“So, okay, you’re telling me you just found yourself out in a rainstorm, looking down into a hole.”
“Well, it wasn’t a rainstorm anymore. The rain had stopped. But otherwise, yes, that’s it exactly. And I was in my nightgown and slippers, and I didn’t have my house key. Well, why should I? Usually, that lock is set on manual. Oh, I despise an automatic lock! It must have been your father’s doing; he’s always going around fiddling with things. And then naturally he couldn’t hear me when I called; he was sound asleep by then, and you can see how deaf he’s grown. I called, I knocked … I couldn’t ring the doorbell, of course, because the power was out, and anyhow he doesn’t hear the doorbell most of the time. I even tried throwing pebbles at our bedroom windows, but that doesn’t work as well in real life as it does in books. So finally I thought, well, I would just settle in the hammock and wait till morning. It wasn’t so bad, really. It was kind of nice. All the lights were out, the streetlights and people’s house lights, and the only sounds were the leaves dripping and the tree frogs peeping. I curled up in the hammock and went to sleep, and in the morning when I woke it was still too early for your dad to be up, so I figured I’d walk down the block a ways to see the damage. The whole neighborhood was a disaster zone, Denny! Enormous trunks and branches lying clear across the street, electrical lines draped everywhere, a car smushed in front of the Browns’ place … And that’s when Sax Brown saw me, when I went to check the smushed car to make sure nobody was trapped inside. Oh, I know what it must have looked like: I was half a block from home in a nightgown with a muddy hem. Not very confidence-inspiring!” And she gave a little laugh.
Denny said, “Okay …”
“But it’s no reason to call in the nursemaids.”
“No, it doesn’t sound like it,” Denny said.
“Oh, good.”
“It sounds more like, say, a confluence of circumstances outside of your control. I can certainly relate to that.”
“So you agree that none of you needs to be here,” Abby said. “Not that I don’t love having you, of course, each and every one of you. But I certainly don’t need you.”
“Why didn’t you tell Stem all this?”
“Stem? Well, I did. I tried to. I tried to tell everyone.”
“Why don’t you ask him to leave? Why ask me and not him?”
“Oh, sweetheart, I’m not asking you to leave. I hope you’ll stay as long as you like. I’m just saying I don’t need a babysitter. You understand that. Stem just … doesn’t. He’s more on your father’s wavelength, you know? He and Dad put their heads together sometimes and develop these notions, you know what I mean?”
“I know exactly what you mean,” Denny said.
But then just as Abby was sitting back in her seat with an expression of relief, her forehead finally losing its tightness, he said, “Same old same old,” and stood up and walked out of the kitchen.
It was a piece of bad luck that one of Abby’s orphans showed up for Sunday lunch. Atta, her name was, and some complicated last name—a recent immigrant in her late fifties or so, overweight and putty-skinned, wearing a heavy, belted dress and stockings that looked like Ace bandages. (It was ninety-two degrees out, and stockings had not been seen in Baltimore for months.) The first anybody knew of her, she was standing outside the front screen door rat-tat-tatting and calling, “Hello? I have come to the right place?”
“Khello” was how she pronounced it, and “have” sounded like “khev.”
“Oh, my goodness!” Abby said. She was descending the stairs behind Stem, both of them carrying stacks of papers they were hoping to find space for in the sunroom. “Atta, isn’t it? Why, how nice to …”
She turned to pile her papers on top of Stem’s, and then she opened the screen door for Atta. “I am early?” Atta asked as she clomped in. “I think not. You said twelve thirty.”
“No, of course not. We’re just … This is my son Stem,” Abby said. “Atta’s new to Baltimore, Stem, and she doesn’t know a soul yet. I met her at the supermarket.”
“How do you do,” Stem said. He wasn’t able to shake hands, but he nodded at Atta over his armload of papers. “Excuse me; I’ll just go set these down someplace.”
“Come and have a seat,” Abby told Atta. “Did you have any trouble finding us?”
“Of course not. But you did say twelve thirty.”
“Yes?” Abby said uncertainly. Maybe the problem was her outfit; she was wearing a sleeveless blouse with a chain of safety pins dangling from the tip of one breast, and wide aqua pants that stopped just below the knee. “We’re pretty informal here,” she said. “We tend not to dress up much. Oh, here’s my husband! Red, this is Atta. She’s come to have Sunday lunch with us.”
“How do you do,” Red said, shaking hands. In his other hand he carried a screwdriver. He’d been fiddling with the cable box again.
“I do not eat red meat,” Atta told him in a loud, flat voice.