“Why didn’t you stay?”
He shrugged and smiled. “They were being polite.”
“Of course they were being polite. That doesn’t mean they weren’t really inviting you.”
After a moment he said, “I have learned, in the tedious course of my life, that it is safer not to presume on these courtesies. I have taken the bait often enough to know how it feels when the trap shuts. Better to forgo the pleasures of, you know, pot roast and mashed potatoes.”
She said, “You want to get yourself on better terms with Ames. How can you do that if you don’t let him — well — treat you like a friend? Ask you to supper? It’s the most ordinary thing in the world.”
He nodded. “There it is. My lifelong exile from the ordinary world. I have to learn the customs. And somehow persuade myself that they pertain to me.” He looked at her. “That’s where it gets tricky.”
“No, you just have to relax a little and remind yourself that you are dealing with a very kind old man.”
He said, “It really is more complex than that, Glory. The other day I gave his kid my glove to use, so he ran upstairs and took that old glove Ames keeps on his desk and brought it down to me. I guess it once belonged to the long-departed Uncle Edward. It seemed harmless enough to me to put it on. I mean, it wasn’t as if I were going to be catching anything with it. But, you know, I stole it once. Temporarily. I don’t know why. And Ames knew I had stolen it, because who else would bother. And I was the town thief. So today when he came up the road from church there I was with that thing on my hand and nothing to do but stand there. He looked at it and looked at me and he didn’t say anything about it and neither did I, but I could tell that he was reminded of all that, my troubled youth, and it was embarrassing. For him, too.”
“I think you forget how long ago all that happened.”
“Yes, and here I am today, John Ames Boughton, solid citizen. A miraculous transformation.” He laughed. He was thoughtful for a while, and then he said, “If I had it all to do over again, I mean adolescent criminality, I’d try to restrict myself to doing things that were explicable. Or at least appeared to be explicable. I’m serious. It’s the things people can’t account for that upset them. The old gent used to ask me, ‘Why did you do that, Jack?’ And I couldn’t even tell him I did it because I felt like it. Even that wouldn’t have been true. What did I want with an old baseball mitt? Nothing. But there wasn’t really much to steal in this town. It would have been hard to find anything to want, anything that might make it seem as though I had a motive. So all my offenses were laid to a defect of character. I have no quarrel with that. But it is a problem for me now.”
Glory said, “If the Ameses ask you to supper again, say yes. And stay. Promise me.”
He laughed. “Will do. On my honor.” He said, “You have a feeling for these things.”
AND THE VERY NEXT DAY, HAVING TOILED EARNESTLY IN the vegetable patch and the flower beds from dawn till noon, and having tightened the joints of the three Adirondack chairs that had always slouched together under the kitchen window as if to be indolently serviceable in the event that something in the yard between them and the barn should attract spectators, and having restrung the clothesline, he came into the house, ironed a shirt, and polished his shoes. “I’m feeling useful,” he said. “Productive. That’s good for morale. So is the tan.” He pushed up his sleeve to show her. “There’s a definite line there.”
“So there is.” She had learned to worry about these hectic outbursts of purposefulness, and to know there was no point in trying to damp them down.
He said, “I believe this is Thursday. So tomorrow is Friday, and Ames will probably be working on his sermon. He won’t welcome interruption.” He said, “I will probably go to church on Sunday. I can do that. My suit no longer smells combustible. Just slightly automotive. I wouldn’t want to alarm anyone.” He laughed.
So all this was in preparation for supper at the Ameses’, for which he had not been invited. But he left the house in the early evening, pausing in the door to look at her and shrug, as if to say, Wish me luck. When he was not home for supper, she told her father that she thought he might have been invited by Ames and Lila.
“Yes,” her father said. “I hope John will take some interest in him. That is a thing I wished for many years. When you give a man a namesake, you do expect a certain amount of help. Ames was a help to me, of course. Not to Jack so much. I don’t mean to criticize. I guess I wasn’t much help to him either, as far as that goes.”
The old man wanted to wait for him in the porch, so they sat there together in the mild night. “You can’t see the lightning bugs through these screens,” he said. “You can’t see the stars. But at least you
