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“He says here ‘for a while’! A while can be a significant amount of time!” They had Jack’s address after the Great Letter came, the one that made her father weep and tremble. Her father sent another note and a little check, in case the first had gone astray. And they waited. Jack’s letter lay open on the breakfast table and the supper table and the lamp table and the arm of the Morris chair. He had folded it away once, when Reverend Ames came for checkers, presumably because he did not want a doubtful glance to fall on it.

“Yes, he will definitely be coming,” he would conclude, as if uncertainty on that point had to do with the language of the letter. Two weeks passed, then three days. Then came the Telephone Call, and her father actually spoke with Jack, actually heard his voice. “He says he will be here day after tomorrow!” Her father’s
anxiety turned to misery without ever losing the quality of patience. “I believe it could only be trouble of a serious kind that would account for this delay!” he said, comforting himself by terrifying himself. Another week, then the Second Telephone Call, again with the information that he would arrive in two days. Then four days passed, and there he was, standing in the back porch, a thin man in a brown suit, tapping his hat against his pant leg as if he could not make up his mind whether to knock on the glass or turn the knob or simply to leave again. He was watching her, as if suddenly reminded of an irritant or an obstacle, watching her with the kind of directness that forgets to conceal itself. She was a problem he had not taken into account. He did not expect to find me here, she thought. He is not happy to see me.

She opened the door. “Jack,” she said, “I was about to give up on you. Come in.” She wondered if she would have recognized him if she had passed him on the street. He was pale and unshaven, and there was a nick of scar under his eye.

“Well, here I am.” He shrugged. “Should I come in?” He seemed to be asking her advice as well as her permission.

“Yes, of course. You can’t imagine how much he has worried.”

“Is he here?”

Where else would he be? “He’s here. He’s sleeping.”

“I’m sorry I’m late. I tried to make a phone call and the bus left without me.”

“You should have called Papa.”

He looked at her. “The phone was in a bar,” he said. He was quiet, matter-of-fact. “I would have cleaned up a little, but I lost the bag that had my razor in it.” He touched the stubble on his jaw with a kind of concern, as if it were an abrasion. He had always been fastidious about such things.

“No matter. You can use Papa’s razor. Sit down. I’ll get you some coffee.”

“Thank you,” he said. “I don’t want to put you to any trouble.” She didn’t say it was late for him to start worrying about
that. He was distant and respectful and tentative. In this, at least, he was so much like the brother of her memory that she knew one hard look from her might send him away, defeating all her prayers, not to mention her father’s prayers, which were unceasing. If he came and left again while her father was sleeping, would she ever tell the old man he had come and gone? Would she tell him it was her anger that had driven him away, this thin, weary, unkempt man who had been reluctant even to step through the door? And he had come to the kitchen door, a custom of the family from their childhood, because their mother was almost always in the warm kitchen, waiting for them. He must have done it unreflectingly, obedient to old habit. Like a ghost, she thought.

“It’s no trouble,” she said. “I’m just glad you’re here.”

“Thank you. Glory. That’s good to know.”

He hesitated over her name, maybe because he was not absolutely certain which sister he was dealing with, maybe because he did not wish to seem too familiar. Maybe because familiarity required an effort. She started putting water in the percolator. But he said, “I’m sorry about this—could I lie down for a little while?” He put his hand to his face. That gesture, she thought. “This shouldn’t have happened. I’ve been all right for a long time.”

“Sure, you go rest. I’ll get the aspirin.” She said, “It seems like old times, sneaking you upstairs with a bottle of aspirin.” She had meant this as a joke of sorts, but he gave her a startled look, and she was sorry she had said it.

Then they heard bedsprings and their father calling, “Do we have company, Glory! I believe we do! Yes!” And then the slippered feet and the cane.

Jack stood up and brushed his hair off his brow and shook down his cuffs and waited, and then the old man appeared in the door. “Ah, here you are! I knew you would come, yes!”

She could see her father’s surprise and regret. His eyes brimmed. Twenty years is a very long time. Jack offered his hand
and said, “Sir,” and his father said, “Yes, shaking hands is very good. But I’ll put down this cane—There,” he said, when he had hooked it on the table’s edge. “Now,” he said, and he embraced his son. “Here you are!” He put the flat of his hand on Jack’s lapel, caressingly. “We have worried so much, so much. And here you are.”

Jack put his arms around his father’s shoulders carefully, as if he were frightened by the old man’s smallness and frailty, or embarrassed by it.

His father stepped back and looked at him again. He wiped his eyes. “Isn’t it something!” he said. “Here I’ve been wearing a necktie for days, waking and sleeping as Glory will tell you, and you’ve caught me in my nightshirt! And what is it? Almost noon! Ah!” he said, and laid his head against Jack’s lapel for a moment. Then he said, “Glory will help me out a little. I’ll get my shoes on and comb my hair, and pretty soon I’ll be something you can recognize! But I knew I heard your voice and I couldn’t wait to get a look at you! Yes!” he said, and took his cane and started toward the hallway. “Glory, if you could help me a little. After you put the coffee on.” And he set off toward his room.

Jack said, “After all these years I guess he still knows when I’m hungover.”

“Well, the coffee will help. He’s excited now, but he’ll rest after lunch and you’ll be able to get some sleep.”

Jack said, “Lunch.”

Twenty years was long enough to make a stranger of someone she had known far better than this brother of hers, and here he was in her kitchen, pale and ill at ease and in no state to receive the kindness prepared for him, awaiting him, even then wilting and congealing into the worst he could have meant by the word “lunch.” And what an ugly word that was anyway.

“I’ll help Papa shave, and then I’ll bring you the razor. The cups are where they always were, and the spoons. So help yourself when the coffee is done.”

“Thanks,” he said. “I will.” He was still standing, still hat in
hand. That’s how he was, all respectfulness and good manners when he knew he ought to have been in trouble. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. She had heard someone say that about him once, a woman at church. He cleared his throat. “Has any mail come here for me?”

“No, nothing.” She went off to help her father put his socks on and shave and get his shirt buttoned, and she thought, as she often did, At least I know what is required of me now, and that is something to be grateful for. She helped him on with his tie and his jacket and parted his hair and combed it straight to one side, which is how he had always combed it himself. Well, no matter, there wasn’t much left of it anyway.

When she was done, her father said, “Now I’ll just look at the newspaper for a little while. I know Jack will want to get cleaned up, too.”

She could smell that the coffee had gone a little past ready, and the thought struck her that he might have left, but there he was, washing up at the kitchen sink with a bar of laundry soap. The house had always been redolent of lavender and lye. She wondered if he remembered. He had hung his jacket and tie over the back of a chair and loosened his collar and was scrubbing his face and his neck with a tea towel, one of those on which their grandmother in her old age had embroidered the days of the week. No matter.

He wrung out the towel and began drying himself down with it. And then he realized she was in the room and turned around and looked at her, embarrassed that she should see him so undefended, she thought, since he rolled down his sleeves and buttoned them and pushed his hair off his brow.

“That’s a little better,” he said. Then he shook out the tea towel and hung it on the bar above the sink. It said Tuesday.

“You should drink this coffee if you’re going to.”

“Yes. I forgot the coffee, didn’t I.” He put his jacket back on and slipped the tie into his pocket.

They sipped bad coffee together while their father sat by the window in his Morris chair reading about the world situation. There were five years between them, and Teddy and Grace, and he had never shown much interest in her beyond tousling her hair now and then. It wasn’t her fault that she was the one to have been at home when everything happened. He seemed embarrassed, this man who began to remind her more of her brother as she looked at him. It was hard for her to look away from him, though she knew he would have liked her to. He held his cup in both hands, but it trembled anyway. He spilled coffee down his sleeve and winced with irritation, and she thought how kind her father was to give him time to recover himself. She said, “You couldn’t be more welcome here, Jack. You can’t know what it means to him to have you here.”

He said, “It’s good of you to say that, Glory.”

“It’s just the truth.”

There now. Her thought was that she might be able to worry a little less if an edge crept into her voice or if she lost patience for a minute.

He said, “Thanks for the coffee. I’ll go shave.”

H
E HAD TAKEN HIS BAG UPSTAIRS, AND HE CAME BACK
down with his jaw polished and his hair combed and smelling of her father’s Old Spice. He was still buttoning his cuffs. He nodded at the towel. “Is it Tuesday?”

“No,” she said, “that towel is a little fast. It’s still Monday.”

He reddened, but he laughed. And from the other room the newspaper crumpled and then they heard the cane and the hard, formal shoes that took a good shine and would not wear out in this world. Their father appeared, a roguish look in his eye, as there always was when he felt at the top of his form.

“Yes, children, lunchtime, I believe. Glory has been so busy getting things ready. She said you hated cream pie, but I was certain
I remembered you had a special fondness for it, and she made it on my say-so, despite her reservations.”

“It’s pretty leathery by now,” she said.

“You see, she’s trying to prejudice you against it! You’d think we’d made a wager of some kind!”

Jack said, “I like cream pie.” He glanced at her.

“It’s for supper, in any case,” she said, and she thought he looked relieved. “Jack’s probably too tired to be hungry. He spent last night on the bus. We should give him a sandwich and let him go rest.”

“I’m fine,” he said.

His father looked at him. “You’re pale. Yes, I see that.”

“I’m all right. I’m always pale.”

“Well, you ought to sit down anyway. Glory won’t mind waiting on us this one time, will you, dear.”

She said, “This one time, no.”

“She works me half to death around here. I don’t know what she’d do without me.”

Jack smiled obligingly, and rested his brow on his hand when his father settled into the grace. “There is so much to be grateful for, words are poor things”—and the old man fell into what might have been a kind of slumber. Then he said, “Amen,” and mustered himself, roguish again, and patted Jack’s hand. “Yes,” he said, “yes.”

G
LORY TOOK
J
ACK UPSTAIRS TO THE ROOM SHE HAD PRE
pared for him, Luke and Teddy’s room they still called it. He said, “That was kind of you,” when she told him she had not put him in the room he had had growing up. It was the same kindness her father had showed her. When, half an hour later, she came upstairs with some towels for him, Jack had already hung up his clothes and set a half dozen books on the dresser between the Abraham Lincoln bookends, having stacked the ten volumes of
Kipling they had supported for two generations in the corner of the closet. He had taken a little picture out of his old room, a framed photograph of a river and trees, and set it on the dresser beside his books. Insofar as he was capable of such a thing, he appeared to have moved in.

The room was empty, the door standing open, so she stepped into the room just to put the towels on the dresser, and she did pause, noticing things, it was true. And when she turned he was there watching her from the hallway, smiling at her. If he had said anything, it would have been “What are you looking for?” No, it might have been “Looking for something?” because he thought he had caught her prying.

“I brought you some towels.”

“Thank you very much. You’re very kind.”

“I hope you’re comfortable,” she said.

“I am. Thank you.”

His voice was soft as it had always been. He never did raise his voice. When they were children he would slip away, leave the game of tag, leave the house, and not be missed because he was so quiet. Then someone would say his name, the first to notice his absence, and the game would dissolve. There was no point calling him. He came back when he came back. But they would look for him, as if the game now were to find him at mischief. Even their father tried, walking street to street, looking behind hedges and fences and up trees. But the mischief was done and he was at home again before they had given up searching. One time, when his absence had ended an evening game of croquet that she was for once on the point of winning, she was overcome with rage and exasperation. And when she knew he was home she had stamped into his room and shouted, “What right do you have to be so strange!”

He smiled at her, pushed his hair off his brow, said nothing. But she knew she had jarred him, even hurt him. She must have been nine or ten, still the little sister he teased or ignored. Her
question sounded adult to her, perhaps to him. It sounded un-harmless, and that had startled them both. From then on his wariness included her, too—a slight change, inevitable no doubt.

And now here she was, embarrassed to have been found putting towels in a long-empty room she had been at some pains to make ready for him, as if a few shirts, a few books, were an inviolable claim on the place and her crossing the threshold an infraction. There was no use being angry. What could he have thought she was looking for? Of course, alcohol. How insulting to think that of her. But then, how insulting to him if she had actually been searching his room. The thought would not have crossed her mind, but he would not know that. Now she found that she almost assumed there was a bottle concealed somewhere, under the bed or behind the stack of Kipling. She promised herself she would never set foot in that room again.