Yes... Uh-huh... Well, how is it?... Oh, good. I've been thinking of you... No, I'm fine for supper, Alan brought fried chicken from that Cluck-Cluck place in Oxford... Yes, it was, wasn't it?"
Alan got a platter from one of the cabinets above the kitchen counter and thought: She is lying about her hands. It doesn't matter how well she handles the phone-they're as bad as they've been in the last year, and maybe worse.
The idea that she had lied to him did not much dismay him; his view of truth-bending was a good deal more lenient than Polly's.
Take the child, for instance. She had borne it in early 1971, seven months or so after leaving Castle Rock on a Greyhound bus. She had told Alan the baby-a boy she'd named Kelton-had died in Denver, at the age of three months. Sudden Infant Death Syndrome-SIDS, the young mother's worst nightmare. It was a perfectly plausible story, and Alan had no doubt whatever that Kelton Chalmers was indeed dead. There was only one problem with Polly's version: it wasn't true. Alan was a cop, and he knew a lie when he heard one.
(except when it was Annie doing it) Yeah, he thought. Except when it was Annie doing it. Your exception is duly noted for the record.
What had told him Polly was lying? The rapid flicker of her eyelids over her too-wide, too-direct gaze? The way her left hand kept rising to tug at her left earlobe? The crossing and uncrossing of her legs, that child's game signal which meant I'm fibbing?
All of those things and none of them. Mostly it was just a buzzer that had gone off inside, the way a buzzer in an airport metaldetector goes off when a guy with a steel plate in his skull steps through.
The lie neither angered nor worried him. There were people who lied for gain, people who lied from pain, people who lied simply because the concept of telling the truth was utterly alien to them... and then there were people who lied because they were waiting for it to be time to tell the truth. He thought that Polly's lie about Kelton was of this last kind, and he was content to wait.
In time, she would decide to show him her secrets. There was no hurry.
No hurry.- the thought itself seemed a luxury.
Her voice-rich and calm and somehow just right as it drifted out of the living room-also seemed a luxury. He was not yet over the guilt of just being here and knowing where all the dishes and utensils were stored, of knowing which bedroom drawer she kept her nylon hose in, or exactly where her summer tan-lines stopped, but none of it mattered when he heard her voice. There was really only one fact that applied fiere, one simple fact which ruled all others: the sound of her voice was becoming the sound of home.
"I could come over later if you wanted, Nettle... You are?
... Well, rest is probably the best thing... Tomorrow?"
Polly laughed. It was a free, pleasing sound that always made Alan feel as if the world had been somehow freshened. He thought he could wait a long time for her secrets to disclose themselves if she would just laugh like that every now and then.
"Gosh, no! Tomorrow's Saturday! I'm just going to lie around and be sinful!"
Alan smiled. He pulled out the drawer under the stove, found a pair of pot holders, and opened the conventional oven. One potato, two potato, three potato, four. How in God's name were the two of them supposed to eat four big baked potatoes? But of course he had known there would be too many, because that was the way Polly cooked. There was surely another secret buried in the fact of those four big potatoes, and someday, when he knew all the whys@r most of them, or even some of them-his feelings of guilt and strangeness might pass.
He took the potatoes out. The microwave beeped a moment later.
"I've got to go, Nettle-"
"That's okay!" Alan yelled. "I've got this under control! I'm a policeman, lady!"
"-but you call me if you need anything. You're sure you're okay, now?... And you'd tell me if you weren't, Nettle, right?...
Okay... What?... No, just asking... You too... Goodnight, Nettle."
When she came out, he had set the chicken on the table and was busy turning one of the potatoes inside-out on her plate.
"Alan, you sweetheart! You didn't need to do that!"
"All part of the service, pretty lady." Another thing he understood was that, when Polly's hands were bad, life became a series of small, hellacious combats for her; the ordinary events of an ordinary life transformed themselves into a series of gruelling obstacles to be surmounted, and the penalty for failure was embarrassment as well as pain. Loading the dishwasher. Stacking kindling in the fireplace. Manipulating a knife and fork to get a hot potato out of its jacket.
"Sit down," he said. "Let's cluck."
She burst out laughing and then hugged him. She squeezed his back with her inner forearms instead of her hands, the relentless observer inside noted. But a less dispassionate part of him took notice of the way her trim body pressed against his, and the sweet smell of the shampoo she used.
"You are the dearest man," she said quietly.