Douglas scrunched back in his seat and gazed down at his corduroy knees. Denny, on his left, bent forward to eye him curiously, but Douglas gave no sign of noticing him.
“After my meeting I’m going to stop by Sinai,” Red said. “See what’s doing with Lonesome, and ask him how to get ahold of his sitter. So could you just—I appreciate this, Ab. I promise it won’t be for long.”
“Oh, we’ll have a good time. Won’t we?” Abby asked Douglas.
Douglas kept his eyes on his knees. Red shut the car door and stood back, holding one palm up in a motionless goodbye, and Abby drove off with the two little boys sitting silent in the rear.
At home, she freed Douglas from his jacket and fixed both boys a snack of sliced bananas and animal crackers. They sat at the child-size table she kept in one corner of the kitchen—Denny munching away busily, Douglas picking up each animal cracker and studying it, turning it over, looking at it from different angles before delicately biting off a head or a leg. He didn’t touch the bananas. Abby said, “Douglas, would you like some juice?” After a pause, he shook his head. So far, she hadn’t heard him speak a word.
She allowed both boys to watch the afternoon kiddie shows on TV, although ordinarily she would not have. Meanwhile, she let Clarence in from the yard—he was just a puppy at the time, not to be trusted alone in the house—and he raced to the sunroom and scrabbled up onto the couch to lick the boys’ faces. First Douglas shrank back, but he was clearly interested, in a guarded sort of way, and so Abby didn’t intervene.
When the girls came home from school, they made a big fuss over him. They dragged him upstairs to look through the toy chest, competing for his attention and asking him questions in honeyed voices. Douglas remained silent, eyes lowered. The puppy came along with them, and Douglas spent most of his time delivering small, awkward pats to the top of the puppy’s head.
Around suppertime, Red arrived with a paper grocery bag. “Some clothes and things for Douglas,” he told Abby, setting the bag on the kitchen counter. “I borrowed Lonesome’s apartment keys.”
“How is he?”
“Mighty uncomfortable when I saw him. Turns out it’s his appendix. While I was there they took him to surgery. He’ll need to stay over one night, they said; he can come home late tomorrow. I did ask about the sitter, but it seems she’s got some kind of leg trouble. Lonesome said he felt bad about saddling us with the boy.”
“Well, it’s not as if he’s a bother,” Abby said. “He might as well not be here.”
At supper, Douglas sat on an unabridged dictionary Red had placed on a chair. He ate seven peas, total, which he picked up one by one with his fingers. The table conversation went on around him and above him, but there was a sense among all of them that they had a watchful audience, that they were speaking for his benefit.
Abby got him ready for bed, making him pee and brush his teeth before she put him in a pair of many-times-washed seersucker pajamas that she found in the grocery bag. Seersucker seemed too lightweight for the season, but that was her only choice. She settled him in the other twin bed in Denny’s room, and after she’d drawn up the blankets she hesitated a moment and then planted a kiss on his forehead. His skin was warm and slightly sweaty, as if he’d just expended some great effort. “Now, you have a good, good sleep,” she told him, “and when you wake up it’ll be tomorrow and you can see your daddy.”
Douglas still didn’t speak, he didn’t even change expression, but his face all at once seemed to open up and grow softer and less pinched. At that instant he was not so homely after all.
The next morning Abby had a neighbor drive carpool, because even back in those days, before the child-seat laws, she didn’t feel right letting such a small boy bounce around loose with the others. Once they were on their own, she settled Douglas on the floor in the sunroom with a jigsaw puzzle from Denny’s room. He didn’t put it together, even though it consisted of only eight or ten pieces, but he spent a good hour quietly moving the pieces about, picking up first one and then another and examining it intently, while the puppy sat beside him alert to every movement. Then after she finished her morning chores Abby sat with him on the couch and read him picture books. He liked the ones with animals in them, she could tell, because sometimes when she was about to turn a page he would reach out a hand to hold it down so he could study it a while longer.
When she heard a car at the rear of the house, she thought it was Peg Brown delivering Denny from nursery school. By the time she got to the kitchen, though, Red was walking through the back door. “Oh!” she said. “What are you doing home?”
“Lonesome died,” Red said.
“What?”
“Lawrence. He died.”