So there was really only one thing more for Edith Goodnough to do before she put supper on the table. She wanted to iron Lyman’s shirt. And she did that then, while the potatoes and green beans boiled, pressed his best white shirt out neat and clean on the ironing board so that he would appear gentlemanly. When she was satisfied she took it in to him where he still sat in the parlor, fumbling with faded pictures of Memphis and Mobile, New York and Boise, and somehow persuaded him to not only put on a different shirt than the one he’d been wearing all day but to also get into a blue suit jacket that matched his dark pants. He didn’t know why. It didn’t matter. I suppose all he understood was that it was an imposition, a damn bother, but like I’ve already said, she managed that too, somehow. And afterwards, when he was dressed to her satisfaction, she herself changed clothes, put on a fine dark skirt and pink blouse and brushed her hair. So they were ready for supper now. They sat down in the kitchen across the table from one another, looking, I fully believe, as if they were contented, even happy.
They didn’t talk much. Edith said she hadn’t expected that they would. It was enough to be dressed up, to be seated at a table with red candles flickering, to be eating a satisfactory supper of baked chicken and pumpkin pie. The only thing she remembers saying was, “I’m still glad you came home, Lyman.”
Lyman was nodding in his chair, almost asleep.
“I know you don’t understand. But I am glad you came home when you did. It was worth the wait. Can you remember all we’ve done?”
“I’m too tired,” he said.
“You want to lie down now, don’t you?”
“I want to sleep.”
“Yes, it’s been a long day. Come on then, I’ll help you.”
She lifted under his arm to help him rise from the chair, and together they walked into the living room. She laid him down on his bed in his suit clothes, took his slippers off. When she pulled a blanket up over his long quiet body she saw that he was already asleep, the blue veins and age spots at his temple showing dimly in the fading light, his chin fallen onto his bow tie. She ran her hand over his forehead once and bent to kiss him, then she went back to the kitchen and put the candles out with moistened fingers and locked the back-porch door. She had thought she would clear the table, put things away, but that seemed excessive now, and so she returned to the living room, where she locked that door too, that outside door that opened formally into the house but was never used, and finally she sat down in the rocking chair between the two beds. Rocking a little, she watched the dark collect in the room while she waited for the moment when she knew she would rise again and strike a match to the old dust coated travel papers on the stairway, which her brother and my daughter had allowed her to store there on the steps in the past years. But that moment hadn’t arrived yet. For a time, for a while longer, she was content to sit and rock quietly, with the matches in her lap. She looked past her brother and out through that south window toward the elm trees that stood in the yard, bare and clean and dark, against a sky that was lighter only by comparison to the dark trees. Still she waited, thinking: In a minute now. Soon, soon I’ll stand up.
IT WAS a dog’s barking, something as simple and ordinary and yet as unpredictable as that—that’s all it was— just the loud and persistent barking of a neighbor’s dog that prevented Edith Goodnough’s plans.
“What the hell’s got into Jack?” I said.
Mavis and I were upstairs in our bedroom getting ready to go out for the night and Rena was already downstairs with her coat on, waiting by the front door for us to take her to Sheila Garfield’s house. Then Jack, our blue heeler, started barking. His nose was raised into the night, and he was howling.
“There must be something in the yard,” Mavis said.
She looked out the east window.
“Come here,” she said.
“What? Is it another skunk?”
“No.”
“It better not be a calf out, not tonight.”
“Will you just come here and look?”
So I looked.