Guptill?”
Lucy sat up straight, putting her feet on the floor; her socks were two different colors, Pete noticed, one brown and one blue. She said, “The janitor at school. What a nice man he was.”
Pete nodded. “Well, we’re kind of friends now, and I go with him and his wife once a week and work at the soup kitchen in Carlisle.”
Lucy shook her head appreciatively. “That’s a wonderful thing for you to do. Petie, that just makes me really proud of you.”
“Why?” He really couldn’t think why.
“Because not everyone can work in a soup kitchen, and it just makes me proud that you do. How long has there been a soup kitchen in Carlisle?” Lucy plucked something from the leg of her jeans and flicked it into the air.
“A few years now. I don’t know. But I’ve been going for a couple months,” Pete said.
“Is Tommy well? He must be old.” Lucy looked over at Pete.
“He’s old,” Pete said. “But he’s still going strong, and his wife is too. They ask about you sometimes, Lucy. I bet they’d love to see you.” He was surprised by the change of her face; it closed down.
“No,” she said, “but you tell them I said hi.” Then Lucy said, “Look, just so you know, I called Vicky and said I would be here, and she said she was busy today. It’s okay. I get it.”
Pete said, “She told me that too, and I’m kind of mad at her for it, Lucy. I mean, she’s your sister.” Without meaning to, Pete wiped a finger on the wall near him, and dust came off, a dark streak of it.
“Oh, Petie,” said Lucy. “Look at it from her point of view. I leave, I never come back, plus she asks me for money—did you know that? Well, she does, and I always give it to her, she can’t make much working in that nursing home, and you know, her husband was laid off, and she must feel, you know, however she feels. Do you see her? Is she happy? Well, I know she’s not happy, but I mean—is she okay?”
“She’s okay.” Pete wiped the dust streak onto his jeans.
“Okay.” And then Lucy looked straight ahead, as though she was thinking about something hard. After a moment she just shook her head, and looked at Pete again. “Awfully nice to see you,” she said.
“Lucy, I need to ask you something.”
“What?”
He thought he saw alarm cross her face. He said, “Was I supposed to tip the guy who cut my hair? I always cut it myself. But I went in Carlisle to that barbershop, and the guy cut my hair, and whisked that little apron thing off me, and I paid him, and I’ve been worried since. Was I supposed to tip him?”
“Does he own the shop?” Lucy tucked her feet up beneath her again.
“I don’t know.”
“Because if the guy owns the place, you don’t have to tip him, but if he doesn’t own it, you should.” Lucy waved a hand dismissively. “Don’t worry about it. If you go back, tip him a few dollars, but don’t worry about it.”
He loved her for this, for her knowledge of the world and her knowledge of him. She didn’t seem embarrassed that he had asked such a question. Oh, he really was happy! Maybe that was why he didn’t hear the car in the driveway. He heard only the loud knock on the door, and he and Lucy both jumped. He saw her fear; she sat up straight and her face became stern; he felt the fear himself. He put his finger to his lips and leaned over to—very, very carefully—pull back the tiniest part of the blind. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, it’s Vicky.”
The clouds had moved away and the sun was shining down now; the cornfields were spread out beyond. As Pete stood at the open door, he suddenly realized that Vicky was fat. He had known this without knowing it, but now that he saw her standing at the door, he saw that she was really pretty fat. It had to do with how tiny Lucy was, that he saw this now. Vicky wore a flowered shirt and navy blue pants—they must have had an elastic waistband around her big stomach—and she held a red pocketbook; her glasses had slipped partway down her nose. They nodded in greeting, and she stepped past him. Pete stood for another moment gazing out at the cornfields; in the afterimage in his mind, something had looked different about Vicky’s face. When he turned to go back inside, Lucy was standing, but she sat down again, and Pete figured that she had tried to give Vicky a hug and that Vicky would have none of it; this is what he saw in Vicky’s expression.
“What is that?” Vicky said, pointing at the rug.
“Oh, it’s a rug,” Pete said. “I bought it the other day.”
“Doesn’t it look nice?” Lucy asked.
Vicky stepped around it and stood in front of Lucy. “Well, here you are,” she said. “So why don’t you tell me—what in this great wide world has brought you back to Amgash?”
Lucy nodded, as though she understood the question. “We’re old,” Lucy said, looking up at her sister. “And we’re getting older.”
Vicky dropped her pocketbook onto the floor and then sat down on the couch as far away from Lucy as she could. But Vicky was big and she couldn’t get that far away, the couch was not very large. Vicky sat, her almost-all-white hair cut short, with a fringe around it, as though it had been cut with a bowl on her head; she tried to hoist a knee up over the other, but she was too big, and so she sat on the end of the couch, and to Pete she looked like someone in a wheelchair he had seen in Carlisle when he went to get his hair cut, an older woman, huge, who was sitting in a motorized wheelchair that she drove around.
But then he saw: Vicky had on lipstick.
Across her mouth, curving on her upper lip and across her plump bottom lip, was an orangey-red coating of lipstick. Pete could not remember seeing Vicky wear any lipstick before. When Pete looked at Lucy, he saw that she had no lipstick on, and he felt a tiny shudder go through him, as though his soul had a toothache.
“So, like, we’re going to die soon and you thought you should come say goodbye?” Vicky asked this, looking directly at her sister. “You look dressed for a funeral, by the way.”
Lucy crossed her legs and put her hands, splayed together, over her knee. “I wouldn’t put it that way. That we’re going to die soon, I mean.”
“How would you put it?” asked Vicky.
Lucy’s face seemed to grow pink. She said, “I would put it the way I just put it. That we’re old. And we’re getting older.” She gave a tiny nod. “And I wanted to see you guys.”
“Are you in trouble?” Vicky asked.
“No,” said Lucy.
“Are you sick?”