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“Stop. No more. Get me an aspirin.”
Liddy obeyed. “You and Tom must stop, Grandma. This silly game, I mean. I’ll chew him out tonight. It’s not funny anymore. I thought if I let you alone, you’d stop raving about some lion. But now it’s been a week—”
Grandma said, “Do you really think we’ll ever see Spot or Kitten again?”
“They’ll be home for supper, hungry as ever,” Liddy replied. “It was crude of Tom to stuff that fur in the Garburator. I’ll stop it.”
“Will you, Liddy?” Grandma walked upstairs as in a trance. “Will you, really?”
Grandma lay planning through the night. This all must end. The dog and cat had not returned for supper, though Liddy laughed and said they would. Grandma nodded. She and Tom must tie a final knot now. Destroy the machine? But he’d install another, and, between them, put her into an asylum if she didn’t stop babbling. No, a crisis must be forced, on her own grounds, in her own time and way. How? Liddy must be tricked from the house. Then Grandma must meet Thomas, at long last, alone. She was dead tired of his smiles, worn away by this quick eating and hiding, this lizard-darting in and out doors. No. She sniffed the cooling wind at midnight.
“Tomorrow,” she decided, “will be a grand day for a picnic.”
“Grandma!”
Liddy’s voice through the keyhole. “We’re leaving now. Sure you won’t come along?”
“No, child! Enjoy yourselves. It’s a fine morning!”
Bright Saturday. Grandma, early, had telephoned downstairs suggesting her two relatives take ham and pickle sandwiches out through the green forests. Tom had assented swiftly. Of course! A picnic! Tom had laughed and rubbed his hands.
“Good-bye, Grandma!”
The rustle of picnic wickers, the slamming door, the car purring off into the excellent weather.
“There.” Grandma appeared in the living room. “Now it’s just a matter of time. He’ll sneak back. I could tell by his voice; too happy! He’ll creep in, all alone, to visit.”
She swept the house with a brisk straw broom. She felt she was sweeping out all the numerical bits and pieces of Thomas Barton, cleaning him away. All the tobacco fragments and neat newspapers he had flourished with his morning Brazilian coffee, clean threads from his scrupulous tweed suit, clips from his office supplies, out the door! It was like setting a stage. She ran about raising green shades to allow the summer in, flooding the rooms with bright color. The house was terribly lonely without a dog making noise like a typewriter on the kitchen floor or a cat blowing through it like silk tumbleweed over rose-patterned carpets, or the golden bird throbbing in its golden jail. The only sound now was the soft whisper that Grandma heard as her feverish body burned into old age.
In the center of the kitchen floor she dropped a pan of grease. “Well, look what I did!” she laughed. “Careful. Someone might slip and fall on that!” She did not mop it up, but sat on the far side of the kitchen.
“I’m ready,” she announced to the silence.
The sunlight lay on her lap where she cradled a pot of peas. In her hand a paring knife moved to open them. Her fingers tumbled the green pods. Time passed. The kitchen was so quiet you heard the refrigerator humming behind its pressed-tight rubber seals around the door. Grandma smiled a pressed and similar smile and unhinged the pods.
The kitchen door opened and shut quietly.
“Oh!” Grandma dropped her pan.
“Hello, Grandma,” said Tom.
On the floor, near the grease spot, the peas were strewn like a broken necklace.
“You’re back,” said Grandma.
“I’m back,” Tom said. “Liddy’s in Glendale. I left her to shop. Said I forgot something. Said I’d pick her up in an hour.”
They looked at each other.
“I hear you’re going East, Grandma,” he said.
“That’s funny, I heard you were,” she said.
“All of a sudden you left without a word,” he said.
“All of a sudden you packed up and went,” she said.
“No, you,” he said.
