The evening wasn’t cold yet when the girl left the café. But the air was turning sharp, with a fall feeling of loneliness coming. Something unaccountable pending in the air.
She went out of the downtown, crossing the tracks and on toward home in the growing dark. The big globes had already shuddered on at the street corners, their blue lights shining now in flat pools on the sidewalks and pavement, and at the front of the houses the porch lights had come on, lifted above the closed doors. She turned into the meager street passing the low houses and arrived at her own. The house appeared unnaturally dark and silent.
She tried the door but it was locked. Mama? she said. She knocked once. Mama?
She stood up on her toes and peered inside through the narrow window set into the door. There was a faint light toward the back of the house. A single unshaded bulb burning in the little hall between the two bedrooms.
Mama. Let me in now. Do you hear me?
She clutched at the doorknob, pulling and twisting it, and she knocked on the window, rattling the hard little pane, but the door stayed locked. Then inside the house the dim hall light went out.
Mama. Don’t. Please.
She clung to the door.
What are you doing? I’m sorry, Mama. Please. Can’t you hear me?
She rattled the door. She leaned her head against it. The wood felt cold, hard, she felt tired now, all at once worn out. There was something like panic coming.
Mama. Don’t do this.
She looked all around. Houses and bare trees. She slid down onto the porch in the cold, lapsing back against the chill boards of the housefront. She seemed to fade away, to drift and wander in a kind of daze of sorrow and disbelief. She sobbed a little. She stared out at the silent trees and the dark street and the houses across the street where people were moving about reasonably in the bright rooms beyond the windows, and she looked up at the movement in the trees when the wind sighed. She sat, staring out, not moving.
Later she came out of that.
Okay, Mama, she said. You don’t have to worry. I’m gone.
Slowly a car went by in the street. The people inside looked at her, a man and a woman, their heads turned in her direction.
She pushed up from the porch and pulled her thin jacket tighter around her, over her thin body, her girl’s chest, and walked away from the house toward town.
It was full dark now and it had turned off cold. The streets were almost empty. Once a dog came barking out at her from behind a house and she held out her hand to him. The dog stood back and barked, his mouth shutting and opening as though operated by a spring hinge. Here, she said. He came forward suspiciously and sniffed her hand, but as soon as she moved he began to bark again. Behind them in the house the front lights went on. A man appeared in the door and yelled Goddamn it, you get in here! and the dog turned and trotted toward the house and stopped and barked again and went inside.
She moved on. She crossed the tracks once more. Ahead at Second Street the traffic light blinked from red to green to yellow, unmindful of the hour, blinking over the black, almost empty pavement. She passed the shadowy stores and looked in the window of the café where the tables were arranged all quiet and neat in rows and the Pepsi light on the back wall shone on the orderly stacks of clean glasses set out ready on the counter. She walked up Main to the highway and crossed it and passed the Gas and Go, the untended fuel pumps and the bright lights overhead, the attendant inside reading a magazine at the counter, and turned at the corner and came to a frame house three blocks from school where she knew Maggie Jones lived.
She knocked at the door and stood blankly waiting. She was unconscious of any thoughts at all. After some time the yellow porch light came on over her head.