She stood by the open window, watching him. The white curtains fluttered in on the damp breeze, obscuring her face, not hiding it entirely but making it seem ghostly. Traffic sounds came in through the window. She took the handkerchief from the bodice of her dress and walked over to the table and put it in one of his groping hands. There was something hard in Larry. She could have taxed him with it, but to what end? His father had been a softie, and in her heart of hearts she knew it was that which had really sent him to the grave; Max Underwood had been done in more by lending credit than taking it. So when it came to that hard streak? Who did Larry have to thank? Or blame?
His tears couldn't change that stony outcropping in his character any more than a single summer cloudburst can change the shape of rock. There were good uses for such hardness - she knew that, had known it as a woman raising a boy on her own in a city that cared little for mothers and less for their children - but Larry hadn't found any yet. He was just what she had said he was: the same old Larry. He would go along, not thinking, getting people - including himself - into jams, and when the jams got bad enough, he would call upon that hard streak to extricate himself. As for the others? He would leave them to sink or swim on their own. Rock was tough, and there was toughness in his character, but he still used it destructively. She could see it in his eyes, read it in every line of his posture... even in the way he bobbed his cancer-stick to make those little rings in the air. He had never sharpened that hard piece of him into a blade to cut people with, and that was something, but when he needed it, he was still calling on it as a child did - as a bludgeon to beat his way out of traps he had dug for himself. Once, she had told herself Larry would change. She had; he would.
But this was no boy in front of her; this was a grown-up man, and she feared that his days of change - the deep and fundamental sort her minister called a change of soul rather than one of heart - were behind him. There was something in Larry that gave you the bitter zing of hearing chalk screech on a blackboard. Deep inside, looking out, was only Larry. He was the only one allowed inside his heart. But she loved him.
She also thought there was good in Larry, great good. It was there, but this late on it would take nothing short of a catastrophe to bring it out. There was no catastrophe here; only her weeping son.
"You're tired," she said. "Clean up. I'll move the boxes, then you can sleep. I guess I'll go in today after all."
She went down the short hall to the back room, his old bedroom, and Larry heard her grunting and moving boxes. He wiped his eyes slowly. The sound of traffic came in the window. He tried to remember the last time he had cried in front of his mother. He thought of the dead cat. She was right. He was tired. He had never been so tired. He went to bed and slept for nearly eighteen hours.
BOOK I CAPTAIN TRIPS Chapter 6
It was late afternoon when Frannie went out back to where her father was patiently weeding the peas and beans. She had been a late child and he was in his sixties now, his white hair coming out from under the baseball cap he always wore. Her mother was in Portland, shopping for white gloves. Fran's best childhood friend, Amy Lauder, was getting married early next month.
She looked down at her dad's back for a peaceful moment, just loving him. At this time of day the light took on a special quality that she loved, a timeless quality that belonged only to that most fleeting Maine genus, early summer. She could think of that particular tone of light in the middle of January and - it would make her heart ache fiercely. The light of an early summer afternoon as it slipped toward dark had so many good things wrapped up in it: baseball at the Little League park, where Fred had always played third and batted clean-up; watermelon; first corn; iced tea in chilled glasses; childhood.
Frannie cleared her throat a little. "Need a hand?"
He turned and grinned. "Hello, Fran. Caught me diggin, didn't you?"
"I guess I did."
"Is your mother back yet?" He frowned vaguely, and then his face cleared. "No, that's right, she just went, didn't she. Sure, pitch a hand if you want to. Just don't forget to wash up afterward."
"A lady's hands proclaim her habits," Fran mocked lightly and snorted. Peter tried to look disapproving and did a poor job of it.