Taft by Ann Patchett Page A

eyes to the door and shook her head. She made a motion with her hand that I should keep going. I stayed behind her, keeping my eyes on her back, on her hair, which stopped in a razor straight line just past her shoulders. She opened the last door on the hallway and I followed her inside. Neither of us said a thing. She pulled back the blankets and I lay the boy down on blue striped sheets. She took off his shoes and covered him. He had been so light that I barely felt the difference when I stood up without him. In the bed he rolled over and took hold of a pillow with both his hands.
    Fay took the same path out of the house. I wondered about my footprints showing in the carpet. Going out felt easier and it was all I could do to keep myself slow. I was relieved Fay saw me all the way out, that she didn't just wave at me from his bedside. My eyes had adjusted some to the dark and I could make out pictures on the walls now, though I couldn't make out the people in them. She came outside with me. When I heard the door close I vowed to never be stupid again. Never. The air smelled like it might rain. I put my hands against my thighs and leaned into it.
    When we got to the car she went around to the other door and got in, like we still had a couple more stops to make on this never-ending ride. "I can't believe we got him inside," she said.
    I just nodded.
    "Tomorrow is Sunday. Carl always sleeps late on Sunday. He won't go to church with them. Nobody'll even think anything about it."
    I sat there without a single thing left to say. It was done. What I couldn't understand was why Fay kept sitting there. She was looking at the house.
    "I'd like to go with you," she said finally.
    "Where?" Could there really be someplace left to go?
    She didn't answer me right away. She was still staring. "I'd like to go home with you."
    Well then I understood. In that neighborhood where quiet was invented it would be hard to miss it. My whole body heard her. It said okay. Take her up, it said, fold that jacket in your arms, press that face to your face, put your mouth to the soft skin next to her eye. It said to take what was offered.
    I should have asked Marion to marry me, the second she told me she was pregnant. That was the mistake.
    "Go on," I said.
    "I mean it."
    "Get out of the car now. I've done enough."
    She put her hand on my neck. It was small and cold. I thought, delicate.
    "I'm telling you to go," I said.
    It seemed like the hand stayed there a long time, but then I heard her door open and close and I saw the shape of her walking up the driveway to the house and still I felt that hand there and I put my hand on my neck to cover the place where she had been.

E VERYTHING HINGED on the dead father. That's what I was thinking. Something had turned them inside out, made them do things they'd barely heard of before. You could tell, Carl wasn't a boy to go licking up everything in the medicine cabinet for the pure pleasure of the high. And Fay. What had happened to her that she would be putting her hand on my neck? Over and over again I saw her sitting in the car, her head resting on the window when she was tired. She was tired. She had been worried for her brother, thought maybe he was dead. Those thoughts shake a person as deep as they go, I know that. You want a little comfort. She had reached out in the wrong direction was all, gone to touch something at the end of a long night and touched me.
    What was surprising was how that minute put such a knot in me. At first I thought I'd just been made stupid by spending all night hunting Carl, but it was there while I slept and there in the morning waking up. It stayed with me all the way to Muddy's. I had felt a thrill. That's the only word for it. I recognized it easy enough. I had been thrilled before in my life. Mostly it came from music, times I had seen Muddy Waters play slide guitar with a broken-off bottle neck around his finger, again when I saw Son House in Chicago. A few times I had been