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“Oh. I didn’t know that. I didn’t—” He put his hands to his face.

Glory said, “No. This is terrible. I won’t let this happen.”

“Let it happen,” Jack said softly. “I don’t have anything to lose.” And he dropped his hands, like a man abandoning all his defenses.

The old man was groping for his napkin, which had slipped to the floor. Jack gave him his. “Thank you, dear,” he said, his voice ragged with tears, and he blotted his face with it.

“That wasn’t Jack’s fault,” Glory said. “You know it wasn’t.”

Her father said, “Then why did you slap old Wheeler’s face? She did, she slapped him. Because his house was no fit place for a child, that’s why. Broken things, rusted things on the ground everywhere. Just everywhere! We could have brought her home! If Jack had owned up to her at all. He knew what kind of place it was,” he said bitterly. “He’d been there.”

Jack leaned back in his chair and shielded his eyes with his hand.

Glory said, “That was so long ago. Can’t we put it aside, Papa?”

“Have you put it aside? We thought you never would get over it. It nearly scared your mother to death the way you mourned for that child.”

She said, “But Jack is here now. His life has been hard. It’s been sad. And he’s home now. He’s come home.”

“Yes,” the old man said, “and he’s telling us goodbye. You know he is. He says he’s read the Bible. Well, any fool could see that. He knows it better than I do. Why would he bother to say
that to me? So I’ll think maybe he’s been working out his salvation. Well, maybe he has. I hope he has. But that isn’t why he spoke to me about it. He doesn’t think he should leave me here worrying about his soul. He has a few chores to finish up around the place. He’s going to toss the old gent an assurance or two, and then he’s out the door.”

Jack laughed. He said, very softly, “That’s not quite the way I thought of it.” He cleared his throat. “But I probably will be leaving. That’s true.”

Her father hung his head. “All of them call it home, but they never stay.”

After a moment Jack said, “You don’t want me hanging around here. Reminding you of things you’d rather forget.” His voice was still barely more than a whisper.

“I never forget them. Hard as I try. They’re my life.” He looked up at his son. “And so are you.”

Jack shrugged and smiled. “Sorry.”

His father reached over and patted his hand. “It worries me sometimes. I don’t know what’s become of my life.” Then he said, fingering Jack’s sleeve, in a tone of rueful admission, “I lost my church, you know.”

Jack said, “Well, I knew you were retired.”

The old man nodded. “That’s one way to look at it.” The candles had begun to flicker in an evening wind. The wind toyed with the crystal droplets on the light fixture. He said, “I lost my wife.”

Jack shifted away as if he expected another rebuke, but his father just shook his head. “Why did I ever expect to keep anything? That isn’t how life is. I’m”—he said—“I’m awfully worried about Ames. There he’s got that little boy. I don’t know.” After a moment he looked up. “I’ve left the house to Glory. All the rest of them are settled. There’s some money you’ll each get a share of, and some for the Ames boy. It’s not much. I know Glory will be glad to see you if you ever feel like coming home again.”

Jack smiled at her across the table. “That’s good to know.”

The old man closed his eyes. “I can’t enjoy the thought of heaven like I should, leaving so much unattended to here. I know it’s wrong to think your mother’s going to ask me about it.” He was silent for a while, and then he said, “I was hoping I would be able to tell her that Jack had come home.”

Jack sat pondering his father, and there was something in his face more absolute than gentleness or compassion, something purged of all the words that might describe it. Finally he said, whispered, “I hope you will give her my love.”

The old man nodded. “Yes. I will certainly do that.”

A
FTER HE HAD PUT HIS FATHER TO BED
J
ACK CAME OUT TO
the kitchen. He said, “Feel like a few games of checkers? I really can’t imagine going to sleep right now.”

“Neither can I.”

He said, “I’m sorry about that, Glory. These things never go the way I expect them to. You’d think I’d have learned by now. Not to expect.”

“You meant well.”

“I believe I did.”

“You did.”

“Yes,” he said, and nodded, as if he had steadied himself against this minor certainty. “I checked with Teddy. And it was your idea to begin with.”

“We both thought it was worth a try.”

“I didn’t try, though. Did you notice that? To lie to him. I lost my nerve.”

“That’s probably just as well.”

He shrugged. “I wouldn’t know.”

They played three wordless games, Jack so distractedly that Glory won despite her best efforts. She thought, There ought to be a name for this. Boughton checkers. Gandhi checkers.

He said, “You probably want to get some sleep.”

“Well, Jack, I just found out that I will inherit this house. I never meant to stay in Gilead. I mean I positively intended to leave Gilead. I don’t want to sound ungrateful, but I’m—‘horrified’ is too strong a word, but it’s the one that comes to mind. So I doubt I could sleep if I wanted to.”

Jack leaned back in his chair and looked around him, almost objectively. “It’s a pretty decent house. Free and clear. You could do worse.”

She said, “This is a nightmare I’ve had a hundred times. The one where all the rest of you go off and begin your lives and I am left in an empty house full of ridiculous furniture and unreadable books, waiting for someone to notice I’m missing and come back for me. And nobody does.”

He laughed. “Poor Pigtails.” Then he said, “When I have that dream, I’m hiding in the barn hoping someone will find me, and nobody does.”

“Well,” she said, “I’m going to get that barn torn down. If I inherit this place, that’s the first thing I’m going to do.”

“Fine. Should I make some coffee?”

“Might as well.”

Jack filled the percolator. Then he leaned against the counter. “It’s your barn. Of course, if you had somebody work on the roof a little, it would last a few more years. That’s just a thought. Paint would help.”

She laughed. “So you want me to keep the barn. What else should I keep?”

“What else are you planning to get rid of?”

“Oh, the rugs, the drapes, the wallpaper, the lamps, the chairs and sofas—a few dozen of the souvenir plates. The figurines.”

“Fine,” he said.

“Some of the bookcases. And Grandpa’s old theology books. There must be five hundred of them.”

“You’ll keep the Edinburgh books, I suppose.”

“Yes, I will keep them.”

“Some of the rest of it you could just put in the attic. I could move things around to make more room up there.”

“That’s a thought.”

He went across the hall to the dining room and flipped on the light, and stood in the doorway, his hands on his hips. “I see what you mean.”

“It looks like something out of
The Old Curiosity Shop
.”

“True.” But he kept looking around at it, the table and sideboard with their leonine legs and belligerently clawed feet, like some ill-considered, doily-infested species of which they were the last survivors. The wall sconces that were lotus blossoms with lightbulbs where their stamens ought to have been. She thought, Dear Lord, he is missing it all in anticipation. She thought, As long as he is alive in the world, or as long as no one knows otherwise, I will probably have to keep all that sour, fierce, dreary black walnut. That purple rug. And if he dies I will still have to keep it, because I have seen him look at it this way.

She said, “You want it to stay the same.”

“What? No, no. It doesn’t matter to me. Maybe I’ll be back here sometime,” he said, and it was clear from his tone that he doubted he would be. That he seemed to entertain doubt only for politeness’s sake. He said, “I’ve thought about this place now and then,” and he shrugged. The coffee was done and he gave her a cup and filled it and took one for himself.

She said, “No one will want me to change anything. When Papa’s gone they’ll come here twice a year or once a year or never, but they’ll want it all to be the same.”

He nodded. “You could sell it. Let someone else tear down the barn. Let the memory of Snowflake vanish once and for all. It would probably be best for everybody if you did that.” He knew he was proposing the unthinkable, and he smiled.

“Ah!” she said, and she rested her head on her arms. “I don’t want this to happen. Somehow I always knew this would happen to me.”

“It doesn’t have to. You could just light out, make a run for it. Let the others deal with it. No one would blame you. I wouldn’t, anyway.”

“No, I really couldn’t do that.”

“Sorry,” he said. And then he said, “It’s a relief to know you feel that way, Glory. I know I have no right to say this, but it is a relief to me. Of course, you can always change your mind.” He got the deck of cards and laid out a hand of solitaire.

W
HEN SHE DID FINALLY GO UP TO HER ROOM AND LIE
down as if to sleep, she fell to pondering the fact that she had almost promised him she would stay in Gilead and keep the house as it was, the grounds as they were, more or less weedy, more or less unpruned, but essentially the same. Even though he might never see it again. All that helpfulness of his, now that she thought about it, was restoration. Mother’s iris garden reclaimed, the Adirondack chairs repaired, the treads replaced on the back porch steps. It was a little like having the family come to life again to have him there, busy about the place the way her father used to be. When he had first come home, fearful as he was that he had become a stranger, he still came around to the kitchen door, that old habit.

She had thought of pulling down the barn because the worst hours of his life, surely, had passed in it. And she couldn’t walk into it without the thought of what might have happened, what she might have found, and then the terrible problem, the catastrophe it would have been for her father no matter what she could think of to say or do. Having to tell Teddy. It would have been the final insult, the most unpardonable desecration of everything they had somehow managed to cherish about him. Dear God in heaven. And then that hiding place he had made, comforting himself in concealment as he had always done. Or hiding his loneliness, or making his estrangement literal, visible. It was something a boy might do, that old game of hiding in the loft. He
had done it as a boy and remembered, and maybe it made him feel at home. She should have pulled it apart herself, not left it for him to do. It was so profound a habit not to intrude on anything of his that she could hardly bring herself to do even what he had asked her. She wondered if he had taken it down, or if he might have left the house when she came upstairs and gone back to it again this very night. And then she wondered if he might not have another bottle hidden somewhere. In the DeSoto. She should have gone back to look around that afternoon, while he was sleeping. She hadn’t been thinking clearly.

What had changed, after all? He had shamed himself in front of her, making her cover for his awful helplessness, defenselessness. Not that she could hold that against him, but that he could never forget what she had seen. She knew this by the way he looked at her now, by the chastened softness of his voice. He had made a generous attempt to lie to his father and failed, and in trying had dropped a stone into a very deep well of sorrow. The report of terrible particulars coming to him after so long, and for no reason except that his poor father seemed to forget everything else while he remembered them more bitterly. Jack promised her that he would never again try to end his life, but then he also told her he had done it only because he’d been drinking, and that must mean that if he happened to have another bottle somewhere—

In the course of time the dim glow of the lightening sky paled the curtains, and she heard Jack stirring in his room. Then finally she fell asleep, and gradually awoke again to the smell of bacon, of coffee.

J
ACK HAD BROUGHT IN HIS SUIT FROM THE PORCH, WHERE
she had hung it to air, and he was brushing and pressing it. There were no really noticeable grease marks except one above a trouser pocket and a few on the underside of the lapels where he had held them closed with his hand. His solicitude for that suit must have
sunk so far into him that he had been a little careful of it even in extremis. If he remembered to keep the jacket closed to hide the smudge on the trousers, it would be about as presentable as it ever was. This was clearly a relief to him. He asked her for a needle and thread and secured a hanging button. She enjoyed the wry seriousness with which he went about such things, these unlikely shifts and competences she knew she was privileged to witness. Still, there was something slightly hectic about it this morning, something disturbingly purposeful.

He hung the suit on the door frame and stood back to look at it. “Not too bad, considering. Hmm?”

“Not bad at all.”

“There’s toast in the oven. And I fried some bacon. I could scramble an egg for you.”

“You’re being very nice.”

He nodded. “I called Teddy.”

It took her a moment to understand what he had said. “You called Teddy?”

“Yes. I woke him up. But I thought I’d better make the call before my resolve faded.”

“Just toast will be fine,” she said.

“As you wish.” He stacked toast on a plate and set it in front of her, and jam, and butter, and a cup of coffee. He said, “I went in to check on the old gent this morning, and he didn’t know who I was. He didn’t know who he was, either. No idea. He was very polite about it.” He propped himself against the counter. “So I thought I’d better talk with Teddy. He’s calling the others. He said he could be here by Tuesday.” It was the first time he had looked at her directly, met her eyes.

“All right. I’ll have to get the house ready. Make up the beds. I’ll need some groceries.”

Jack said, “I’ll be here to help you with that. Until Tuesday. Then I’ll be out of your way.”