She said, “Nobody’s fault.”
He was standing there with his hands on the back of his chair, looking at her, tired and serious. She could almost see what he had been like as a young man. He said, “There are people you seem to know the first time you see them. And other people you might spend your whole life with and never really know. That first day you walked into the church, that rainy Sunday, I felt as though I recognized you somehow. It was a remarkable experience. It was.”
“But you don’t really know nothing about me,” she said, since he couldn’t bring himself to say it. She was about to hear those words again: I don’t know you.
He said, “Well, in one sense that may be true.”
“I’d say it’s true.” She wasn’t going to be standing there waiting for it.
“Not in a way I thought would matter. And it doesn’t matter now, Lila. Not really.”
“I guess that’s good, because there ain’t much to tell. I don’t know who my folks were, I don’t know my own last name.”
He said, “I understand that. It makes no difference to me. None at all.”
“Well,” she said, “if there’s something else you want to ask me about, you might as well do it.”
He said, “Yes.” And then he said, “It makes me uncomfortable, you can see that. But I feel as though I need to know — how things stand. I can’t help wondering why you went back there. What you were doing there.”
“I was just going to look at the pelicans on the river, and seeing the shack reminded me that I left some money hidden under a plank in the floor. I could see the place was empty. I looked for the money and it was gone. I thought it would feel good to rest a little anyway, so I sat there on the stoop in the sunshine and I guess I fell asleep. Then I woke up and that boy was standing there looking at me.”
“You didn’t know him at all.”
“Never seen him in my life before. That’s the truth.”
“Yes, of course. Of course.” Then he said, “I hate to seem to be questioning you, Lila. But when I heard you had gone out there, I thought it might mean you weren’t happy. You know, here, with me. I knew from the beginning that things might be difficult, and I thought I could accept whatever happened. But it never crossed my mind there might be a child. I thought I had learned not to set my heart on anything. But I find myself thinking about that child — much of the time. So the idea that you might want to leave — it would be extremely difficult for me to live with that.”
She said, “I ain’t leaving. Farthest thing from my mind.” If this was not entirely true, it was true enough. “I just go off to look at pelicans and everything goes haywire. I don’t know. I thought I might as well get some use out of that money. Took me all summer to save it up.”
“I only asked because, if there was anything I could do to make you want to stay—”
She said, “My child is going to have a big old preacher for its papa, and live in a good, warm house, and eat ham and eggs three times a week. And it’s going to know all them hymns by heart. You’ll see.”
“Well,” he said, “that will be wonderful. Wonderful.” Then he sat down to his breakfast. He said his grace to himself, behind his trembling hands, and she thought it would be good if she could tell him she had meant to buy him a present with her money, but that would sound like a lie, and then he wouldn’t trust her the way he wanted to.
She said, “That boy out at the shack, he was just an ugly, dirty, lonely little cuss, half scared to death. And I was thinking he could’ve been any child that had nobody to take him up and see to him.”
He looked at her. Then he said softly, “I did know you. I do know you,” and his eyes filled with tears.
“That’s good, I guess.” She shrugged and turned away. “Maybe I ain’t so hard to know as some people. No reason why I should be. More coffee?” She couldn’t talk to him the way he was talking to her. That boy out at the cabin, he knew her. Married? To a preacher? Sounds like you making that up. That his child you got there? Meaning no harm, knowing no better. It seemed almost as if she had lied to the preacher when she said she didn’t know that boy. He had been at the edge of her sight all those years, orphaned, his whole life just that terrible little ember of pride, meanness and kindness all that he had to shelter it with, and the injured fearfulness that comes when anybody at all might do you the worst kind of harm, just by the way they look at you. This old man is beautiful and kind and very patient, she thought, and if he looked at me that way I might just die of it. Well, but for now he is mine to touch if I want to. So when she brought his coffee she put her arms around his neck and she kissed his hair. Might
