Songs in Ordinary Time

by Mary McGarry Morris

  Marie was shocked when Omar handed her the box. It was too flashy, she said, not at all her type of thing. Norm could feel Omar’s disappointment. “Well, try it on, Mom. At least give it a chance,” he said.

  When she came out of the bathroom, he and Omar were both grinning. With her dark hair and dark eyes, she looked beautiful.

  “But when will I ever wear it?” she asked, glancing back at herself in the mirror.

  “How about next week,” Omar said. “When we apply for the marriage license.”

  It was late Friday afternoon when Alice came home, sunburned and irritable. She said she’d hated her week at the lake, but at least she seemed more like her old self, Norm thought.

  “The wedding license!” she kept saying. “The wedding license!”

  It was the first thing Benjy had told her.

  “Oh God,” she groaned, throwing her bag onto the floor. “I don’t believe it! What is she, crazy? How could she do this?”

  “But she’s really happy,” Benjy said. “You should see her. She doesn’t even yell anymore. Nothing makes her mad.”

  She spun around to Norm. “What about Bernadette Mansaw? How could she forget about that?”

  “That really was business,” Norm said; then, seeing her shocked look, added, “I know for a fact.”

  “Norm’s Omar’s partner now,” Benjy said. “They go out selling every morning.”

  “What?” Alice cried.

  “Well, not his partner,” Norm said. “I’m just kind of helping, I guess.”

  “But he said partner,” Benjy insisted.

  He wished Benjy wouldn’t hit her with everything all at once like this. She’d end up back under the covers in her sealed room and all the recrimination and despair would start again. He followed her into the kitchen and tried to explain how well things had been going here. He told her about the bills finally being paid. He opened the cupboard and pulled out a plate from the new set of dishes Omar had bought. He pointed to the can of paint in the corner. Omar was going to paint the kitchen pale blue, Mom’s favorite color. He told her how Marie and Omar had gone to the Klubocks’ soap party and stayed on, visiting with the Klubocks, long after the other guests had gone home. Jessie Klubock had come to the back door the other night to ask Omar about ordering more soap. “She almost made it into the kitchen!” Norm laughed.

  “Oh God, into this dump! How humiliating!” she groaned, looking around.

  She didn’t understand. Things had changed, he tried to explain. They hadn’t really understood Omar or given him a fair chance. “He’s really a sharp guy,” he said.

  “Yah, he can sell anybody anything,” Benjy said from the doorway.

  “Well, that’s pretty obvious,” Alice said, staring at Norm. “What’d he do, let you drive his big Cadillac all over the place?”

  “Shut up! You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about!” he snapped.

  “Oh, I know. He promised you something, didn’t he? What? A hi-fi? A new glove! Or maybe your own little franchise! God, Norm, what a hypocrite you are! I didn’t think you’d be this easy,” she said, starting back into the living room.

  “Not as easy as you!” he yelled after her.

  She turned, her face white, lips trembling, and then she ran upstairs and slammed her door.

  “Norm!” Benjy said. “Now she’ll get all upset again.”

  “Let her! Who the hell cares! Miss Purity up there,” he called loudly from the bottom of the stairs. “Looking down her nose all the time at everyone, when she’s the hypocrite. She’s the one!”

  “Norm!” Benjy said, grabbing his arm.

  Norm pushed him away and ran up to her room. He shouted against the door. “You kill me, you’re so goddamn afraid of what people are going to think. You’re embarrassed! Jesus Christ, how about us? Did you think about that? Did you give a fuck about that?” He kicked the door. “Goddamn you, Alice, why’d you do that?” he panted. He wasn’t easy, goddamn it. He hadn’t been gullible and he wasn’t a hypocrite. All he wanted was to be part of something big, something bigger and better than himself or any one of them.

  It was late afternoon and they were on their way home. As Norm drove, his tongue tingled with the thought of ice-cold beer. Exhausted, Omar had been asleep for the last fifteen minutes.

  “What time is it?” Norm asked, but Omar’s mumble ended in a gasping snore. He turned the radio on. They were almost at Bart’s Bar and Grill, and he wanted Omar to wake up. Omar’s head bobbed up and down.

  It wasn’t that he needed a beer. As a matter of fact, yesterday they’d finished the route too late to stop and that had been okay. He’d been disappointed, but it was no big deal. It wasn’t even the beer he enjoyed as much as Omar’s company, the camaraderie in the quiet darkness after a hard day. But right now, he had to admit, he was thirsty as hell. He turned the radio up louder, which only seemed to plunge Omar into deeper sleep. He called his name. Nothing. Finally he reached over and nudged him. “Omar, wake up, we’re almost at Bart’s.”

  Omar’s head lifted and his eyes rolled as he tried to keep them open. “I’m just too…” he mumbled, then drifted off again.

  Norm pulled into the parking lot and turned off the motor. “Omar!” he called sharply, then got out of the car. He came around to Omar’s side and opened the door. “Omar, wake up! We’re at Bart’s! Omar, we’re here!” His chin lay on his chest. Norm reached in and shook his arm. “Omar! Come on, wake up!”

  Omar’s eyes opened and he stared up at him.

  “We’re here,” he said weakly. “We’re at Bart’s.”

  “So we are,” Omar muttered, grunting as he got out of the car. It was obvious he didn’t feel like stopping. Norm reached in back for Omar’s jacket and handed it to him. A piece of paper fluttered onto the ground. It was a check from Minnie Hewlings, that nice old lady who had cut him a slice of hot apple pie. The sale had been for three dollars and thirty cents, but the check was made out for thirty-three dollars and thirty cents.

  “Look!” he said, catching up to Omar.

  “Well, I’ll be,” Omar said, then looked back at Norm. “A mistake or maybe a gift,” he said with a wink as he slipped the check into his breast pocket.

  “It’s got to be a mistake,” Norm said. “She was just a little old lady.”

  “I don’t know, Norm. You said she liked you. Maybe it was her way of showing it, you know, slipping you a little something extra.”

  “Oh no, she didn’t have any money, I could tell.” He had seen the knife’s brief hesitation between the thinness of her own rationed slices and then the wider one for him. Certain things you just know.

  “Well, what’ll we do?” Omar said, pausing in the vestibule. He checked his watch. “It’ll take us a good hour to get back there. We’d have to leave now.”

  The door opened, and Norm stepped aside as two men in dust-streaked shirts emerged from the beery darkness.

  “You tell me what to do. You decide.” Omar smiled.

  “Well, could we mail it to her?” he asked.

  “If we had her address, we could.”

  “Well, how about if we just don’t cash it?”

  “Now, how can I do that to your mother? How in good conscience do I take money out of your mother’s pocket to cover some old lady’s carelessness?”

  So there was only one thing left to do, he realized with a sinking heart. They’d have to head back there, when he’d been looking forward to this since last week. “I’ll drive,” he said on their way to the car. “That way you can sleep.”

  Omar thumped the hood of his car. “Wait, I just thought. What we can do here is cash the check, all right? We give your mother her rightful money. But what we’ll do, you see, is take the difference and set it aside. Then next time we’re out that way, we’ll return Miss Hewlings’s overdraft, which I guarantee you she will not have missed or even understand what it is we are talking about. How’s that sound?”

  “Sounds good!”
r />   “Creative thinking!” Omar said as they headed into the bar. “Problem solving! Dexterity with the pieces, that’s what it comes down to in the end, Norm, remember that.”

  Norm sat at a table while Omar placed their order at the bar. He didn’t know why Omar preferred checks. He might be a shrewd businessman, but this just proved how easily mistakes could be made. With cash you knew what you had. From now on he’d scrutinize every check, read each line twice. A sharpness like pain made him blink as the old woman’s shaky script scrawled across his vision.

  Omar carried two mugs of beer to the table. “Here you go,” he said, setting the mug in front of him. Foam slicked down the side onto the table. Omar sank into the chair with a sigh. “I’m so glad you didn’t want to go back. I don’t think I could stand two more hours in that hot car.”

  “You know, I was just thinking. I looked at that check. I could swear she wrote three dollars and thirty cents.”

  “What’re you saying, Norm?” Omar asked in a low voice.

  “I don’t know.” He shrugged. “It just seems weird, that’s all. I know it doesn’t make sense,” he said, taking his first sip. He could see he was irritating Omar, who peered at him through the smoky haze. He took a long drink.

  “Then what’re you suggesting?” Omar asked.

  “Nothing!” And he meant it. Obviously there had been two errors made, the old woman’s and his. Omar was upset with him. Probably for being so careless in the first place. He downed the rest of his beer. He’d really messed everything up. Omar hadn’t even wanted to stop. He was tired and wanted to go.

  “That was fast,” Omar said, and before Norm could say anything, he had gotten up and gone to the bar to order two more beers.

  An hour had passed, and now three men had joined them. Two were plumbers and one was a salesman like Omar. They had been talking about bass fishing and lures, and now the salesman was doing a card trick called Chicago Hat, which Norm was having a hard time following. Now Omar was showing the men a trick. Norm was on his third beer. He had ordered it when Omar was in the bathroom.

  “Now where’s the ace of clubs?” Omar asked as the plumber searched through the cards he held. “You just had it.”

  “I’ll be damned,” the plumber said, laying the cards facedown. Omar spread his own hand on the table so the plumber could see them.

  “You don’t have it, either,” the plumber said, and Omar pointed to one of the plumber’s cards. The plumber turned it over. The ace of clubs. The men all laughed. Norm felt great. A baseball game played loudly over the radio. Eli Grba was pitching against the Senators. Omar was laughing. He shuffled the cards, then slapped down the deck for Norm to cut.

  “Oh no, not your kid,” the salesman cried. “I know how that one goes.” He pushed the deck to one of the plumbers. “I’m not as stupid as your old man thinks I am,” he said to Norm, who couldn’t stop grinning. This was great. He felt great, really great. He wouldn’t mind being Omar’s kid, wouldn’t mind having Omar for his old man. He just hoped his mother didn’t go and screw it all up with her moods and her temper. Sometimes he wondered what Omar saw in her. The bartender was looking their way. Norm raised his hand and waved him over.

  “Let’s go!” Omar said, getting up so suddenly it took Norm a moment to disentangle himself from the chair rungs. He lurched through the door into the warm dusk of the parking lot. Omar unlocked the car then stood glaring at him.

  “What’s the matter?” His voice cracked. “Why’re you mad at me?”

  “I don’t have time for losers, Norm. I don’t drink with a man that can’t stop.”

  “I thought you wanted—”

  “You thought nothing, Norm,” he growled in his face. “You weren’t thinking anything. You were thirsting, that’s all you were doing, boy!”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yah, you’re sorry,” Omar said, shoving him back against the car. “I bring you home like this and who’s your mother gonna blame? Me, damn you, and I don’t want anything coming between me and her, you hear me? I don’t want to see her upset. I don’t want to hear her crying. She’s too good a woman for this kind of shit. You hear me?”

  Miserable with shame, Norm kept nodding. Omar was right.

  “From now on, we stop for a beer, we stop for a beer or we don’t stop at all.”

  “I’m sorry.” He could barely utter the words. He felt like such a shithead.

  “How’d you pay for that beer?” Omar’s eyes narrowed. “You’re not pilfering from me, are you, boy?”

  “No! I had money! I wouldn’t do that! I swear I wouldn’t!”

  “God, I hope not. If I can’t trust you, Norm, I don’t want anything to do with you,” he said with such loathing that Norm felt his own stomach turn.

  After all the time together on the road, after all the shared confidences, it was a shock to be so abruptly repudiated. He watched Omar walk around the front of the car. “You can trust me,” he said when Omar got in. “I’d never take anything from you, honest to God I wouldn’t.”

  Omar regarded him with a weariness that revealed a lifetime of disappointment at the hands of flawed men. “I hope not,” he said, turning the key. “Because I like you, Norm.” He glanced over at him. “I always wanted a son. I always did.”

  Three days had passed since the grisly discovery in the moonlit woods. And for as many nights in the dreams of children and Howard Menka, the hideous corpse, its clothes shredded in ghastly streamers, rose from swamp fog to stalk the streets and backyards on its way, its blind and ravenous way, to climb the stairs, on which each hollow treaded thud, each mounting wooden beat, was the nearing pulse, the implacable cadence of doom, deafening doom, down airless hallways to paper doors. Children ran screaming to their parents’ beds, and in his, Howard Menka gasped, his fist at his swelling heart. Jozia lay in the next room, crying. The only man she had ever loved sat in a jail cell, refusing to talk to anyone, refusing to be helped. She blamed her brother. If only Howard had stayed away and made his own life, then he wouldn’t have been shot. None of this would have happened. But the body, Howard had tried to tell her, the body had been there all summer. Remember? he said. Remember how he had tried to warn her? No, she said, looking right at him. He’d never said a word about a dead body to her.

  People were surprised but certainly not outraged that Grondine Carson had killed a trespasser, because it wasn’t just a man’s right to protect home and property. It was his duty. What most found deeply troubling was that for two and a half months the body had lain undetected, only a few miles from town, opprobrious proof, many felt, of the carelessness and disorder that were in the air, not just in Atkinson, but in the whole state, all over the country. What the community found most chilling, most shocking, was that the victim could be so unmissed, that any man might be so unwanted, so unloved, that no one had tried to find him.

  When his name was finally printed in the paper, no one came forward. Earl Lapham Jones was a mystery man, with even the cause of his death uncertain. No bullet had been found in or near the body. There were no weapons nearby. Grondine Carson would talk to no one, not the Chief, not his lawyer. He had told all he knew, and the rest was up to them.

  Benjy watched the greasy haze waft over the kitchen table to the open window. The washing machine churned through its last cycles, spinning now with a steady click. After the long day’s quiet he welcomed the noise and the clutter of pots and peelings on the stove and counter as they sat around the table. His mother had fried a steak, and the pan sizzled behind him on the burner.

  There was a basket of wet clothes by the door. Alice had been told this morning to bring it down to the new dryer Omar had installed in the cellar. She said she would, but there it sat. Still in her bathrobe, she hunched over the table, working on the same crossword puzzle she had carried down from her room. Her eyes were puffy. Her skin had broken out and her hair was limp. She was always either reading a book or doing a crossword puzzle. Sometimes Benjy would hear her
crying upstairs. She never went anywhere, not even out in the yard. Mary Agnes had called once from the lake, but Alice made him say she wasn’t home. She told him afterward that on her last day there she had overheard Mary Agnes and the girls in the cabin laughing and calling her “Alice, the patron saint of vocations.” His mother said things would be better for her once she got away to school. Things would be better for everyone, he thought.

  “Damn!” she muttered, erasing a word. No one said anything. “Damn!” she said again, then flung the puzzle and pencil onto the floor. She looked around the table, but they fixed their attention elsewhere. His mother continued cutting the steak into servings. Was there anything new in the paper about the dead man? she asked. They answered, their voices scuffling to fill the silence. No, no one had read it yet. No. Not yet. Benjy watched Omar mash butter into his potatoes. He shook salt into his palm, then sprinkled it over the potatoes. With his fork he patted the potatoes back up into a mound, then added more butter, which he watched melt.

  “Mr. Briscoe said it was a stabbing,” his mother said as she passed the steak platter. “He said they could tell by the internal organs.” She shuddered. “Well, what was left of them, anyway.”