They threw back covers, slipped into robes, and hurried to the bedroom the old man had wanted when he came to live with them, the corner bedroom, the one with lots of windows, cross ventilation.
The old man’s bed was empty. He had made his way into the adjoining bathroom. He seemed to be through with being sick, and stood shivering.
Charlie and Laura rushed to him.
“Father,” Laura said, “you should have called us.”
“I did. You wouldn’t answer,” the old man said accusingly.
“We came the second we woke,” Charlie said.
The old man fumbled for the drinking glass in the porcelain rack beside the medicine cabinet. Charlie grabbed the glass, rinsed it, filled it with water.
The old man washed his mouth out, gargled noisily, his mouth a sunken, wrinkled hole in his face. His skin held a grayish cast. A bundle of dried sticks inside the old-fashioned nightgown, the old man was a terrifyingly cadaverous comment on the mortality of human flesh.
“I’ll get the doctor,” Laura said.
“I don’t want the doctor,” the old man said, pulling away from them belligerently and shuffling toward his own bed, across the room.
“It must have been those pickles at dinner,” Charlie said.
“I’ve eaten pickles before! I know what made me sick!”
Charlie and Laura looked at each other, then at the old man wavering toward the bed.
“What, sir?” Charlie asked.
“I know,” the old man said ominously. “I got a good stomach. I don’t get sick easy. I know what caused it. ”
The old man crawled into bed and pulled the covers over his head. Laura touched Charlie’s arm. They slipped out of the room. In the hallway, she whispered, “You can’t do much with him when he sets his mind this way.”
“How about the doctor?”
“I’m sure he’s all right, Charlie. It was those pickles. You go on back to bed. You’ve got to work tomorrow—today. I’ll listen for him.”
Charlie didn’t think he would get back to sleep. He lay and smoked, thinking of Laura in the chair she’d drawn close to her father’s door.
He’d thought he had a full awareness of the circumstances when he married Laura. An only child, she’d cared for her father a long time, since the death of her mother. She’d explained that she wanted to keep her father with her, and Charlie had said okay. It wasn’t, after all, as if they were a pair of teenagers running away to get married. Both were in their thirties.
Charlie’s first wife had accidentally killed herself nearly ten years ago, rushing home from a bridge game late one icy afternoon. Laura had never married, never had much chance to know men, for that matter.
She and Charlie had met prosaically enough in a supermarket. They were, he guessed, prosaic people. Laura was no raving beauty, though she was well built and had a pleasant face framed in brown hair. Charlie was a tall, pleasant-looking man, a little on the thin side, who looked as if he worked long hours at a desk in a large office, which was exactly the case.
The old man’s strenuous objections had marred what should have been one of life’s more perfect moments. Charlie had regretted this more for Laura’s sake than his own. He’d figured he understood the old man and was old enough himself to overlook the shortcomings of a close, demanding in-law.
But now, after only a few weeks of marriage, Charlie wasn’t so sure. There was a point where churlishness became too barbed for comfort, where a martyred air of being persecuted permeated the whole house.
Charlie napped finally, awoke too quickly, and dragged through the day. Driving home, he hoped Laura’d had a chance to catch a nap this afternoon. She’d looked plenty bushed when he left the house this morning.
Old man Emmons was in the living room, cackling toothlessly at a TV run of an old W. C. Fields comedy. Charlie spoke cordially, and the old man speared him with a look from his cavernous eyes. “You back?”
Charlie let it pass. “Where is Laura?”
“Gone to the store,” the old man said. “Can’t you keep still while the movie’s on?”
With a sigh and shake of his head, Charlie passed through the house, crossed the rear yard and entered the garage. He was outfitting a wood-working shop, using one side of the garage. The place was chilly. He turned on the butane heater and began to tinker with a drill press, setting it in position and bolting it down.
He was spending more and more time out here, he realized. The thought caused him to drop his wrench, sit on a saw horse, and light a cigarette. He wondered if he were already in the process of becoming one of those hobbyist husbands, shunted out of his own house by an in-law.
He threw the cigarette on the floor and ground it under his heel. Damn it, that old man was going to have to change his ways, and that’s all there was to it.
Charlie went back into the house. The living room was empty. Laura was home—there was a bag of groceries on the table just inside the front door.
Then Charlie heard their voices, hers and her father’s, in argument, from the old man’s bedroom.
“He hid my pills, I tell you!” the old man said.
“No, father,” Laura said patiently, “they were right there in the cabinet where you put them—behind the soda box.”
“You’re working hand in glove with him!”
“Father…”
“I can see it now! He’s turning you against me.”
“No, father. We both love you and want you to be happy. We want to take care of you. ”
The old man snorted in disbelief as Laura came into the living room, picked up the groceries, and started toward the kitchen.
“I’ll hurry dinner up, Charlie. I was late getting to the store.”
Laura’s worn look caused Charlie to put off what he’d intended to say.
“I’ll give you a hand,” he said.
The right emotional distillation didn’t again take place inside of Charlie, and he didn’t speak his mind during the following week.
Then on Tuesday Laura called him
