Remembering always felt almost guilty, a lingering where there was no cause to linger, as if whatever you loved had a claim on you and you couldn’t help feeling it no matter what. There was nothing to do but leave, and still. That Mack. There was a time when she would have been so glad if he’d asked her for anything at all. If he had said one word to her, there in the street that day. The old man always pretended he was worried that some fellow would show up at the door. When she told him there was nobody coming for her, Mack was that nobody. She could just see the smile on his face, him standing at the Reverend’s door, his eyes all sly with the evil he was doing. He’d have his hands on his hips, looking around at the neighborhood as if he couldn’t quite believe people really lived that way. Cigarette hanging out of his mouth, laughing to himself. No decent man would look at every single thing in the world as if it had a price tag on it and he knew it wasn’t worth half that much because he could see what the paint hid, where the rot was. He’d flip his cigarette into the bushes and say, So it’s Mrs. Ames now, and laugh. He’d say, Good to see you, Rosie, hardly looking at her, and light up another cigarette and glance away from her like anything else would be more interesting, because nothing had changed at all. She’d probably shut the door on him, and then if he left she’d be thinking about him more than she usually did.
Or he might sit down on the step to finish his smoke, and if the old man happened to come walking up from the church, he’d tell him he was looking for a little work. If he happened to get a lift out of town, people always appreciate a dollar or two to help pay for the gas. The Reverend would nod, he could do something or other around the place, and he would say, Thanks, smiling, and then as soon as the old man had come inside to look for his wallet he would drift away because it was a lie that he wanted work or money. He would have said a few words to the old man just to make her worry about what he might say. He’d have been sitting there smoking, his back to her, making sure she remembered that the two of them were not strangers and never would be, either. That’s just how it is. If she ever saw that child of Missy’s, it would be the child she’d hoped to steal. No matter that it had never seen her face. If she heard it was in trouble, she would say, Come here to me, then. I used to dream I’d have you to comfort. That’s how I kept myself alive for a while one time.
You. What a strange word that is. She thought, I have never laid eyes on you. I am waiting for you. The old man prays for you. He almost can’t believe he has you to pray for. Both of us think about you the whole day long. If I die bearing you, or if you die when you are born, I will still be thinking, Who are you? and there will be only one answer out of all the people in the world, all the people there have ever been or will ever be. If we find each other in heaven, we’ll say, So there you are! We’d be perfect in heaven, no regrets, no grudges, nothing to make you turn a cold eye on me the way you might do someday when you’re old enough to really see me. When I tell you that that knife is the only thing I have to leave you. Then I’d be all hard and proud, like it didn’t even matter what you thought. What else can a person do? And it would be the only thing that mattered, because no one else could say “you” and mean the same thing by it. But there would be years when the child would just want to sit on her lap. He’d favor her over anybody. He’d be crying and she’d pick him up, and then it would take him a minute to be done crying, but that would be all that was left of it, because she had her arms around him. Comfort. That’s strange, too. When she used to lie there almost asleep, with her cheek on the old man’s sweater, the night all around her chirping and whispering, the comfort of it was a thing she’d have promised herself the whole day long.
Thinking that way made her want to turn onto her back, to feel how good it was to be lying there, her body resting at a kind of simmer, the baby nudging a little, just so she’d know it was there. She could feel her body resting, the way you can tell that a cat asleep in the sun knows it’s sleeping. The pleasure of it is
