He was physically tired, and he figured that would make it easy for him to sleep. But the slight soreness in his muscles seemed to keep him tossing and turning, and being tired wasn’t quite the same as being sleepy in this case.
He lay awake for a long time, stressing about his hens. Feeling bad about his old regular customers, who were now reduced to buying their eggs at the supermarket. Feeling worse about his new prospective customers at Eastbridge, who seemed to think he was magical, and who could so easily be disappointed.
And what if he didn’t even have eggs for his own family to eat, or egg money to help Stacey feed and keep the family? What a miserable turn of events that would be.
And then, underneath that, if he wasn’t the boy with the best, freshest eggs around, then who was he? What did he have if he didn’t have that?
While he pondered these dark avenues of thought, he chanted the word “lay” under his breath. As though the hens could hear his command.
It hit him suddenly when it hit, and made his eyes fly open wide. Then, having had the revelation, he wondered how he could ever have made such a mistake.
He rose and slipped quickly into his shoes, then trotted out the kitchen door and through the night to the henhouse, still in his pajamas.
When he opened the door in the dark, the hens set up a frightened ruckus. They weren’t used to Stewie coming in at such an hour, and were clearly alarmed by the prospect of anything or anyone else coming along in the dead of night.
“It’s okay,” Stewie whispered. “You’re okay. You’re fine. It’s only me, Stewie.”
They recognized his voice, and believed him, and they settled slowly.
A thin crescent of moon shone through the dirty henhouse window, and it lit his way as he moved along the rows of nesting boxes.
“Please lay,” he whispered over and over, at least once to each bird. “Please. I’m sorry if I was impolite before. I should’ve said ‘please.’”
He said nothing to the older hens, because that might have been too much pressure. Even being asked nicely to do something was hard, if it was a thing you probably couldn’t do. Stewie knew that as well as anybody and better than most.
Then he said good night to them at the henhouse door and put himself back to bed.
This time he slept.
Part Four
Autumn
Chapter Twenty-Six
The Woods
Stewie
Stewie burst through the front door and into the reception area of Eastbridge. Probably too loudly and too suddenly, and as stridently as a person can burst when he is carrying a cardboard box heavy with fully loaded egg cartons.
Everybody looked up.
There were two people behind the reception desk, both of whom he knew well. Janet and Ted. There were three women residents sitting near the walls in wheelchairs, their spotted and arthritic hands resting on blankets on their laps.
“They’re laying!” Stewie cried, not meaning to be too loud. “All the hens are laying! The new-new ones and the sort-of-new ones. They’re all laying, and now I have enough eggs to bring for all the Eastbridge people!”
He set the heavy cardboard box of eggs on the reception desk. It felt good to get out from under all that weight.
Ted caught his eye and put a finger to his lips to remind Stewie about speaking quietly.
“Sorry,” he said.
One of the residents, Mrs. Wilson, waved him over to her wheelchair.
“What’s this now?” she asked when he arrived. “It sounds like a happy thing, and we all like to see you happy, Stewart, so tell me all the details.”
“Well,” he said, feeling breathy and excited again. “My hens are getting old, and not laying so much or so regular, and some of the original ones aren’t laying at all. I bought some new chicks with my egg money, but they didn’t lay as fast as I thought they would, so then I didn’t know what I would do, because I didn’t have any egg money to buy more chicks. I barely had enough eggs for Stacey and Theo and me, and maybe a carton to bring for Marilyn, my grandmother, and meanwhile the people here at Eastbridge put together enough extra money to get all their eggs from me, because mine are so much fresher and better, but I didn’t even have them to sell.” He paused just long enough for a quick breath. “But then the new hens started to lay, so I sold those eggs to my old regular customers in Lake View, where I live, and then I got enough money to buy a whole batch of even newer chicks, and now they’re laying, too. Now everybody’s laying. Well, not so much the old hens, but still, it’s enough. So I just brought as many eggs as Marjorie in the kitchen said she would take from me if I had them. Now I have them! That’s why I’m so happy.”
“You live in Lake View?” Mrs. Wilson asked.
It struck Stewie as an odd thing to take away from everything he had just said.
“Yeah, you didn’t know that?”
“Why, no. I figured you lived here in the city. Lake View is so far. How do you get out here so often?”
“I take the bus.”
“Why, that must take you an hour!”
“A little more, but I don’t mind. No offense, Mrs. Wilson, but I’ve got to go now. I have to go tell Marilyn the good news. I don’t know if she hears me or not. I never know anymore if she hears me when I talk to her, but I also don’t know for a fact that she doesn’t, so I talk to her a lot, and I still have to tell her everything that’s important.”
“All right,” she said. “You run and do that, Stewart. But come see me again on the way out, won’t you? I always enjoy your visits.”
“Yes, ma’am. I promise.”
He darted away from her wheelchair and headed fast for the stairs.
As he trotted along, he heard Janet talking on the telephone—heard her say, “He’s here right now. He just got here a minute ago. Oh dear. Oh no. Yes, I’ll try to stop him.” Then she called his name. “Stewie! Stewie, wait!”
Stewie did not wait. He was too anxious to see Marilyn and tell her his good news, so he pretended not to hear Janet in time. Whatever she had to say to him, he figured he could hear it on the way back down. He had to come back down to the reception area anyway to pick up the eggs and take them to Marjorie in the kitchen. And he had promised Mrs. Wilson another visit.
He vaulted up the stairs two at a time and ran down the hall toward Marilyn and Louise’s room.
Before he could reach their doorway, two of the Eastbridge nurses came out of the room, rolling a gurney. On it was something the size and shape of a person, but Stewie figured it probably wasn’t a person, because it was completely covered with a bleached white sheet. He didn’t figure you would cover a person all the way over like that, because if you did, how could they even breathe? Surely a nurse would know that.
The two nurses looked up to see Stewie standing there, and they stopped. And the gurney stopped.
“Oh, Stewie,” one of them said. “Janet said she was going to keep you downstairs until we could talk to you.”
“I was too fast for her,” he said. “Talk to me about what?”
But the situation had already begun to stir up a funny feeling in his belly, and he found himself wishing he had never asked, and hoping they would never answer.
Louise appeared in the doorway before they could say more.
“I’ll talk to him,” she said. “Let me do this. Stewie and I are good friends. This will be better coming from a friend.”
“I know you’re old enough to understand that everybody and everything dies,” Louise said.
Something about her voice felt troubling to Stewie. She was using that extra-gentle tone, the kind people used when they seemed to think Stewie was as fragile as fine china, and maybe already slightly cracked. It reminded him of the pity looks, and it was making the funny feeling in his belly even more troubling. It was not a pleasant sensation, to put it mildly.