The Done Thing by Tracy Manaster

Author:Tracy Manaster
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: F+W Media
Published: 2016-11-04T04:00:00+00:00

With enough time gone for the change to be believed, I told Kath I’d convinced the bird watchers to switch their meetings to Sundays. Could I drop in again at linners? I asked her Monday on a walk. She cawed and improvised a jig right there on the street. At the Claverie house, the children looked strange and half-starved, husked for spring from thick sweaters.

“Glad you’re here,” said Blue with his warm, unguarded smile. He was bound to be the easiest; I didn’t have to meet his eyes.

“You’ve been keeping well?” Pam asked, like I was a cut of beef and apt to spoil.

“I’ve been busy,” I said and I thought of Marjorie. The half of her mouth that could manage it smiled sometimes when she saw me. Every weekend. I’d had the desk man find a chair for her room. His name was Arthur, but Call-Me-Art. He said Marjorie was lucky to have such a good friend, and I didn’t correct him. Every visit, I switched off Marjorie’s TV. You were so dead set against the box and maybe your mother felt that way too.

“I’m glad,” Pam said. In the softening of her posture I saw that she’d been tense. I hugged her. Everything would be all right. She was so much prettier when she smiled.

April came. I paid for another six months of post box use.

The linner after April Fool’s the littlest Claveries flopped about, playing possum. Midway through the month, I filled out my annual petition to visit and mailed it to Stemble. You were plenty smart, Clarence. You’d be suspicious in its absence.

Call-Me-Art stopped asking for my ID.

When positioned by her left hand, Marjorie’s right regained the ability to hold a weak fist.

Pamela’s sunny self returned. Her laugh carried across the Claveries’ backyard on Saturdays and across the tables when we met downtown for dinner. Every Thursday, when I called her apartment, the phone rang four times and went to voicemail. The first time I let out a small, undignified cackle. I’d never been so happy to be wrong. Either that or she’d chosen, Clarence. She was past you now and glowing. And still in Maisie’s post box your letters came, two, three times a week, hungrier than ever before, desperate and pecking, like birds to bread crusts.

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