“I need my things,” Aldine said. “And I can’t just leave without saying anything to Sonia. We could stay with her for the night. I’ll make a bed for you, and we can explain everything in the morning. I’ll tell her that I ran into you, that you were sick and had nowhere to go. She’ll understand. Oh, and the front house is a doctor’s. She rents it out to him for living and office visits. I send out billings and the like, so he’s promised to deliver the baby free of charge.”
“We can’t stay,” Ansel said. He couldn’t explain to Sonia Odekirk—much less expect her to understand—that he, a friend and member of her church, was the father of Aldine’s baby, so he had now left his wife and three children to do the right and proper thing.
The pickets of the fence beside them loomed like teeth. Somewhere an unseen animal scurried and dug. “I can’t go there,” he said. “Come with me now to the farm.”
“But what will we do?” Aldine said, her face worried, her eyes black. She stepped closer to him.
Her round dark eyes sought something in him, groping almost like hands. He wanted to pull her to him under the black-leafed maple and kiss her. He felt better and stronger than he had the whole trip, almost weightless, and the night had a richness to it that seemed full of possibility. He would keep Aldine with him at the farm and he would get well, and everything else could be sorted out from a place where he was himself.
Instead of kissing her on the mouth, he kissed her neck, her ear, a bare space where the shawl slid off her shoulder. The future lay like still water in his mind.
“I’m going to the farm,” he said. “I have to check on the radio and the house. Krazy Kat. You can come with me.”
“But how would we get there?” she asked.
He had planned to go by train. Aldine said again the part about Sonia’s house, the nice doctor, waiting until light, all the while letting his hands and his kisses travel over her neck and body. If only he could go with her to the house with all of its rooms and furnishings. He could go on touching her there. They would not be anyone’s charity.
“Dr. Stober has a car,” she said, pointing at a Nash parked across the street. “He doesn’t use it much. How far is it to the place?”
“About five hours.”
“He let someone use it once. A friend of his. He never drives it.”
Ansel didn’t know what to say.
“Or we could just stay here with Sonia, as I said.”
It would not look right, Ansel knew. He wasn’t sleeping under anyone else’s roof ever again.
“You think he would loan it to you?” he said.
She looked dubious and then determined. Then she turned, and he was watching her dark, swollen form slip into a side door of the doctor’s office. He closed his eyes. He felt he was living a dream or, really, that a dream—a strange, not unpleasant dream—was lifting him away and was carrying him along, and because Aldine was part of the dream, the dream was perfect, and it was pleasant to be carried along on it.
“I’ve got it,” she whispered, and he opened his eyes. He was sitting down. He didn’t remember sitting.
She held a small tin box, and when she opened it, she held up a key. “I wrote a note to tell him we’ll—I didna’ say it was you, just me—that I’ll bring it back.”
He rose heavily to his feet and she was at once close to him again. Her hair smelled sweet, and even through his heavy clothes, and hers, he felt the smoothness and roundness and fullness of her body.
He climbed behind the wheel. She sat close beside him, as she had done once before, and the ignition flared at his touch.
83
Ansel’s house stood quiet in a quiet night. Blown brush and dirt and debris had collected everywhere but, still, the sight of the house calmed him as it always had, the same four windows and the same red door he had glimpsed from his mother’s lap, his father’s truck, the back of a sleigh, a tractor seat. The cottonwood leaned over and touched the roof. As the car rolled over the rocks and dust of the drive, the headlights swept the barn and caught the startling eyes of an animal.
“Krazy Kat,” Ansel murmured in a low, pleased tone, and Aldine said, “Won’t Neva be glad!”
He had never let go of her the whole ride, both of them wide awake in the darkness as the black fields rolled by. They were happy riding along and they were happy now, stepping out of the car. The cat watched them for a moment, then ran into the barn. That they would enter the house together and have no impediment made Aldine tremble. Her ears roared with it.
A long strip of tape flapped over the front door, but other strips still held, and Ansel broke the seal by tugging hard on the knob. Aldine’s foot struck a coffee mug left standing on the porch and it rolled away. When Ansel’s fingers found the light switch, the living room lit up before them: dust and mouse droppings everywhere, the sheet-wrapped hulk of the radio, its edges taped to the floor, the sprigged love seat in its place below the window, a paper costume for Shirley Temple where it had fallen by the stairs. Ansel said nothing, but led her up the stairs. There were times when his illness seemed to exhilarate instead of drain, when fatigue became eagerness and he knew he had turned the corner. The bed was not made up, but there were a few blankets in the cupboard, the quilts his mother had made and Ellie had not wanted. It was cold in the room, and he didn’t want Aldine to be cold. He spread them over the bed as she watched.
“We shouldn’t kiss until I’m better,” he said.
“Not on the mouth,” she said. She unzipped her dress, and stepped out of it.
“I’m gigantic,” she said, but he shook his head so that she felt his rough chin brush her ear. She didn’t feel grotesque now, not in the cocoon of blankets that they pulled over them, warming the air with musty blue cotton. His body made her feel small and rightly formed because it was his baby that her belly held. His hands were rough as they moved over the skin of it, then over the skin of her breasts and back and neck and face. She let herself touch the back of his head and his shoulders and then downward. She let herself think only of the present and of what she had wanted all this time.
84
When Sonia Odekirk couldn’t find Aldine, she stepped out her back door and up the sidewalk to Dr. Stober’s office. She was convinced the baby had started coming in the night and she’d slept through it, though why Aldine hadn’t shaken her awake she couldn’t understand.
It was a bright day with a bit of wind, the kind you had to push against when you walked. Weeds cowered, stood back up, were flattened again. Blue sky swallowed gust after gust above the black roof of her house, where in childhood there had been a flag, where now there was a gunmetal socket for a flagpole. She hurried up the wide front steps, pulled open the lace-curtained door that said Myron L. Stober, M.D. in black letters, and closed it as fast as she could to shut out the wind.
Dr. Stober was sitting at his desk reading the Journal-Post.
“Have you seen Miss McKenna?” she asked.