“It’s okay, Dad. This is Maggie. My girlfriend. She’s visiting with me.”
“I’m pleased to meet you, Mr. Jones,” she said.
“It’s Dr. Jones,” he said, correcting her. “You shouldn’t be here. It’s not safe.”
“It’s all right now, Dad. I told you, I checked around. No one’s here but Mom. And now us.”
“I’ll be careful, Dr. Jones,” Maggie said.
Mollified, Jed sat down at the table and applied himself to the sandwich.
Maggie washed her hands at the sink. “Marissa,” she said. “You’re a little low on supplies. Would you like me to take you to the grocery store now that Cal is here with his dad?”
“Oh, thank you, but no. I’ll go when the check comes. We get by eating out of the garden till the check comes, then Jed’s fine at the farm while I go. It’s just a few more days.”
“Tell you what, let’s go now. Cal will cover the cost—it’ll make him feel useful. That would be all right, wouldn’t it, Cal?” Maggie asked. “I could take your mom to the grocery store now while you spend a little time with your dad?”
“You sure you want to do that?”
“There’s a grocery in Pratt, isn’t there?” she asked Marissa.
“You don’t want to go to that one,” she said. “The prices are terrible there.”
“That’s okay this one time, Marissa. So, should we go while Cal visits with his dad?”
“Are you sure?” Marissa asked a little nervously.
“We’re sure, Mom,” Cal said. “Go get some groceries.”
*
So their visit began. Maggie and Marissa went to the small grocery where Marissa was greeted familiarly and kindly by a few people. They asked after Dr. Jones and she replied that he was fine and staying busy. When they got home with a few bags of groceries they found Jed had washed and was sitting in his chair, writing in one of his notebooks, rocking sometimes, muttering as he wrote.
Maggie assured Cal that the trip to the store had gone well and asked him how things were at home. “As normal as they ever get. We can leave now.”
Cal helped put the groceries away, hugged his mother and promised to be back the next day.
The next morning, after breakfast, they stopped at a store to buy paint and supplies, and returned to the farm. Cal talked Jed into helping him sand and paint the porch and the front of the house, while Maggie spent most of her day with Marissa, getting to know her and seeing the garden, which was only a small patch but impressive. In the second bedroom of their house Marissa had a loom and showed Maggie some of her decorative weaving, something she’d been doing for decades. The other thing she kept in that weaving room was a bookshelf stuffed with books, all of which had been read to death. It reminded Maggie of Cal’s treasured books that he read and read and read again.
“Your family does love books,” Maggie said.
“It always gets us through,” Marissa said.
They all had lunch together but Cal and Maggie left them at dinnertime. On the third day Maggie went to a bookstore and bought Marissa and Jed some new books. She had noticed the books they kept were mostly science, law or literary classics so she bought a nice big stack, including a few large art books, hoping she wasn’t duplicating what they had. Marissa was breathless with excitement and gratitude.
“I notice you don’t have a computer in the house,” Maggie said to Marissa.
Marissa looked at her in shock. “We can’t have a computer,” she said. “Jed wouldn’t be able to get along with it. There are enough voices in his head without the internet. We had a computer for a short time and he didn’t sleep for days.”
“I thought it might keep him busy and help him communicate,” Maggie said.
“He would soon be communicating with aliens from outer space. I’m very careful with what we have on TV.”
“Marissa, has your whole life been like this?” Maggie asked. “Taking care of Jed?”