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“Don’t talk.”

He looked away. There was grief in his expression, a kind of bewilderment. Could he be surprised? Or was it only the shock of finding himself back in the world, with all his defenses ruined and his one friend lost to him?

She said, “Do that thing with your lip.” So he pulled his lip taut over his teeth and she shaved it. “Now your chin.” And he did the same. She lifted his chin and shaved his throat. Then she wiped away the foam with the sponge and inspected him.

“Good enough,” she said. It was a relief to see him looking more like himself. She smoothed his hair away from his brow. The gentleness of the gesture seemed to come as a relief to him. So she kissed his cheek.

He said, “I’d never have done that if I’d been sober. I don’t even remember—anything about it.” He looked at his hands, as if to confirm to himself that it had happened.

“It’s over now.”

He smiled at her as if to say, No, it isn’t, and it won’t be. “I’m sorry you saw me like that,” he said.

“I’m glad it wasn’t worse.”

He nodded. “Now you know me—some other aspects of my character.”

She said, “Let’s not talk.”

“All right.”

“I still haven’t brought clothes for you. You’ve made me nervous about going into your room. Do I have your permission?”

He laughed. “Yes, you have my permission.”

S
O HE WENT INTO THE BARN AND DRESSED HIMSELF AND
came out in his father’s dark pants and beautiful old shirt, the sleeves rolled for lack of cuff links. It bothered her that she had forgotten to bring him socks. They walked together up the path to the porch, he behind her, the two of them no doubt looking very unlike two ordinary people who had not passed through fearful and wearying hours together. If anyone saw them, which God forbid.
She could hear Jack’s breathing and his footsteps in the grass, neither of which she could take for granted anymore, if she ever had.

They heard voices from the road. He stopped. It was as if he turned to face some last, unimaginable trial. But she said, “It’s nothing to do with us,” and he nodded and followed her again, up the step, into the porch.

“Is that Jack with you?” their father called, and she said, “Yes, Papa,” and Jack smiled at her and shook his head. He was sober enough to know that speech was not a thing he could risk. They went up the stairs, and she drew his blinds and brought a glass of water to set on the night table. She found a ball of socks in the dresser and put it beside the water. He rolled onto his stomach and hugged the pillows to his face. He was relieved to lie down on his own bed, as if he had been too long away from home and had come back again to a kind of rest that meant, That’s all over now, or Now at least I know it will be over sometime.

She washed her face, brushed her hair, and changed her dress and went downstairs to tend to her father. She said, “He’s getting some rest.”

The old man was rigidly wakeful. She knew he had been sitting there, interpreting noises, interpreting her haste and her strained assurances, then Jack’s slow steps on the stairs behind her. He would have interpreted her reddened eyes, too, if he had looked at her. “He’s all right,” he said.

“Yes, he’s all right.”

He closed his eyes. He was as still as if he had expended all the life that remained to him composing himself to accept this cross. His jaw slackened a little, and she thought for a terrible moment that he might have died, but then his hands adjusted themselves on the quilt and she knew it was only sleep.

T
IRED AS SHE WAS, SHE COULD NOT POSSIBLY SLEEP
. S
HE
felt lonely, lonely. She found a wire coat hanger in the front closet and straightened it, and went out to the barn. She pulled Jack’s
shirt out of the exhaust pipe. He had managed to jam in the tails of it only. The body and the sleeves were lying on the ground, a greasy clay of perpetual dank and animal waste and vehicle seepage, old life and old use whose traces outlasted the memory of them. She caught one sock and then the other with the hanger. So, the proof of what he had intended was removed, and that was a comfort to her, as if she could now stop believing it entirely herself. She put the socks in the fireplace on a pyre of kindling. They made a smoldering fire. Then she filled the sink with water and scrubbed at the shirt, careful of the embroidery. It might be best to let it soak for a while. She went up the stairs as quietly as she could, and into Jack’s room. She found two pints of whiskey in the bottom drawer, as he had said. He stirred and raised his head and looked at her, irritated, but it was troubled sleep, not awakening. She took the bottles out to the orchard and emptied them on the ground, and put the empty bottles in the shed. Then she went back to the silent house. That shirt. It had to be put out of sight. She squeezed the water out of it and put it on a hanger, carried it out to the shed, and hung it from a nail in the wall behind the door.

How to announce the return of comfort and well-being except by cooking something fragrant. That is what her mother always did. After every calamity of any significance she would fill the atmosphere of the house with the smell of cinnamon rolls or brownies, or with chicken and dumplings, and it would mean, This house has a soul that loves us all, no matter what. It would mean peace if they had fought and amnesty if they had been in trouble. It had meant, You can come down to dinner now, and no one will say a thing to bother you, unless you have forgotten to wash your hands. And her father would offer the grace, inevitable with minor variations, thanking the Lord for all the wonderful faces he saw around his table.

She wished it mattered more that the three of them loved one another. Or mattered less, since guilt and disappointment seemed
to batten on love. Her father and brother were both laid low by grief, as if it were a sickness, and she had nothing better to offer them than chicken and dumplings. But the thought that she could speak to them in their weary sleep with the memory of comfort lifted her spirits a little. There was a nice young hen in the refrigerator, and there were carrots. There were bay leaves in the cupboard. Baking powder. Lila would send Robby over with whatever she lacked, knowing better than to ask why Glory or Jack didn’t go to the store themselves. Good Lila. She might know some simple, commonplace treatment for hangover, some cool hand on the brow that would wake Jack from his sweaty sleep, as if penance were swept aside by absolution. If there were such a thing, Jack would know and would have asked for it, unless misery was the way he spoke to himself, unless he had meant to recruit his whole body to the work of misery. There would be a rightness in his grieving in every nerve. However slight her experience, she did know that. And she knew he would sleep for hours, and awake vague and somber.

So she bathed the hen and set it in water with the carrots and an onion and the bay leaves. Some salt, of course. And she turned on the heat. Poor little animal. This life on earth is a strange business.

S
HE HAD SAT BY THE SPUTTERING RADIO, TRYING TO IN
terest herself in
The High and the Mighty
. She went into the kitchen to turn the little hen onto her belly, and she saw that a blue Chevrolet had pulled into the driveway. Teddy. Of course, Teddy would come just now. Glory felt anxiety, and relief, and resentment. If he had come even a week earlier, he’d have found everything much better, another atmosphere in the house. Instead, he was walking in on failure and shame. She should have called him weeks ago, asked him to come while her father was still a little sprightly and Jack was still all right, even, she had
thought, healthy. At least not unhealthy, not miserable. She had felt, she knew now, that she was sustaining a familial peace—fragile, certainly, and only more remarkable for that. Jack, who had never trusted any of them, trusted her. Not always, not wholly, not without reservations of a kind he did not divulge and she could not interpret. Still, even Teddy would have envied the talking and joking and the moments of near-candor, the times they were almost at ease with each other. She had been so proud of all that, pleased to believe it was providential that she should be there, having herself just tasted the dregs of experience, having been introduced to something bleaker than ordinary failure—it was a sweet providence that sent her home to that scene of utter and endless probity, where earnest striving so predictably yielded success, and Boughton success at that, the kind amenable to being half-concealed by the rigors of yet more earnest striving. Not that she could entirely forget the bitterness of her chagrin, not that she preferred the course her life had taken to the one she had imagined for it. But she did feel she had been rescued from the shame of mere defeat by the good she was able to do her brother.

Teddy walked into the porch, into the kitchen, threw his arms around her, and kissed her forehead. “Hiya, babe,” he said, making a brief study of her face, noting and ignoring the weariness of it. “Good to see you! How’s it going? Do you mind if I make a few phone calls?”—all this in a very soft voice, since he knew his father was probably asleep. He leaned in the hallway, giving advice and assurance, making three attempts to reach someone who didn’t answer. Then he hung up the phone and came back and hugged her again, comforting her, though he said nothing. Teddy used to be just Jack’s height, a slightly sturdier version of him, without the tentativeness that made Jack always seem to be taking a step back. Now Teddy was taller, she thought, no doubt the effect of quiet purposefulness on the one hand and evasiveness and generalized reluctance on the other. Once again he studied her face. She had been frightened so recently, and she was sad,
and so tired, and it was all surely visible to him. “I hope I haven’t come at a bad time,” he said. “It’s been hard to stay away. I finally gave in.”

“This is a good time. As good as any, I suppose.” What excuse was there for keeping him, all of them, away while their father dozed through whatever time remained to him, even though the old man himself did not ask her to send for them? Teddy could have blamed her for letting things get worse without calling him. It was pride, or it was shame that had made her hope Jack would recover himself enough to let the others see that things had been good between them. Though there was their father, too. But she saw nothing of anger or accusation in Teddy’s manner. A calm, affable man who went about his doctoring with scrupulous detachment and a heavy heart, he saw enough misery in the ordinary course of his life to avoid adding to it, except when compelled to on medical grounds.

“Is he here?”

She said, “He’s upstairs.”

“Would he mind if I said hello to him?”

She said, “Why should he mind?” and they laughed, ruefully. “I’ll tell him you’re here.”

J
ACK WAS LYING ON HIS BACK WITH AN ARM ACROSS HIS
face, to shield his eyes from the light that came through the drawn blinds. When he heard her at the door he rolled away from her.

“What,” he said. “What is it.”

“Teddy’s here.”

He laughed. “I wondered when you were going to get around to that. Calling Teddy.”

“I didn’t ask him to come. He just came on his own, as far as I know.”

He turned to look at her. “You’re whispering. So he must be downstairs.”

“Yes.”

“I didn’t hear his car. I guess I was asleep.”

“Well, he’d like to see you.”

“Have you told him?”

“No. Should I?”

“Please don’t. Don’t, Glory. It will never happen again, I swear.” He rubbed his face. “I’ll have to wash up. I shouldn’t have slept in this shirt. I could use an aspirin.” He swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up. “Where did I leave my shoes?” He rubbed his eyes. “Teddy,” he said. “That’s just what I need right now.”

She brought him the bottle of aspirin and a glass of water. Then she brought him a washcloth and a towel.

“Thanks,” he said.

“I’ll tell him you’ll be down in a few minutes. I’ll start some coffee.”

“Yes, coffee,” he said, scrubbing his face and his neck, then his face again. “Sorry,” he said. “Sorry about all this.”

She went down to the kitchen. Teddy was standing in the porch looking out at the garden. “You’ve been busy,” he said.

“Jack did most of it.”

He looked at her, to gauge the ratio of truth to loyalty in what she said, ready to be pleased with either of them, just wanting the information. “Then he must be doing all right.”

“He was for a while.”

“I see.” Teddy with his crisp hair and his groomed hands, his soft brown sweater and his tortoiseshell glasses. He was mild and reassuring in every way he could be, by nature, habit, and intention. There was something of the scent of rubbing alcohol about him, so faint that he must have known it suggested illness or emergency and have scrubbed it off as carefully as he could. That would account for the cologne he wore, his only departure from decorous simplicity. After a few minutes he said, “I can leave, if that’s what he wants. I knew he wouldn’t be too happy to see me. You can tell him I won’t stay long.”

“Give him a few more minutes. He’ll be down. He probably wanted to clean up a little.”

Teddy laughed. “And polish his shoes, I suppose. Has he changed a lot?”

“I didn’t know him as well as you did. He’s still Jack.”

“Dad told me you and he get along. He worried about that.”

Jack came down the stairs in his stocking feet, wearing one of his own shirts, still trying to button a sleeve. He stopped by the door, glanced at Glory, and smiled. He folded the cuff over twice, then unbuttoned the other sleeve and rolled it up, too.

His brother said, “Jack.”

Jack said, “Teddy.”

“How are you, Jack? It’s good to see you.”

Jack propped himself against the counter and folded his arms. It was fairly obvious how he was. Still, Glory wished he were not so thin, that he’d put on a better shirt, that it was not so hard for him to raise his eyes. “I’m all right,” he said. He smiled and shrugged. “I’ve been looking for work.”

Teddy drew a breath. He said, “I’m your brother, Jack! Jesus Christ!”

Jack laughed.