LITMIR.BIZ

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coming. Don’t get upset. I’m coming.’

      Jo-Beth started upstairs. How many times a day did she cover this route? Her life was being counted out in stairs climbed and descended, climbed and descended.

      ‘What is it, Momma?’

      Joyce McGuire lay in her usual position: on the sofa beside the open window, a pillow beneath her head. She didn’t look sick; but most of the time she was. The specialists came, and looked, and charged their fees, and left again shrugging. Nothing wrong physically, they said. Sound heart, sound lungs, sound spine. It’s between her ears she’s not so well. But that was news Momma didn’t want to hear. Momma had once known a girl who’d gone mad, and been hospitalized, and never come out again. That made her more afraid of madness than of anything. She wouldn’t have the word spoken in the house.

      ‘Will you have the Pastor call me?’ Joyce said. ‘Maybe he’ll come over tonight.’

      ‘He’s a very busy man, Momma.’

      ‘Not too busy for me,’ Joyce said. She was in her thirty-ninth year but she behaved like a woman twice that age. The slow way she raised her head from the pillow as if every inch was a triumph over gravity; the fluttering hands and eyelids; that perpetual sigh in her voice. She had cast herself as a movie consumptive, and would not be dissuaded from the role by mere medical opinion. She dressed for the role, in sickroom pastels; she let her hair, which was a rich brunette, grow long, not caring to fashion it or pin it up. She wore no trace of make-up, which further enhanced the impression of a woman tottering on the tip of the abyss. All in all, Jo-Beth was glad Momma no longer went out in public. People would talk. But that left her here, in the house, calling her daughter up and down the stairs. Up and down, up and down.

      When, as now, Jo-Beth’s irritation reached screaming pitch she reminded herself that her mother had her reasons for this withdrawal. Life hadn’t been easy for an unmarried woman bringing up her children in a town as judgemental as the Grove. She’d earned her malady in censure and humiliation.

      ‘I’ll get Pastor John to call,’ Jo-Beth said. ‘Now listen, Momma, I’ve got to go.’

      ‘I know, honey, I know.’

      Jo-Beth returned to the door, but Joyce called after her.

      ‘No kiss?’ she said.

      ‘Momma –’

      ‘You never miss kissing me.’

      Dutifully Jo-Beth went back to the window, and kissed her mother on the cheek.

      ‘You take care,’ Joyce said.

      ‘I’m fine.’

      ‘I don’t like you working late.’

      ‘This is not New York, Momma.’

      Joyce’s eyes flickered towards the window, from which she watched the world go by.

      ‘Makes no difference,’ she said, the lightness going from her voice. ‘There’s no place safe.’

      It was a familiar speech. Jo-Beth had been hearing it, in one version or another, since childhood. Talk of the world as a Valley of Death, haunted by faces capable of unspeakable malice. That was the chief comfort Pastor John gave Momma. They agreed on the presence of the Devil in the world; in Palomo Grove.

      ‘I’ll see you in the morning,’ Jo-Beth said.

      ‘I love you, honey.’

      ‘I love you too. Momma.’

      Jo-Beth closed the door and started downstairs.

      ‘Is she asleep?’

      Tommy-Ray was at the foot of the flight.

      ‘No. She’s not.’

      ‘Damn.’

      ‘You should go in and see her.’

      ‘I know I should. Only she’s going to give me a hard time about Wednesday.’

      ‘You were drunk,’ she said. ‘Hard liquor, she kept saying. True?’

      ‘What do you think? If we’d been brought up like normal kids, with liquor around the house, it wouldn’t go to my head.’

      ‘So it’s her fault you got drunk?’

      ‘You’ve got a downer on me, too, haven’t you? Shit. Everybody’s got a downer on me.’

      Jo-Beth smiled, and put her arms around her brother. ‘No, Tommy, they haven’t. They all think you’re wonderful and you know it.’

      ‘You too?’

      ‘Me too.’

      She kissed him, lightly, then went to the mirror to check her appearance.

      ‘Pretty as a picture,’ he said, coming to stand beside her. ‘Both of us.’

      ‘Your ego,’ she said. ‘It’s getting worse.’

      ‘That’s why you love me,’ he said, gazing at their twin reflections. ‘Am I growing more like you or you like me?’

      ‘Neither.’

      ‘Ever seen two faces more alike?’

      She smiled. There was an extraordinary resemblance between them. A delicacy in Tommy-Ray’s bones matched by clarity in hers which had both of them idolized. She liked nothing better than to walk out hand in hand with her brother, knowing she had beside her a companion as attractive as any girl could wish, and knowing he felt the same. Even amongst the forced beauties of the Venice boardwalk they turned heads.

      But in the last few months they hadn’t gone out together. She’d been working long hours at the Steak House, and he’d been out with his pals amongst the beach crowd: Sean, Andy and the rest. She missed the contact.

      ‘Have you been feeling weird these last couple of days?’ he asked, out of nowhere.

      ‘What kind of funny?’

      ‘I don’t know. Probably just me. Only I feel like everything’s coming to an end.’

      ‘It’s almost summer. Everything’s just beginning.’

      ‘Yeah, I know … but Andy’s gone off to college, so fuck him. Sean’s got this girl in LA, and he’s real private with her. I don’t know. I’m left here waiting, and I don’t know what for.’

      ‘So don’t.’

      ‘Don’t what?’

      ‘Wait. Take off somewhere.’

      ‘I want to. But …’ He studied her face in the mirror. ‘Is it true? You don’t feel … strange?’

      She returned his look, not certain she wanted to admit to the dreams she’d been having, in which she was being carried by the tide, and all her life was waving to her from the shore. But if not to Tommy, whom she loved and trusted more than any creature alive, to whom?

      ‘OK. I admit it,’ she said, ‘I do feel something.’

      ‘What?’

      She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I’m waiting too.’

      ‘Do you know what for?’

      ‘Nope.’

      ‘Neither do I.’

      ‘Don’t we make a pair?’

      She reran the conversation with Tommy as she drove down to the Mall. He had, as usual, articulated their shared feelings. The last few weeks had been charged with anticipation. Something was going to happen soon. Her dreams knew it. Her bones knew it. She only hoped it was not delayed, because she was coming to the point, with

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