He wanted to answer, but he couldn’t speak yet.
She looked past him and down the concrete stairs, probably to the spot where his empty wagon sat. He didn’t bother to look around to be sure what she was seeing. He was too busy breathing.
“Well, I know you didn’t come to sell me eggs,” she said.
He shook his head, still not ready to speak.
“It hasn’t been a week, and besides, you’re all out.”
Stewie opened his mouth, but no words came through. Only noisy, raspy breathing.
“I’ll just wait here until you’re ready to explain yourself,” she said.
She leaned one shoulder against the frame of the open door. Then she reached into her skirt pocket and absentmindedly pulled out a peppermint candy. It was the kind with the swirls of red in an otherwise white disk. She unwrapped the cellophane and popped the candy into her mouth. Then, as though suddenly remembering something she had forgotten, she reached again into the same pocket and produced another candy, which she held in his direction.
“Thank you, ma’am,” he said, and took it from her. His words, though breathy, sounded intelligible.
“Now how about you tell me to what I owe this visit?”
“Pardon, ma’am?”
“It means ‘What brings you here?’”
“Oh. That. I thought you might . . .”
But he couldn’t quite force out the ending of the thought. Because she might not like it. It might even make her mad. He wanted to do what he was doing, but he didn’t want to present the idea to her in words. It made him feel afraid.
And he had been extra afraid since Mabel’s death and Elsie’s near accident. It had left him feeling as though something terrible was hiding around every corner, waiting to surprise him at any time. Waiting to leap into his life and rip something away.
“What?” Marilyn asked when she seemed to grow tired of waiting. She wasn’t looking at him, which helped. She was staring past him and out over the lake. Stewie could see the slight lump of the peppermint candy in her cheek. He could hear the way it interfered with the clarity of her speech. “What did you think I might?”
“I thought you might need . . .”
But again, he could not bring himself to finish.
He briefly closed his eyes and tried to will himself away. It made no difference to where. Just elsewhere. Then he opened his eyes, and he was still on her stoop.
“What did you think I might need?” she asked. Her voice was even, and he couldn’t tell if she was already mad or not.
Stewie took a big, deep breath and forced out the word.
“Help.”
At first, no reply. He didn’t dare look at her face.
“Why would you think I need help? Help with what?”
“You know.”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t ask.”
“You know. Babysitting. For the little girl.”
“Oh,” she said. “I see now.” She definitely sounded as though she’d moved closer to being mad, but he couldn’t tell if she had arrived yet. “You think I’m going to burn the place down.”
“Not necessarily that again.”
“But something.”
“Maybe,” he said. He sounded desperate to his own ears. “Maybe something.”
“I’m not going to forget to turn off the stove again.”
Stewie thought that was interesting, because she seemed to have purposely avoided the fact that there were other somethings that could go wrong.
“If you say so, ma’am. If you say you won’t, I’ll believe you. I just figure we don’t know what we’re gonna forget. Why, if we knew, then we could just be sure we didn’t forget it. Couldn’t we? I bet when you were cooking that bacon last time, if anybody had asked you, you’d have said you wouldn’t forget to turn off the burner. I shouldn’t say for a fact, because I don’t know things about other people for sure. It’s just that I never met anybody who figured they were about to forget something.”
He allowed a pause. A silence. In case he had made her mad. In which case, he figured it was better to find out as soon as possible, rather than keep talking and chance making her any madder.
While he waited, he untwisted the cellophane ends of his candy wrapper.
She did not fill his pause.
“I just wouldn’t want to see you get in trouble,” he said.
“When I said that, I was just worrying out loud. I didn’t mean for you to take that on as your own problem.”
“No, ma’am. I know you didn’t. Nobody ever does.”
“But you always take it on anyway.”
“Yes, ma’am. That seems to be what I do.”
“I see,” she said. “Well, then, I guess you’d best come in.”
Stewie let out a long breath, popped the candy into his mouth, and stepped inside.
“I’m going to enter Elsie in a chicken flying contest,” he said.
“Who’s Elsie?”
“She’s a chicken.”
“Well, I might’ve seen that coming. I thought chickens couldn’t fly.”
“Most people think that. But they do fly. Some. Well. A little. They just have . . . what do you call it when you have things holding you back?”
“Limitations?”
“Yeah. That’s it. They have limitations.”
“Don’t we all,” Marilyn said.
He wanted to tell her more, but he had promised to help her babysit. And he had to stay true to his word about that.
Chapter Eight
The Anti-Disaster Patrols
Marilyn
Marilyn finished applying polish to the fingernails of her right hand, then sat back against the couch cushions and gently blew on the wet polish. She could hear the kids playing in the next room.
A voice in her head said she should go in and check on them again. After all, Izzy was her responsibility. And that little egg boy, why, he was just a child himself.
Then again, she hated to smudge the wet nail polish by moving around too much, especially near unpredictable children.
One of her soap operas was playing on the television, but she had turned the volume down low so she could hear how things were going in the den.
Before she felt confident that her nails were dry, the boy burst into the living room again on one of his patrols.
It was almost humorous the way he moved, though she would have felt guilty laughing at him, even silently on the inside of her head. Still, there was something almost . . . bustling about it. A tense bustling. That was the only word she could find to describe it.
He kept his arms to his sides, as if nervousness had him tied around the waist. His legs moved very fast but not very far. They stayed mostly under him, which forced many quick, small steps in the place of more-normal large ones. His eyebrows seemed to knit down and together with worry.
He had been reminding her of something all afternoon, with that odd way of bustling about the house, but she hadn’t quite been able to pin it down. Now it struck her that he moved like one of those chickens he so revered.
He stuck his head into the kitchen first, then shuffled off to the bathroom. Why, Marilyn didn’t know, and hadn’t asked. Maybe he thought she had drawn a bath and carelessly left it running. She certainly hoped he hadn’t made it his business to check that she had remembered to flush the toilet.
He sped by her again on the way back to the den to rejoin Izzy.
“I could take offense to this, you know,” she called as he bustled past.
“I hope you don’t, though,” he said, and kept bustling.
A minute or two later she sat up, blew on her nails again, and walked to the den doorway to look in on the children.
They were sitting on the rug, playing with Izzy’s interlocking plastic blocks. Building something Marilyn could not identify, but that seemed wildly ambitious in its scope. Maybe a sprawling ranch, or some kind of military complex.
They did not look up.
She gazed down on them for a minute or so, feeling grateful for her good fortune. It was almost ridiculously luxurious, having this time to herself and not even needing to look after the troublesome girl.
Her better angels commented that it might be unfair to ask the boy to do her job for her. After all, he was receiving nothing in return. She quickly reminded them that he had chosen to do it. She hadn’t asked.