Searching for Caleb

"And she's not just someone. She's not just any old person that you would treat so formally the minute she hurt your feelings."

"Who's hurt?" Duncan said.

"Look at Grandfather. Do you know what I found him doing the other day?

He was at the kitchen table all hunched over with his head in his hands.

I thought something was wrong. Then he sat up and I saw he'd been studying this world map in the Hammond atlas. Not Maryland, not the United States, the world, Duncan. That's how far he let Caleb run before he would go after him. Are we going to do that too?"

"We're never going to forget that man, are we," Duncan said. "The one that got away." He set down a crimping iron. "However, we're wandering off the subject here. Meg has not vanished. We know exactly where she is.

She writes us a letter once a week. All I'm saying is don't repeat history, give her a little breathing space. Let her ask us first."

"Oh, there's always some excuse."

"I'm just telling you what I think."

"Do you wish I hadn't come after you, when you left home?"

"No."

"Well, I wish it sometimes, Duncan Peck."

"No doubt you do," said Duncan.

"And if you ever walk off again, you realize I won't follow. I'll have them declare you legally dead, I'll remarry right away."

"Of course," he said serenely.

There was no way to win a fight with that man.

She stormed out of the shop and then stood on the sidewalk, wondering what to do with herself. Everything seemed irritating. The sunlight was too sharp for her eyes. The traffic was too noisy, a swarm of gigantic glaring station wagons. She hated the way the women drivers were poised at the Main Street traffic light, all lifting their arms simultaneously to orchestrate their hairdos. She turned in the other direction, toward home, which was not where she wanted to be but she couldn't think of any place else.

In the kitchen, her grandfather was washing the dishes. Periodically he had these spells of trying to make the house look cared for. He wore around his waist a striped linen dishtowel with an enormous charred hole in its center. He bent over the sink, unaware of Justine's presence, doggedly scrubbing a saucepan with a piece of dried gourd that Duncan had grown two years ago after reading about its scouring properties. The gourd looked like a chunk of hardened beige seaweed. From time to time he stopped scrubbing and examined it, frowning, as if he found it difficult to believe. Then he rinsed the saucepan and plodded over to the table with it, head bowed, shoulders hunched. "Hello, Grandfather," Justine said. "Grandfather?"

He started and looked up. "Eh?"

"You don't have to wash the dishes."

"I'd like to know what we'd eat off tonight if I didn't."

"We could always go to the diner," Justine said.

"Ha."

He dried the saucepan on a corner of his apron. Then he set it on a stack of meticulously cleaned, polished plates and trudged back to the sink. He was so stooped that, from behind, his head seemed to disappear. All Justine saw was his rounded shoulders, the elastic X of his suspenders in the hollow of his spine, and his trousers draped and formless as if he had no seat. Nowadays, everywhere Justine looked she found something to make her sad.

She would have liked to write Meg another letter, but she had sent one just this morning. So she went instead to Meg's bedroom, to open her closet and stare at the row of shirtdresses that seemed to be leading a gentle muted life of their own. Someday soon, Meg said in her letters, she would stop by for the rest of her things or her parents could bring them when they came to visit. But Justine felt comforted by what was left behind and she would be sorry to see the room stripped. She took a deep breath of Meg's clean smell: Ivory soap and fresh-ironed fabric. She stroked the collar of the nearest dress, with its precise top-stitching, and then she lifted the cover of the sewing machine to admire Meg's mastery of such a complex, wheeled Invention. She would have opened bureau drawers, but Meg was particular about her privacy.

When Meg was a baby, Justine had realized for the first time that it was possible to die. She had felt suddenly fragile under the responsibility of staying alive to raise her daughter. (In those days, she expected to do it perfectly; she thought no one else could manage.) She developed a fear of fire that was so unfounded she couldn't even tell Duncan because of course he would laugh at her. Over and over again she imagined the salty smell of smoke in the air, or a flickering red glow reflected on the wall. If Duncan were home he could get them out of anything, but what if it happened in the daytime while he was at work? By herself she was so young and skinny and incompetent. Then gradually, she developed an escape plan. They were living in Uncle Ed Hodges's garage apartment at the time.