“Well, I’m glad if you don’t.”
He nodded. “Happy to oblige.”
“That’s one thing I don’t ever want around here.”
“It might be hard to find one in Iowa. So that’s good.” He said, “Because this is your house, Lila, no credenza will ever come under its roof!”
“Now you’re laughing at me.”
“I’ve made a solemn promise! I gave you my word. I’ve never been more serious.” He was at the cupboard, rummaging. “Sometimes I just laugh because I’m surprised. But I’d better have a little lunch. I get cranky on an empty stomach. Can’t risk disheartening some poor sinner. You never know when one might wander in. Just a peanut butter and jelly sandwich will make me worthier of my calling. Till supper anyway.”
“I was going to do that, then we got talking.”
“I’m glad we got talking. I’m always glad when we talk. I have so much to learn. Here I could have wandered in someday with a credenza, meaning no harm—” Then he looked at her. “I’m sorry!”
“It don’t matter.” She had put her hands to her face. “I was just thinking.”
He stood looking at her. “Well, why don’t you come down to the church with me. It’s quiet today. Some people are coming from Des Moines to talk with me about a funeral. I didn’t really know the fellow, he just happened to die here, and I have to have something to say about him. But you could wait for me in the sanctuary. Do your thinking there.”
She shook her head. “It ain’t that kind of thinking.” She said, “It’s on my mind now, so I might as well get it done with. It’s so different here it makes me remember other places I been. I guess I have to do that. Sort things out a little. Seems like I don’t even know myself, everything’s so different.”
“Yes. Well, as soon as I can get away I’ll be home. Unless you want the afternoon to yourself.”
“I’ll come to find you like I always do.”
“All right.” He kissed her forehead. “Five o’clock, then.”
It came over her, before he had even closed the door behind him, the thought of that house in St. Louis. It was just pure misery. Misery must have been what she was looking for, because she felt it the minute she walked in that door. The twilight of the parlor made her feel as if she had stepped into deep water with her eyes open. Breathing came hard and sound reached her a heartbeat after she should have heard it. She could hardly speak. Nothing was the way it was in daylight, but the place had its own ways and you got used to them. Like death, if something comes after it. That first day there were girls fighting over a hairbrush. Mrs. got up from her chair and went and took the brush away from them and put it in the credenza. When they saw her coming they shrank away from her, watching her. “Now,” she said when she came back to Lila, “you get a safe place to live, so long as you act right. Any trouble and you’re gone. I don’t like drinking or yelling. I don’t want you out on the street. This is a respectable house. Quiet. Our gentlemen like it that way.” She called them gentlemen. And the girls were supposed to be ladies.
But they were always fighting over something, a pair of shoes or a scrap of ribbon. And Mrs. would be slapping or pulling hair. The gentlemen brought in liquor, so they didn’t have to steal it out of the cabinet unless they just wanted to. Mrs. went off sometimes to visit her sister and left the woman they called Peg in charge, and she’d let them drink if they let her boss them around a little. Then they’d fight over nothing at all, and cry for their mothers, and say they were going to leave that place and that life and never look back, and the gentlemen would say, “Sure you will, sugar. Just not tonight.” But they never opened the shades or stepped out the door, and they never touched the credenza. Then they were glad when Mrs. came back. She’d yell at them for their cheap carousing and say she was going to toss them all out, and she’d add what she said was the cost of the liquor to the amount of money she said they all owed her already, and they’d just be glad she was back anyway, and they’d be so quiet and so careful to mind her that she had to calm down sometime. They’d be begging her to let them brush out her hair. A few of them had lived there since they were almost children, one or two of them probably feeble-minded. And two or three of them were just like Lila, no better and no worse. All crowded into two rooms, sleeping on cots so that the other rooms stayed nice for entertaining.
If one of them got sick they’d all get sick, or say they were, and Mrs. would close every blind and turn off every light, so the gentlemen would know they couldn’t have company, she said, but really to make everything miserable enough to get back at them if they ever dared pretend. When a house is shut up like that in the middle of a summer day the light that comes in through any crack is as sharp as a blade. And there would be a pot of potato soup simmering from morning to night, and the steam from it would bring out the tobacco smells and the sour old liquor smells in the rugs and the couches
