“Don’t make it too long,” she said.
Then I left and went outside and damned myself for a fool, while the stars winked overhead like so many clowns’ eyes. What in Christ’s name did I think I was doing? Sure she was good-looking. Of course she was a fine woman, a person you just naturally felt good being near and wanted to help if you could. But what help was any of what I’d been doing on the couch? That was a lot of help, wasn’t it? She was thirty-one years older than I was, after all, and more to the point, she might have been closer to me than just a good neighbor woman down the road if in 1922 my dad had been able to persuade her to give up her iron sense of duty. Sometimes, hell, it seems to me that I’ll always have more of balls than I ever will of brains. Sometimes I’m flat a goddamn fool.
Anyway, after that night I didn’t go back the next day, or the next. It was almost two weeks before I returned to see Edith, and then when I entered that postcard living room again I made a point of sitting on a straight chair. I stayed away from the couch. Edith, though, was no different than she had been before. She was still pleasant, a little vacant maybe, like she was still caught inside that fog dream of hers, but pleasant nonetheless, as if nothing new had happened between us. So it was comfortable with her again, and I went on stopping by the house in the evening to see her, to visit and pass the time between old friends. I did that at least once a week as the winter turned spring and the pattern returned.
THEN TOWARD the end of July—this would still be 1961—she called me one evening early. “Good, you’re home,” she said.
“I just came in.”
“I have a surprise for you. Will you come for supper?”
So I cleaned up, combed my hair and shaved, and drove down to the Goodnough place. And there, parked in front of the house at the picket gate, was a new green Pontiac with out-of-state plates, and inside the house, sitting with his elbows on the kitchen table and that foolish lap-dog’s grin on his face, was Lyman Goodnough.
“Well,” I said. “I’ll be go to hell.”
He stood up to shake my hand. “Long time no see.”
He sat down again and grinned some more, as if he expected me to make some appropriate formal remarks upon his safe return to the house. Edith stood beside him with a hand on his shoulder. She was beaming; her face shone like a fresh pink poppy. I admit they made a picture, the two of them smiling at me from across the kitchen table, but I wasn’t up to it. I wasn’t so forgiving as Edith was.