Heel - § 4: The Noticing

The church supper was over and the men had gone out to the lot to stand around the cars, and the kitchen behind them was close with steam and loud with women, the counters heaped with the good wreckage of a meal that had fed sixty. Lorraine had her arms in the big sink to the elbow and Arlene was beside her with a towel, and down the counter Ruth Mealer and Della Pruitt were scraping the long pans into the slop pail and arguing without heat about whose recipe the scalloped corn had been, and somebody's radio was going on the windowsill, low, under the run of the water and the talk. It was a good warm noise to work in. Lorraine handed a plate up out of the suds and Arlene took it and turned it once under the towel and set it in the rack, and they had done it so many hundred times together that neither of them had to watch her hands.

There was ham and there was the scalloped corn and there were seven kinds of pie down to crumbs, and the long tables out in the hall were being folded and carried off by the older boys, and up the counter Inez Tackett was counting the good forks back into their felt roll so the church would not come up short again like the time before. Over all of it the steam came up off the sink and fogged the window and ran back down it in slow lines. A church kitchen after a supper was the warmest room Lorraine knew. It had fed the whole town and now it fed the women who had done the feeding, on the leavings and the talk.

Arlene was telling about her aunt who had married a man from Ohio that nobody could understand a word out of, and she did the man, the flat closed-up mouth of him, until Della had to set the slop pail down, and the laugh went around the kitchen and came back, and Arlene's was the biggest of it, rough and glad and with her whole self in it. Lorraine looked sideways at her friend laughing at her own foolishness with her hands full of wet plates and felt the warm of the kitchen go all the way through her. There was no place she would rather have had her arms in dishwater than here, beside this woman, in the steam, with the radio going.

Arlene was the one who had come, three years back, the week Walter died. She had come in the back without knocking and put the coffee on and done the sink full of casserole dishes the church ladies kept carrying over and would not take home, and she had stayed past dark two nights running, and not once had she told Lorraine that Walter was in a better place or that the Lord did not hand you more than you could carry. She had just stayed, and washed up, and let Lorraine be no account in front of her. You did not forget that. You did not get many people in a life you could fall apart in front of, and Lorraine had the one, and she was standing at her elbow drying the church's plates.

The plates came down and went up. Out the window over the sink the lot was going blue with the evening, the men dark shapes by the dark cars, a boy chasing another boy between the bumpers.

Arlene had stopped talking.

She was looking out the window with the towel gone still in her hands, and Lorraine followed her look and there was nothing out there but the lot and the men and the milk truck pulled up at the side door of the parish hall, the milkman carrying his wire rack of bottles in to the church icebox for the morning, lifting his cap to Reverend Tice on the step.

"That's Coomer," Arlene said. "The milkman. That's Coomer, isn't it."

"Sure it's Coomer," Lorraine said. "He's had this route forever."

"How long would you say."

"I don't know. Since we came. Since before."

"Six years we've been on Lattimore Street," Arlene said. "He was bringing it the first morning. I remember him on the step the day we moved in, before the truck with our things even got there, and Earl made the joke about the milk beating the furniture." She turned the towel over in her hands and did not dry anything with it. "Lorraine. He hasn't changed. Six years and he's the same. The same little belly and the same way of going up on his toes to reach the high shelf and the same red on his neck. Not a gray hair. Not a line on him he didn't have." Her voice had dropped under the kitchen noise so it was just for Lorraine. "My daddy went gray between when I married and when Petey came. Earl's got his reading glasses now and his bad shoulder. You and me, Lorraine, look at us, we're not the girls that moved onto that street. But Coomer. Coomer's the milkman on the step the first morning, exactly, and it's six years."

The water ran. Down the counter Ruth said something and Della laughed.

"He's got a good clean job and he keeps regular hours and he eats his supper at home," Lorraine said, and she heard the smooth come into it, the easy certain run of it, and it came out of her without her reaching for it, the right change already in her hand before she had thought to count it. "A man like that, out in the air every day, up before the rest of us. They keep. Some men just keep, Arlene."

"Coomer," Arlene said, like she had not heard her, watching the man set his empty rack back in the cab and pull his cap down. And then she lifted her chin and her voice came up out of the quiet place and went bright and carrying across the kitchen. "Ruth. Ruth, you've been on Lattimore longer than anybody. How long's Coomer been your milkman?"

Lorraine took Arlene by the elbow.

She did it gently, with her wet hand, a kind steering touch, the touch for a friend who has had a little too much at a wedding, and she had the towel out of Arlene's hand and a fresh stack of saucers into it before Ruth had even got turned around from her pail, and she heard her own self saying wasn't it always the way, you get to talking and the work stops dead, and these saucers won't dry themselves, and she had moved Arlene a half step down the counter and put her back to the window and her face to the rack, and the carrying thing Arlene had started did not get finished. Ruth said something about Coomer being older than dirt and went back to her scraping. The kitchen closed back over the little gap. Arlene stood with the saucers and the towel and dried them, one and one and one, and did not say anything else, and Lorraine kept her own eyes on the suds and her hands going and did not look at her friend's face, because she did not need to look at it to know it had a question on it, and she had given it her answer already, in the wet hand on the elbow and the bright voice laid over the top: not here, and not from her.

She told herself she had saved Arlene an embarrassment in front of Ruth and Della. She believed it as far as the front of it.

It was a Thursday after that, midmorning, that Lorraine came over to Arlene's with a dress pattern, and the kitchen was yellow and alive as it always was, the curtains Arlene had run up on the machine moving a little at the window over the sink, a pot of beans gone low and good on the back of the stove for Earl's supper, the table with its oilcloth and the worn pale place at the near corner and the smell of coffee standing in the room.

The house had Arlene all through it. There was Petey's drawing of a boat held to the icebox under a magnet shaped like a strawberry, and a row of African violets on the sill that she fussed over and talked to under her breath, and on the doorframe to the hall the pencil marks where she had stood Petey every birthday and measured him climbing. Out the window the shutters stood open against the clapboard, and Arlene had painted them herself the summer before, a soft barn red she had picked out of three reds at the hardware in town and been pleased with ever since. The red was clean and whole and bright in the morning, not a flake gone off it anywhere. Buddy had come over at Lorraine's heel and gone in under the table and lay there with his chin on his paws and his eyes out on the room, and Arlene had said hello to him and given him the heel of a biscuit, and he had taken it soft off her palm as he took everything, and that was all the thought anybody gave him. He was a good dog under a table. There was a dog under half the tables on the street.

They had the pattern out on the cleared end of the table and the radio on low for company, and Arlene was leaning over the tissue with the pins in her mouth when the program changed and a new one came up, an afternoon serial, a man's voice and an announcer, and Arlene went still over the pattern with the pins in her mouth and her hand flat on the tissue.

She took the pins out of her mouth one at a time and set them down.

"This one," she said. "I've heard this one."

"You've heard them all," Lorraine said. "They run a hundred of them."

"No. This one. This exact one." Arlene had her head turned to the radio, her whole body gone to listening. On the radio the man was telling another man about a horse and the money he was going to put on it, and the second man was warning him off it, and the announcer came in over them, warm, amused. "He loses the money," Arlene said quietly. "He puts it on the horse and the horse goes down at the last fence and he loses every cent and has to tell his wife, and right—" she lifted one finger and held it up, waiting, and on the radio the announcer gave a little chuckling laugh, soft, fond, three notes of it, and dropped his voice for the next part, and Arlene's finger came down. "There. Right there. The little laugh, right in that spot. I've heard this before, Lorraine. The same words. The same man and the same horse and his laugh falling in the very same place. Not a one like it. This one."

Lorraine looked at her friend's face. It was pale and set, the eyes holding steady on Lorraine and asking her, with the braced stillness of a person waiting on a blow, and for a half a second the steadiness of it reached across the table and took hold of something in Lorraine and she felt the floor of the morning tilt a half a step.

Then she remembered about Arlene's mother.

Arlene's mother had passed in the spring, quick, a stroke at the ironing board, and Arlene had been the one to find her, and she had not been all the way right since. She had got thin in the face. She slept poor; Earl had said so at the Legion. A thing like that, your own mother gone out from under you between one shirt and the next, it caught up with a person. It came at them sideways, in the quiet, in the afternoons. It made them hear things and tie things together that had no string between them. Grief did that. Everybody knew grief did that. Lorraine's own grandmother had talked to an empty chair for a year after her husband went.

The tilt went out of the floor. Lorraine came back up onto the level of it, into the yellow kitchen with the beans going and the pattern on the table, and she reached across and put her hand over Arlene's hand where it lay flat on the tissue, and she patted it, twice, warm.

"You're tired, honey," she said. "You've been carrying a lot since your mama. It's no wonder things run together on you." She kept her hand on Arlene's hand. "They make those programs up ahead by the dozen and the men all sound alike and the stories all come out the same, the horse and the money and the wife, it's the only story they've got. You've heard a hundred like it and they've all run together into the one, and you're tired, and your mind's tired, and it's no wonder. You ought to let Earl take Petey a Saturday and you ought to sleep till noon."

Arlene looked at Lorraine's hand on her hand.

She did not pull it away. She let it lie there and be patted, and something went down in her face, some lifted awake thing settling back, and she gave a small breath out through her nose that was almost the start of her laugh but had no glad in it, and she said maybe she was tired. She said it was probably the heat. She picked the pins back up off the oilcloth and put one in her mouth and bent back over the tissue, and on the radio the man with the horse found out about the last fence, and lost it all, and went home in the dark to tell his wife, and the announcer dropped his voice for it in the same soft place he always would, in the same place he already had.

Under the table the dog lifted his head off his paws. He looked at Arlene bent over the pattern, his ears up, his tail gone still along the floor, and neither woman saw him do it.

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