Searching for Caleb (3 page)

   She opened drawers for no reason and slammed them shut, pulled down the yellowed windowshade and let it snap up again. Then she called, "Duncan?

   Meg? Am I the only one doing anything?"

   Duncan came in with his oldest clothes on: a white shirt worn soft and translucent and a shrunken pair of dungarees. His arms and legs gawked out like a growing boy's. He had a boy's face still, the expression trustful and the corners of his mouth pulled upward. With his hair and skin a single color and his long-boned, awkward body he might have been Justine's brother, except that he seemed to be continually turning over some mysterious private thought that set him apart. Also he moved differently; he was slower and more deliberate. Justine ran circles around him with his cup of coffee until he stopped her and took it from her hands.

   "I could be dressed and gone by now, the rest of you would still be lolling in bed," she told him.

   He swallowed a mouthful of coffee, looked down into the cup and raised his eyebrows.

   Justine went back through the living room, where Meg's mattress lay empty with her blanket already folded in a neat, flat square. She knocked on the bathroom door. "Meg? Meggie? Is that you? We're not going to wait all day for you."

   Water ran on and on.

   "If you set up housekeeping there the way you did yesterday we'll leave you, we'll walk right out and leave you, hear?"

   She tapped the door once more and returned to the kitchen. "Meg is crying again," she told Duncan.

   "How can you tell?"

   "She's shut up in the bathroom running the faucet. If today's like yesterday, what are we going to do?" she asked, but she was already trailing off, heading toward her bedroom with her mind switched to something else, and Duncan didn't bother answering.

   In the bedroom, Justine dressed and then gathered up heaps of cast-off clothing, a coffee cup and a half-empty bottle of bourbon and a Scientific American. She tried to fold her blanket as neatly as Meg's.

   Then she straightened and looked around her. The room swooped with shadows from the swinging lightbulb. Without furniture it showed itself for what it was: a paper box with sagging walls. In every corner were empty matchbooks, safety pins, dustballs, Kleenexes, but she was not a careful housekeeper and she left them for whoever came after.

   When she returned to the kitchen her grandfather and Duncan were standing side by side drinking their coffee like medicine. Her grandfather wore his deerskin slippers: otherwise, he was ready to leave. No one was going to accuse him of holding things up. "One of the trials I expect to see in hell," he said, "is paper cups, where your thumbnail is forever tempted to scrape off a strip of wax. And plastic spoons, and pulpy paper plates."

   "That's for sure," Duncan told him.

   "What say?"

   "Where's your hearing aid?" Justine asked.

   "Not so very well," said her grandfather. He held one hand out level, palm down. "I'm experiencing some discomfort in my fingers and both knees, I believe because of the cold. I was cold all night. I haven't been so cold since the blizzard of eighty-eight. Why are there not enough blankets, all of a sudden?"

   Duncan flashed Justine a wide, quick smile, which she returned with the corners tucked in. There were not enough blankets because she had used most of them yesterday to pad the furniture, shielding claw feet and bureau tops and peeling veneer from the splintery walls of the U-Haul truck, although Duncan had told her, several times, that it might be best to save the blankets out. This was still January, the nights were cold.

   What was her hurry? But Justine was always in a hurry. "I want to get things done, I want to get going," she had said. Duncan gave up. There had been no system to their previous moves either; it seemed pointless to start now.

   Meg came into the kitchen and claimed her coffee without looking to left or right-a neat, pretty girl in a shirtwaist dress, with short hair held in place by a sterling silver barrette. She was scrubbed and shining, buttoned, combed, smelling of toothpaste, but her eyes were pink. "Oh, honey!" Justine cried, but Meg ducked out from between her hands. She was seventeen years old. This move was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. Justine said, "Would you like some bread? It's all we've got out."

   "No, thank you, Mama."

   "I thought we'd have breakfast when we get to what's-its-name, if it's not too long to wait."

   "I'm not hungry anyway."

   She said nothing to her father. It was plain what she thought: If it weren't for Duncan they would never have to move at all. He had gone and grown tired of another business and chosen yet another town to drag them off to, seemingly picked it out of a hat, or might as well have.

   "Your father will be driving the truck all alone," Justine said, "since last time it made Grandfather sick. Would you like to ride with him?" She never would let a quarrel wind on its natural way. She knew it herself, she had no tact or subtlety. She always had to be interfering. "Why not go, he could use the company."

   But Meg's tears were back and she wouldn't speak, even to say no. She bent her head. The two short wings of her hair swung forward to hide her cheeks. And Duncan, of course, was off on some tangent of his own. His mind had started up again; he was finally awake. His mind was an intricate, multigeared machine, or perhaps some little animal with skittery paws. "I am fascinated by randomness," he said. "Do you realize that there is no possible permutation of four fingers that could be called absolutely random?"

   "Duncan, it's time to roll the mattresses," Justine said.

   "Mattresses. Yes."

   "Would you?"

   "Hold up your hand," Duncan told the grandfather, leading him through the living room. "Then take away two fingers. The first and third elements, say, of a four-element . . ."

   "Last night," said Meg, "Mrs. Benning asked me again if I would like to stay with her,"

   "Oh, Meg."

   "She said, 'Why won't your mother allow it? Just till the school year is over,' she said. She said, 'You know we'd love to have you. Does she think you'd be imposing? Would it help if I talked to her one more time?'"

   "You'll be leaving us soon enough as it is," said Justine, stacking empty paper cups.

   "At least we should consider my schooling," Meg said. "This is my senior year. I won't learn a thing, moving around the way we do."

   "Teaching you to adapt is the best education we could give you," Justine told her.

   "Adapt! What about logarithms?"

   "Now I can't keep on and on about this, I want you to find the cat. I think she knows it's moving day. She's hiding."

   "So would I," said Meg, "if I could think of a place." And she slid off the counter and left, calling the cat in her soft, sensible voice that was never raised even when she argued. Justine stood motionless beside the sink. When she heard footsteps she spun around but it was only her grandfather.

   "Justine? There are neighbors here to see you off," he told her. He sniffed through his long, pinched nose. People who were not related to him ought to keep to themselves, he always said. He watched narrowly while Justine rushed through the house, hunting her keys and struggling into her coat and jamming her hat on her head. "Check your room, Grandfather," she called. "Turn off the lights. Will you help Meg find the cat? Tell her we're just about to leave."

   "Knees?"

   "And don't forget your hearing aid."

   "They don't get better that fast, the cold has sunk into the sockets," her grandfather said. "Ask me again tomorrow. Thank you very much."

   Justine kissed his cheekbone, a polished white blade. She flew through the living room and out the front door, into the chalky dawn. Cold air yanked at her breath. Frozen grass crunched under her feet. Over by the U-Haul truck, Mr. Ambrose was helping Duncan load the last of the mattresses. Mrs. Ambrose stood to one side, along with the Printzes and Mrs. Benning and Delia Carpenter and her retarded daughter. And a few feet away was a newsboy Justine had never seen before, a canvas sack slung from one shoulder. Except for the newsboy they all wore bathrobes, or coats thrown over pajamas. She had known them for nearly a year and there were still these new things to be learned: Alice Printz favored fluffy slippers the size of small sheep and Mrs. Benning, so practical in the daytime, wore a nightgown made of layers and layers of see-through pink or blue or gray-it was hard to tell which in this light. They stood hugging themselves against the cold, and the Carpenter girl's teeth were chattering. "Justine, I never!" Alice Printz was saying. "You thought you could slip out from under us. But we won't let you go that easy, here we are at crack of dawn waiting to see you off."

   "Oh, I hate goodbyes!" said Justine. She went down the row hugging each one, even the newsboy, whom she might after all know without realizing it. Then a light came on over the Franks' front door, three houses down, and Justine went to tell June Frank goodbye. All but the newsboy came along with her. June appeared on her cinderblock steps carrying a begonia in a plastic pot. "I had this growing for you ever since I knew you would be moving," she said, "and if you had run off in the night the way you're doing and not give me a chance to say goodbye it would have broke my heart in two." June rolled her hair up on orange juice cans. Justine had never known that before either. And she said not to thank her for the plant or its growth would be stunted. "Is that right?" said Justine, her attention sidetracked. She held up the pot and thought a minute. "Now why, I wonder?"

   "I don't know why, I only know what my mother used to say to me," June said. "Justine, honey, I won't come any further, but you tell the others goodbye for me too. Tell that pretty little Meg and your sweet old grandfather, tell that handsome husband, hear? And I'm going to write you a letter. If my sister decides to get married again I have to write you first and ask you what the cards say. I wouldn't think of letting her go ahead without it. Can you manage such a thing long distance?"

   "I'll surely try," said Justine. "Well, I won't say thank you for the plant then but I promise to take good care of it. Goodbye then, June."

   "Goodbye, old honey," June said, and she grew sad all at once and came down the steps to lay her cheek softly against Justine's while the others looked on, suddenly still, tilting their heads and smiling.

   Meanwhile Meg had settled in the rear of the battered Ford with an enormous gray tweed cat in her lap. The cat crouched and glared and Meg cried, causing a mist of tears to glaze the squat little house with its yellowed foundations, its tattered shrubs, the porch pillars rotting from the bottom up. In the front seat, her great-grandfather placed his hearing aid in his ear, adjusted a button, and winced. Duncan slammed the tailgate on the last of the mattresses and climbed into the truck cab. He turned on the headlights, coloring the gray and white scene in front of him-Justine being passed from hand to hand down a row of neighbors in their nightclothes. "Ho, Justine," he called softly. Of course she couldn't hear. He had to beep the horn. Then everybody jumped and screeched and a window lit up half a block down, but Justine only gave him a wave and headed for the car, unsurprised, because wasn't he always having to honk for her? She was late for everything, though she started out the earliest and the fastest and the most impatient. She was always leaving places the same way, calling scraps of goodbyes and then running, flying, bearing some shaking plant or parcel or covered dish, out of breath and laughing at herself, clutching her hat to her head as she sped along.

   At nine o'clock in the morning, Red Emma Borden was wiping the counter in the Caro Mill Diner when these four unfamiliar people walked in-a man and wife, a teenaged daughter and a very ancient gentleman. Red Emma was about to have a cigarette (she'd been on her feet since four) and she wasn't eager to wait on anyone else. Still, it was nice to see some new faces. She had been born and raised and married and widowed in this town and she was sick of everybody in it. So she puffed up her orange curls, tugged her uniform down, and reached for the order pad. Meanwhile the strangers were trying to find acceptable seats, which was not all that easy to do. Two of the counter stools were broken, just topless aluminum pedestals, and another would tip you off as soon as you tried to perch upon it. They had to cluster at one end down near the exhaust fan. Even then, the old gentleman had a long tail of cotton batting dangling out from under him. But none of them made any complaint; they just folded their arms and waited for her behind four pairs of blue, blue eyes. "Well, now," said Red Emma, slapping down cracked plastic menu cards. "What you going to have?"

   She addressed the woman first-a skin-and-bones lady wearing a hat. But it was the husband who answered. "Speedy here will have everything in the kitchen," he said.

   "Speedy! I barely inched along," the woman said.

   "I thought you had entered the Indy five hundred. And your seat belt flopping out the door, after I took all that time installing it for you-"

   "I will take coffee and three fried eggs," the woman told Red Emma.

   "Sunny side up. And hotcakes, link sausages, and orange juice. And something salty, a sack of potato chips. Grandfather? Meg?"

   Red Emma feared she would be cooking all morning, but it turned out the others just wanted coffee. They had the dazed, rumpled look of people who had been traveling. Only the woman seemed to care to talk. "My name is Justine," she said, "and this is my husband, Duncan. Our Grandfather Peck and our daughter Meg. Do you have the keys?"

   "How's that?"

   "We were told to stop here and pick up the keys for Mr. Parkinson's house."

   "Oh yes," said Red Emma. She would never have supposed that these were the people for Ned Parkinson's house-a tacky little place next to the electric shop. Particularly not the old gentleman. "Well, he did say somebody might be by," she said. "Have you took a good look at it yet?"