“You know what I keep wondering about?” Danny said. “That girl who come upstairs to the door that night.”
“I was thinking about her, too,” said Farish. “I didn’t get a good look at her. Where’d she come from? What was she doing hanging around outside the house?”
Danny shrugged.
“You didn’t ask her?”
“Look, man,” Danny said, trying to keep his voice even, “there was an awful lot going on that night.”
“And you let her get away? You said you saw a kid,” said Farish to Gum. “Black or white? Boy or girl?”
“Yeah, Gum,” said Danny. “What’d you see?”
“Well, I tell you the truth,” said their grandmother, faintly, “I didn’t get a good look. You know how my eyes are.”
“Was it one? Or more than one?”
“I didn’t see a whole lot. When I run off the road, I heard a kid screaming and laughing from up on that overpass.”
“That girl,” Eugene said to Farish, “was down on the square watching Loyal and me preach earlier in the night. I remember her. She was riding a bicycle.”
“She wasn’t on any bicycle when she come to the Mission,” said Danny. “She ran away on foot.”
“I’m just telling you what I saw.”
“I believe I seen a bicycle, come to think of it,” said Gum. “I can’t be sure.”
“I want to talk to this girl,” Farish said. “Yall say you don’t know who she is?”
“She told us her name but she couldn’t make up her mind. First it was Mary Jones. Then it was Mary Johnson.”
“Would you know her if you saw her again?”
“
“So did I,” Danny said.
Farish compressed his lips. “Are the cops involved in this?” he said abruptly to his grandmother. “Have they asked you any questions?”
“I didn’t tell em a thing.”
“Good.” Awkwardly, Farish patted his grandmother on the shoulder. “I’m on find out who done this to you,” he said. “And when I find em, you bet they’ll be sorry.”
————
Ida’s last few days at work were like the last few days before Weenie died: those endless hours of lying on the kitchen floor beside his box, and part of him still there but most of him—the best part—gone already. Le Sueur’s Peas, his box had said. The black lettering was stamped in Allison’s memory with all the sickness of despair. She had lain with her nose only inches away from those letters, trying to breathe in time with his fast, agonized little gasps as if with her own lungs she could buoy him up. How vast the kitchen was, so low down, so late at night: all those shadows. Even now, Weenie’s death had the waxy sheen of the linoleum in Edie’s kitchen; it had the crowded feel of her glass-front cabinets (an audience of plates ranked in galleries, goggling helplessly); the useless cheer of red dishcloths and cherry-patterned curtains. Those dumb, well-meaning objects—cardboard box; cherry curtains and jumbled Fiestaware—had pressed close in Allison’s grief, sat up and watched with her all the long awful night. Now, with Ida leaving, nothing in the house shared Allison’s sorrow or reflected it but objects: the gloomy carpets, the cloudy mirrors; the armchairs hunched and grieving and even the tragic old tall-case clock holding itself very rigid and proper, as if it were about to collapse into sobs. Within the china cabinet, the Vienna bagpipers and crinolined Doulton ladies gestured imploringly, this way and that: cheeks hectic, their dark little gazes hollow and stunned.
Ida had Things to Do. She cleaned out the refrigerator; she took everything out of the cabinets, and wiped them down; she made banana bread, and a casserole or two, and wrapped them in tinfoil and put them in the freezer. She talked, and even hummed; and she seemed cheerful enough except that in all her rushing around, she refused to meet Allison’s eye. Once Allison thought she caught her crying. Gingerly, she stood in the doorway. “Are you crying?” she asked.
Ida Rhew jumped—then pressed a hand to her chest, and laughed. “Bless your heart!” she cried.
“Ida, are you sad?”
But Ida just shook her head, and went back to work; and Allison went to her room and cried. Later on, she would regret that she’d wasted one of her few remaining hours with Ida by going up to her bedroom to cry alone. But at the moment, standing there in the kitchen watching Ida clean out the cabinets with her back turned had been too sad to bear, so sad that it gave Allison a panicky, breathless, choking feeling to remember it. Somehow Ida was already gone; as warm and solid as she was, she had already turned into a memory, a ghost, even as she stood in her white nurse’s shoes in the sunny kitchen.
