Five minutes later he was gone, backing their little red Pinto out onto Pond Street, giving his usual brief toot on the horn, and putting away. She was left alone with Denny, who was in the process of strangling himself while he tried to wriggle under his highchair tray.
‘You’re going at that all wrong, Sluggo,’ Sarah said, crossing the kitchen and unlatching the tray.
‘Blue!’ Denny said, disgusted with the whole thing.
Speedy Tomato, their tomcat, sauntered into the kitchen at his usual slow, hipshot juvenile delinquent’s stride, and Denny grabbed him, making little chuckling noises.
Speedy laid his ears back and looked resigned.
Sarah smiled a little and cleared the table. Inertia. A body at rest tends to remain at rest, and she was at rest. Never mind Walt’s darker side; she had her own. She had no intention of doing more than sending Johnny a card at Christmas. It was better, safer, that way –
because a body in motion tends to keep moving. Her life here was good. She had survived Dan, she had survived Johnny, who had been so unfairly taken from her (but so much in this world was unfair), she had come through her own personal rapids to this smooth water, and here she would stay. This sunshiny kitchen was not a bad place. Best to forget county fairs, Wheels of Fortune, and Johnny Smith’s face.
As she ran water into the sink to do the dishes she turned on the radio and caught the beginning of the news. The first item made her freeze with a just-washed plate in one
hand, her eyes looking out over their small backyard in startled contemplation. Johnny’s mother had had a stroke while watching a TV report on her son’s press conference. She had died this morning, not an hour ago.
Sarah dried her hands, snapped off the radio, and pried Speedy Tomato out of Denny’s hands. She carried her boy into the living room and popped him into his play-pen. Denny protested this indignity with loud, lusty howls of which she took no notice. She went to the telephone and called the EMMC. A switchboard operator who sounded tired of repeating the same piece of intelligence over and over again told her that John Smith had discharged himself the night before, slightly before mid-night.
She hung up the phone and sat down in a chair. Denny continued to cry from his playpen.
Water ran into the kitchen sink. After a while she got up, went into the kitchen, and turned it off.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
1.
The man from Inside View showed up on October 16, not long after Johnny had walked up to get the mail.
His father’s house was set well back from the road; their graveled driveway was nearly a quarter of a mile long, running through a heavy stand of second-growth spruce and pine.
Johnny did the total round trip every day. At first he had returned to the porch trembling with exhaustion, his legs on fire, his limp so pronounced that he was really lurching along. But now, a month and a half after the first time (when the half a mile had taken him an hour to do), the walk had become one of his day’s pleasures, something to look forward to. Not the mail, but the walk.
He had begun splitting wood for the coming winter, a chore Herb had been planning to hire out since he himself had landed a contract to do some inside work on a new housing project in Libertyville. ‘You know when old age has started lookin over your shoulder, John,’ he had said with a smile. ‘It’s when you start lookin for inside work as soon as fall rolls around.’
Johnny climbed the porch and sat down in the wicker chair beside the glider, uttering a small sound of relief. He propped his right foot on the porch railing, and with a grimace of pain, used his hands to lift his left leg over it. That done, he began to open his mail.
It had tapered off a lot just lately. During the first week he had been back here in Pownal, there had sometimes been as many as two dozen letters and eight or nine packages a day, most of them forwarded through the EMMC, a few of them sent to General Delivery, Pownal (and assorted variant spellings: Pownell, Poenul, and, in one memorable case, Poonuts).