“I would wonder,” he said quietly, “only if you didn’t feel that way.”
They stirred, shaking off the grip of strong emotions, ready to turn to light things, normal subjects.
“Pick out a movie you want to see Friday,” Randall said.
“Early showing or late?”
“Late. We’ll have dinner first, if that suits you.”
He opened her car door with an exaggerated flourish.
“I declare, sir, how kind of you,” Catherine said with an extravagant drawl and a simper.
Randall choked a surprised laugh.
“I am your servant, you sweet flower of Southern womanhood,” he responded instantly.
She gripped his hand for a second and then started the engine. She watched him walk back into the office before she pulled out to go home.
It was a lackluster evening. Catherine found herself wandering around the house in search of something to do.
I’m completely shaken out of pattern, she reflected. And a good thing, too. Not much of a pattern to stick to.
There was dust on the furniture, and the bathroom needed a thorough scrubbing. This lack of order made Catherine irritable, but she was too restless to begin clearing it up.
When she started putting the clean dishes back into the kitchen cabinets, she came to a stop as her hand fell on an unfamiliar shape. Mrs. Perkins’s casserole dish. Returning it was something concrete and necessary. She marched out her front door in a glow of virtue.
I’ll thank her so nicely and be such a lady she won’t be able to say a word about me, Catherine resolved.
The long summer day was fading as she left her house. She stopped on her doorstep to drink in the evening. The sky in the west was stained a dark strawberry-juice pink. The locusts were in full voice, their drone rising and falling in hypnotic rhythm. The humid warmth made her skirt limp against her legs, but the air was no longer stifling. As she moved on with a slower step, the grass rustled around her feet.
The streetlights were on. Catherine emerged from her yard onto the silent street, passing under the lamp at the corner. As she crossed the pavement, she barely bothered to glance right and left. It was a time for quiet in Lowfield.
She was embraced by the dusk, cast back for a few minutes into the time before Saturday, when she had felt shielded by the safety of her own town, street, and house, her unassailable heritage of land and good family.
Catherine sighed as she walked up the gleaming white concrete to the Perkins’s pillared verandah. As she lifted the polished brass knocker, she returned to the present.
It was a signal of her intention to be formal that she went to the front door, instead of to the back as a good neighbor would.
Carl Perkins answered the door. Catherine had been expecting Miss Molly, for some reason, and for a moment she was startled as his thickened frame filled the doorway. She wondered how he could endure the long sleeves he always wore. As a gust of air from the house rushed out to meet her, she decided she understood his preference, at least in his own home. The air was not only cooled, it was refrigerated.
“Catherine Linton! Come on in,” he said, with no trace of surprise, only welcome.
He ushered her through the two-story entrance hall and into the living room. Miss Molly, dwarfed in the corner of an enormous beige couch, rose as Catherine entered. The little woman had some knitting in her hand, and she carefully set it down before she advanced to greet Catherine.
“I enjoyed the gumbo so much,” Catherine said, smiling her most correct smile and extending the casserole dish to Miss Molly, who looked mildly flustered.
“So glad you enjoyed it, just some leftovers really,” Molly Perkins deprecated properly. She took the proferred dish and went full tilt toward the back of the house, where, Catherine remembered, the enormous kitchen lay.
“Bring our neighbor some coffee,” Mr. Perkins called after the dumpy retreating figure.
Catherine raised a hand in protest, but it was too late.
“Come on, have a seat. Been a while since we got to visit with you,” Mr. Perkins urged.
She thought he was lonely. She managed another smile and sat reluctantly in a deep armchair facing the couch. As she sank farther and farther into it, she wondered how she was going to get up with any grace, with her short legs thrust out at such an angle.
Miss Molly came back in, burdened with a tray. Mr. Perkins was on his feet in an instant.
“You shouldn’t carry things like that,” he chided. “Why didn’t you call me?”
“I can carry this perfectly well, I’m not made of glass,” she scolded him.
Mr. Perkins peered over Miss Molly’s curly gray hair to give Catherine a wry shake of the head.
“How do you take yours, Catherine?” Miss Molly asked as she settled back on the couch.
“Black, please,” Catherine answered. “I hope this wasn’t any trouble for you.”
“No, no,” disclaimed Carl Perkins. “We always have a pot on at night until we go to bed.
“I saw you through the window at the
“Mondays are mighty busy at the paper,” Catherine responded. She disliked being reminded of how “on view” she was, with her desk right by the big window. It had bothered her when she first began working at the
Miss Molly handed Catherine her cup. A lot of wriggling was required before Catherine could work herself forward in her chair to reach it. Miss Molly’s hand had a definite tremor, which didn’t make the little transaction any easier.
Oh dear oh damn, Catherine thought. She wished she had just handed over the dish and gone right back out the door. Her intention of impressing Miss Molly with her sterling character and imperviousness to gossip seemed childish now.
Carl Perkins had just started to comment on the effect the rainless summer was having on the cotton when Molly Perkins’s shaky hands caused an incident. His attention on Catherine, Mr. Perkins held out a hand for his coffee cup. When Molly extended the cup to him, some of the steaming liquid spilled on his hand. For a long moment, as Catherine held her breath in sympathy for his pain, he kept his eyes on her face as if he felt nothing. Then Mrs. Perkins’s eyes teared as if she were going to cry over her mistake.
“Oh, Carl!” she said in a trembling, guilty voice. He looked at her, then down at the coffee that had run off his hand and stained the beautiful beige material of the couch.
Mrs. Perkins somehow kept hold of the cup, rescuing it before it spilled completely. Then there was the fuss of Mr. Perkins’s retreat to the bathroom to put cold water and ointment on his burned hand, Mrs. Perkins’s agonized exclamations, and Catherine’s attempt to leave, which was firmly crushed by Mr. Perkins as he marched off to the bathroom.
As all this was being settled, Catherine passed from being uncomfortable to being miserable. She obviously disturbed Miss Molly for some reason; and she had no business sitting around frightening an old lady into burning her husband and staining expensive upholstery. But to extricate herself from this little visit without being out-and- out rude would have required more dexterity than Catherine could muster at the moment.
The scene jelled again as Mr. Perkins entered and sat down as though nothing had happened, quieting his wife’s attempt at yet another apology with a soothing, “Now don’t fuss any more, honey.” Mr. Perkins was stoically controlling the pain he must have felt from the burn.
How kind he is to act as if it doesn’t even hurt, Catherine thought. They must have a good marriage. They’ve come a long way together.
After Carl Perkins had come to Lowfield from Louisiana, he had climbed in the town and bought a business; then climbed more and bought more, with Miss Molly joining clubs right and left, working in the church, entertaining. The Perkins’s only child was their son Josh. There were mementos of Josh everywhere: football trophies, baseball trophies, 4-H medals, and framed certificates. Catherine hadn’t seen Josh in years. She recalled him as arrogant and insensitive, but intelligent in a graceless way. He had been one of Lowfield High School’s golden boys.
Now he was married, about to become a father; and far, far away from Lowfield, Mississippi. Los Angeles, hadn’t Miss Molly said?
Catherine was craftily preparing a lead-in to the subject of Josh, aware that little would be required of her if she could get Mr. Perkins launched, when Mr. Perkins himself jumped the conversational gun.
