Too Much Happiness Part 11

She hadn't been just a once-through reader either. Brothers Karamazov, Mill on the Floss, Wings of the Dove, Magic Mountain Brothers Karamazov, Mill on the Floss, Wings of the Dove, Magic Mountain, over and over again. She would pick one up, thinking that she would just read that special bit-and find herself unable to stop until the whole thing was redigested. She read modern fiction too. Always fiction. She hated to hear the word "escape" used about fiction. She might have argued, not just playfully, that it was real life that was the escape. But this was too important to argue about.

And now, most strangely, all that was gone. Not just with Rich's death but with her own immersion in illness. Then she had thought the change was temporary and the magic would reappear once she was off certain drugs and exhausting treatments.

Apparently not.

Sometimes she tried to explain why, to an imaginary inquisitor.

"I got too busy."

"So everybody says. Doing what?"

"Too busy paying attention."

"To what?"

"I mean thinking."

"What about?"

"Never mind."

One morning after sitting for a while she decided that it was a very hot day. She should get up and turn on the fans. Or she could, with more environmental responsibility, try opening the front and back doors and let the breeze, if there was any, blow through the screen and through the house.

She unlocked the front door first. And even before she had allowed half an inch of morning light to show itself, she was aware of a dark stripe cutting that light off.

There was a young man standing outside the screen door, which was hooked.

"Didn't mean to startle you," he said. "I was looking for a doorbell or something. I gave a little knock on the frame here, but I guess you didn't hear me."

"Sorry," she said.

"I'm supposed to look at your fuse box. If you could tell me where it is."

She stepped aside to let him in. She took a moment to remember.

"Yes. In the cellar," she said. "I'll turn the light on. You'll see it."

He shut the door behind him and bent to take off his shoes.

"That's all right," she said. "It's not as if it's raining."

"Might as well, though. I make it a habit. Could leave you dust tracks insteada mud."

She went into the kitchen, not able to sit down again until he left the house.

She opened the door for him as he came up the steps.

"Okay?" she said. "You found it okay?"

"Fine."

She was leading him towards the front door, then realized there were no steps behind her. She turned and saw him standing in the kitchen.

"You don't happen to have anything you could fix up for me to eat, do you?"

There was a change in his voice-a crack in it, a rising pitch, that made her think of a television comedian doing a rural whine. Under the kitchen skylight she saw that he wasn't so young. When she opened the door she had just been aware of a skinny body, a face dark against the morning glare. The body, as she saw it now, was certainly skinny, but more wasted than boyish, affecting a genial slouch. His face was long and rubbery, with prominent light blue eyes. A jokey look, but a persistence, as if he generally got his way.

"See, I happen to be a diabetic," he said. "I don't know if you know any diabetics, but the fact is when you get hungry you got to eat, otherwise your system all goes weird. I should have ate before I came in here, but I let myself get in a hurry. You don't mind if I sit down?"

He was already sitting down at the kitchen table.

"You got any coffee?"

"I have tea. Herbal tea, if you'd like that."

"Sure. Sure."

She measured tea into a cup, plugged in the kettle, and opened the refrigerator.

"I don't have much on hand," she said. "I have some eggs. Sometimes I scramble an egg and put ketchup on it. Would you like that? I have some English m.u.f.fins I could toast."

"English, Irish, Yukoranian, I don't care."

She cracked a couple of eggs into the pan, broke up the yolks, and stirred them all together with a cooking fork, then sliced a m.u.f.fin and put it into the toaster. She got a plate from the cupboard, set it down in front of him. Then a knife and fork from the cutlery drawer.

"Pretty plate," he said, holding it up as if to see his face in it. Just as she turned her attention to the eggs she heard it smash on the floor.

"Oh mercy me," he said in a new voice, a squeaky and definitely nasty voice. "Look what I gone and done now."

"It's all right," she said, knowing now that nothing was.

"Musta slipped through my fingers."

She got down another plate, set it on the counter until she was ready to put the toasted m.u.f.fin halves and then eggs smeared with ketchup on top of it.

He had stooped down, meanwhile, to gather up the pieces of broken china. He held up one piece that had broken so that it had a sharp point to it. As she set his meal down on the table he sc.r.a.ped the point lightly down his bare forearm. Tiny beads of blood appeared, at first separate, then joining to form a string.

"It's okay," he said. "It's just a joke. I know how to do it for a joke. If I'd of wanted to be serious we wouldn't of needed no ketchup, eh?"

There were still some pieces on the floor that he had missed. She turned away, thinking to get the broom, which was in a closet near the back door. He caught her arm in a flash.

"You sit down. You sit right here while I'm eating." He lifted the bloodied arm to show it to her again. Then he made an egg-burger out of the m.u.f.fin and the eggs and ate it in a very few bites. He chewed with his mouth open. The kettle was boiling. "Tea bag in the cup?" he said.

"Yes. It's loose tea actually."

"Don't you move. I don't want you near that kettle, do I?"

He poured boiling water into the cup.

"Looks like hay. Is that all you got?"

"I'm sorry. Yes."

"Don't go on saying you're sorry. If it's all you got it's all you got. You never did think I come here to look at the fuse box, did you?"

"Well yes," Nita said. "I did."

"You don't now."

"No."

"You scared?"

She chose to consider this not as a taunt but as a serious question.

"I don't know. I'm more startled than scared, I guess. I don't know."

"One thing. One thing you don't need to be scared of. I'm not going to rape you."

"I hardly thought so."

"You can't never be too sure." He took a sip of the tea and made a face. "Just because you're an old lady. There's all kinds out there, they'll do it to anything. Babies or dogs and cats or old ladies. Old men. They're not fussy. Well I am. I'm not interested in getting it any way but normal and with some nice lady I like and what likes me. So rest a.s.sured."

Nita said, "I am. But thank you for telling me."

He shrugged, but seemed pleased with himself.

"That your car out front?"

"My husband's car."

"Husband? Where's he?"

"He's dead. I don't drive. I mean to sell it, but I haven't yet."

What a fool, what a fool she was to tell him that.

"Two thousand four?"

"I think so. Yes."

"For a minute I thought you were going to trick me with the husband stuff. Wouldn't of worked, though. I can smell it if a woman's on her own. I know it the minute I walk in a house. Minute she opens the door. Instinct. So it runs okay? You know the last day he drove it?"

"The seventeenth of June. The day he died."

"Got any gas in it?"

"I would think so."

"Nice if he filled it up right before. You got the keys?"

"Not on me. I know where they are."

"Okay." He pushed his chair back, hitting one of the pieces of crockery. He stood up, shook his head in some kind of surprise, sat down again.

"I'm wiped. Gotta sit a minute. I thought it'd be better when I'd ate. I was just making that up about being a diabetic."

She pushed her chair and he jumped.

"You stay where you are. I'm not that wiped I couldn't grab you. It's only I walked all night."

"I was just going to get the keys."

"You wait till I say. I walked the railway track. Never seen a train. I walked all the way to here and never seen a train."

"There's hardly ever a train."

"Yeah. Good. I went down in the ditch going round some of them half-a.s.sed little towns. Then it come daylight I was still okay except where it crossed the road and I took a run for it. Then I looked down here and seen the house and the car and I said to myself, That's it. I could have took my old man's car, but I got some brains left in my head."

She knew he wanted her to ask what had he done. She was also sure that the less she knew the better for her.

Then for the first time since he entered the house she thought of her cancer. She thought of how it freed her, put her out of danger.

"What are you smiling about?"

"I don't know. Was I smiling?"

"I guess you like listening to stories. Want me to tell you a story?"

"Maybe I'd rather you'd leave."

"I will leave. First I'll tell you a story."

He put his hand in a back pocket. "Here. Want to see a picture? Here."

It was a photograph of three people, taken in a living room with closed floral curtains as a backdrop. An old man-not really old, maybe in his sixties-and a woman of about the same age were sitting on a couch. A very large younger woman was sitting in a wheelchair drawn up close to one end of the couch and a little in front of it. The old man was heavy and gray haired, with eyes narrowed and mouth slightly open, as if he might suffer some chest wheezing, but he was smiling as well as he could. The old woman was much smaller, with dark dyed hair and lipstick, wearing what used to be called a peasant blouse, with little red bows at the wrists and neck. She smiled determinedly, even a bit frantically, lips stretched over perhaps bad teeth.

But it was the younger woman who monopolized the picture. Distinct and monstrous in her bright muumuu, dark hair done up in a row of little curls along her forehead, cheeks sloping into her neck. And in spite of all that bulge of flesh an expression of some satisfaction and cunning.

"That's my mother and that's my dad. And that's my sister Madelaine. In the wheelchair.

"She was born funny. Nothing no doctor or anybody could do for her. And ate like a pig. There was bad blood between her and me since ever I remember. She was five years older than I was and she just set out to torment me. Throwing anything at me she could get her hands on and knockin me down and tryin to run over me with her f.u.c.kin wheelchair. Pardon my French."

"It must have been hard for you. And hard for your parents."

"Huh. They just rolled over and took it. They went to this church, see, and this preacher told them, she's a gift from G.o.d. They took her with them to church and she'd f.u.c.kin howl like a f.u.c.kin cat in the backyard and they'd say oh, she's tryin to make music, oh G.o.d f.u.c.kin bless her. Excuse me again.

"So I never bothered much with sticking around home, you know, I went and got my own life. That's all right, I says, I'm not hanging around for this c.r.a.p. I got my own life. I got work. I nearly always got work. I never sat around on my a.s.s drunk on government money. On my rear end, I mean. I never asked my old man for a penny. I'd get up and tar a roof in the ninety-degree heat or I'd mop the floors in some stinkin old restaurant or go grease-monkey for some rotten cheatin garage. I'd do it. But I wasn't always up for taking their s.h.i.+t so I wasn't lasting too long. That s.h.i.+t people are always handing people like me and I couldn't take it. I come from a decent home. My dad worked till he got too sick, he worked on the buses. I wasn't brought up to take s.h.i.+t. Okay though-never mind that. What my parents always told me was, the house is yours. The house is all paid up and it's in good shape and it's yours. That's what they told me. We know you had a hard time here when you were young and if you hadn't had such a hard time you could of got an education, so we want to make it up to you how we can. So then not long ago I'm talking to my dad on the phone and he says, Of course you understand the deal. So I'm what deal? He says, It's only a deal if you sign the papers you will take care of your sister as long as she lives. It's only your home if it's her home too, he says.