by Stephen King
“Johnny? Is it you?”
“The very same.”
“How are you?”
“Fine. How’s by you?”
“I’m fine,” she said. “Glad you called. I ... didn’t know if you would.”
“Still sniffin that wicked cocaine?”
“No, I’m on heroin now.”
“You got your boy with you?”
“I sure do. Don’t go anywhere without him.”
“Well, why don’t the two of you truck on out here some day before you have to go back up north?”
“I’d like that, Johnny,” she said warmly.
“Dad’s working in Westbrook and I’m chief cook and bottlewasher. He gets home around four-thirty and we eat around five-thirty. You’re welcome to stay for dinner, but be warned: all my best dishes use Franco-American spaghetti as their base.”
She giggled. “Invitation accepted. Which day is best?”
“What about tomorrow or the day after, Sarah?”
“Tomorrow’s fine,” she said after the briefest of hesitations. “See you then.”
“Take care, Sarah.”
“You too.”
He hung up thoughtfully, feeling both excited and guilty—for no good reason at all. But your mind went where it wanted to, didn’t it? And where his mind wanted to go now was to examine possibilities maybe best left unconsidered.
Well, she knows the thing she needs to know. She knows what time dad comes home-what else does she need to know?
And his mind answered itself: What you going to do if she shows up at noon?
Nothing, he answered, and didn’t wholly believe it. Just thinking about Sarah, the set of her lips, the small, upward tilt of her green eyes—those were enough to make him feel weak and sappy and a little desperate.
Johnny went out to the kitchen and slowly began to put together this night’s supper, not so important, just for two. Father and son batching it. It hadn’t been all that bad. He was still healing. He and his father had talked about the four-and-a-half years he had missed, about his mother—working around that carefully but always seeming to come a little closer to the center, in a tightening spiral. Not needing to understand, maybe, but needing to come to terms. No, it hadn’t been that bad. It was a way to finish putting things together. For both of them. But it would be over in January when he returned to Cleaves Mills to teach. He had gotten his half-year contract from Dave Pelsen the week before, had signed it and sent it back. What would his father do then? Go on, Johnny supposed. People had a way of doing that, just going on, pushing through with no particular drama, no big drumrolls. He would get down to visit Herb as often as he could, every weekend, if that felt like the right thing to do. So many things had gotten strange so fast that all he could do was feel his way slowly along, groping like a blind man in an unfamiliar room.
He put the roast in the oven, went into the living room, snapped on the TV, then snapped it off again. He sat down and thought about Sarah. The baby, he thought. The baby will be our chaperon if she comes early. So that was all right, after all. All bases covered.
But his thoughts were still long and uneasily speculative.
2
She came at quarter past twelve the next day, wheeling a snappy little red Pinto into the driveway and parking it, getting out, looking tall and beautiful, her dark blonde hair caught in the mild October wind.
“Hi, Johnny!” she called, raising her hand.
“Sarah!” He came down to meet her; she lifted her face and he kissed her cheek lightly.
“Just let me get the emperor,” she said, opening the passenger door.
“Can I help?”
“Naw, we get along just fine together, don’t we, Denny? Come on, kiddo.” Moving deftly, she unbuckled the straps holding a pudgy little baby in the car seat. She lifted him out. Denny stared around the yard with wild, solemn interest, and then his eyes fixed on Johnny and held there. He smiled.
“Vig!” Denny said, and waved both hands.
“I think he wants to go to you,” Sarah said. “Very unusual. Denny has his father’s Republican sensibilities—he’s rather standoffish. Want to hold him?”
“Sure,” Johnny said, a little doubtfully.
Sarah grinned. “He won’t break and you won’t drop him,” she said, and handed Denny over. “If you did, he’d probably bounce right up like Silly Putty. Disgustingly fat baby.”
“Vun bunk!” Denny said, curling one arm nonchalantly around Johnny’s neck and looking comfortably at his mother.
“It really is amazing,” Sarah said. “He never takes to people like ... Johnny? Johnny?”
When the baby put his arm around Johnny’s neck, a confused rush of feelings had washed over him like mild warm water. There was nothing dark, nothing troubling. Everything was very simple. There was no concept of the future in the baby’s thoughts. No feeling of trouble. No sense of past unhappiness. And no words, only strong images: warmth, dryness, the mother, the man that was himself.
“Johnny?” She was looking at him apprehensively.
“Hmmmm?”
“Is everything all right?”
She’s asking me about Denny, he realized. Is everything all right with Denny? Do you see trouble? Problems?
“Everything’s fine,” he, said. “We can go inside if you want, but I usually roost on the porch. It’ll be time to crouch around the stove all day long soon enough.”
“I think the porch will be super. And Denny looks as if he’d like to try out the yard. Great yard, he says. Right, kiddo?” She ruffled his hair and Denny laughed.
“He’ll be okay?”
“As long as he doesn’t try to eat any of those woodchips.”
“I’ve been splitting stove-lengths,” Johnny said, setting Denny down as carefully as a Ming vase. “Good exercise.”
“How are you? Physically?”
“I think,” Johnny said, remembering the heave-ho he had given Richard Dees a few days ago, “that I’m doing as well as could be expected.”
“That’s good. You were kinda low the last time I saw you.”
Johnny nodded. “The operations.”
“Johnny?”
He glanced at her and again felt that odd mix of speculation, guilt, and something like anticipation in his viscera. Her eyes were on his face, frankly and openly.
“Yeah?”
“Do you remember ... about the wedding ring?”
He nodded.
“It was there. Where you said it would be. I threw it away.”
“Did you?” He was not completely surprised.
“I threw it away and never mentioned it to Walt.” She shook her head. “And I don’t know why. It’s bothered me ever since.”
“Don’t let it.”
They were standing on the steps, facing each other. Color had come up in her cheeks, but she didn’t drop her eyes.
“There’s something I’d like to finish,” she said simply. “Something we never had the chance to finish.”
“Sarah ...” he began, and stopped. He had absolutely no idea what to say next. Below them, Denny tottered six steps and then sat down hard. He crowed, not put out of countenance at all.
“Yes,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s right or wrong. I love Walt. He’s a good man, easy to love. Maybe the one thing I know is a good man from a bad one. Dan—that guy I went with in college—was one of the bad guys. You set my mouth for the other kind, Johnny. Without you, I never could have appreciated Walt for what he is.”
“Sarah, you don’t have to ...”
“I do have to,” Sara contradicted. Her voice was low and intense. “Because things like this you can only say once. And you either get it wrong or right, it’s the end either way, because it’s too hard to ever try to say again.” She looked at him pleadingly. “Do you understand?”
“Yes, I suppose I do.”
“I love you, Johnny,” she said. “I never stopped. I’ve tried to tell myself that it was an act of God tha
t split us up. I don’t know. Is a bad hot dog an act of God? Or two kids dragging on a back road in the middle of the night? All I want ...” Her voice had taken on a peculiar flat emphasis that seemed to beat its way into the cool October afternoon like an artisan’s small hammer into thin and precious foil “... all I want is what was taken from us.” Her voice faltered. She looked down. “And I want it with all my heart, Johnny. Do you?”
“Yes,” he said. He put his arms out and was confused when she shook her head and stepped away.
“Not in front of Denny,” she said. “It’s stupid, maybe, but that would be a little bit too much like public infidelity. I want everything, Johnny.” Her color rose again, and her pretty blush began to feed his own excitement. “I want you to hold me and kiss me and love me,” she said. Her voice faltered again, nearly broke. “I think it’s wrong, but I can’t help it. It’s wrong but it’s right. It’s fair.”
He reached out one finger and brushed away a tear that was moving slowly down her cheek.
“And it’s only this once, isn’t it?”
She nodded. “Once will have to put paid to everything. Everything that would have been, if things hadn’t gone wrong.” She looked up, her eyes brighter green than ever, swimming with tears. “Can we put paid to everything with only the one time, Johnny?”
“No,” he said, smiling. “But we can try, Sarah.”
She looked fondly down at Denny, who was trying to climb up onto the chopping block without much success. “He’ll sleep,” she said.
3
They sat on the porch and watched Denny play in the yard under the high blue sky. There was no hurry, no impatience between them, but there was a growing electricity that they both felt. She had opened her coat and sat on the porch glider in a powder-blue wool dress, her ankles crossed, her hair blown carelessly on her shoulders where the wind had spilled it. The blush never really left her face. And high white clouds fled across the sky, west to east.
They talked of inconsequential things—there was no hurry. For the first time since he had come out of it, Johnny felt that time was not his enemy. Time had provided them with this little air pocket in exchange for the main flow of which they had been robbed, and it would be here for as long as they needed it. They talked about people who had been married, about a girl from Cleaves Mills who had won a Merit scholarship, about Maine’s independent governor. Sarah said he looked like Lurch on the old Addams Family show and thought like Herbert Hoover, and they both laughed over that.
“Look at him,” Sarah said, nodding toward Denny.
He was sitting on the grass by Vera Smith’s ivy trellis, his thumb in his mouth, looking at them sleepily.
She got his car-bed out of the Pinto’s back seat.
“Will he be okay on the porch?” she asked Johnny. “It’s so mild. I’d like to have him nap in the fresh air.”
“He’ll be fine on the porch,” Johnny said.
She set the bed in the shade, popped him into it, and pulled the two blankets up to his chin. “Sleep, baby,” Sara said.
He smiled at her and promptly closed his eyes.
“Just like that?” Johnny asked.
“Just like that,” she agreed. She stepped close to him and put her arms around his neck. Quite clearly he could hear the faint rustle of her slip beneath her dress. “I’d like you to kiss me,” she said calmly. “I’ve waited five years for you to kiss me again, Johnny.”
He put his arms around her waist and kissed her gently. Her lips parted.
“Oh, Johnny,” she said against his neck. “I love you.”
“I love you too, Sarah.”
“Where do we go?” she asked, stepping away from him. Her eyes were as clear and dark as emeralds now. “Where?”
4
He spread the faded army blanket, which was old but clean, on the straw of the second loft. The smell was fragrant and sweet. High above them there was the mysterious coo and flutter of the barn swallows, and then they settled down again. There was a small, dusty window which looked down on the house and porch. Sarah wiped a clean place on the glass and looked down at Denny.
“It’s okay?” Johnny asked.
“Yes. Better here than in the house. That would have been like ...” She shrugged.
“Making my dad a part of it?”
“Yes. This is between us.”
“Our business.”
“Our business,” she agreed. She lay on her stomach, her face turned to one side on the faded blanket, her legs bent at the knee. She pushed her shoes off, one by one. “Unzip me, Johnny.”
He knelt beside her and pulled the zipper down. The sound was loud in the stillness. Her back was the color of coffee with cream against the whiteness of her slip. He kissed her between the shoulder blades and she shivered.
“Sarah,” he murmured.
“What?”
“I have to tell you something.”
“What?”
“The doctor made a mistake during one of those operations and gelded me.”
She punched him on the shoulder. “Same old Johnny,” she said. “And you had a friend once who broke his neck on the crack-the-whip at Topsham Fair.”
“Sure,” he said.
Her hand touched him like silk, moving gently up and down.
“It doesn’t feel like they did anything terminal to you,” she said. Her luminous eyes searched his. “Not at all. Shall we look and see?”
There was the sweet smell of the hay. Time spun out. There was the rough feel of the army blanket, the smooth feel of her flesh, the naked reality of her. Sinking into her was like sinking into an old dream that had never been quite forgotten.
“Oh, Johnny, my dear ...” Her voice in rising excitement. Her hips moving in a quickening tempo. Her voice was far away. The touch of her hair was like fire on his shoulder and chest. He plunged his face deeply into it, losing himself in that dark-blonde darkness.
Time spinning out in the sweet smell of hay. The rough-textured blanket. The sound of the old barn creaking gently, like a ship, in the October wind. Mild white light coming in through the roof chinks, catching motes of chaff in half a hundred pencil-thin sunbeams. Motes of chaff dancing and revolving.
She cried out. At some point she cried out his name, again and again and again, like a chant. Her fingers dug into him like spurs. Rider and ridden. Old wine decanted at last, a fine vintage.
Later they sat by the window, looking out into the yard. Sarah slipped her dress on over bare flesh and left him for a little bit. He sat alone, not thinking, content to watch her reappear in the window, smaller, and cross the yard to the porch. She bent over the baby bed and readjusted the blankets. She came back, the wind blowing her hair out behind her and tugging playfully at the hem of her dress.
“He’ll sleep another half hour,” she said.
“Will he?” Johnny smiled. “Maybe I will, too.”
She walked her bare toes across his belly. “You better not.”
And so again, and this time she was on top, almost in an attitude of prayer, her head bent, her hair swinging forward and obscuring her face. Slowly. And then it was over.
5
“Sarah ...”
“No, Johnny. Better not say it. Time’s up.”
“I was going to say that you’re beautiful.”
“Am I?”
“You are,” he said softly. “Dear Sarah.”
“Did we put paid to everything?” she asked him.
Johnny smiled. “Sarah, we did the best we could.”
6
Herb didn’t seem surprised to see Sarah when he got home from Westbrook. He welcomed her, made much of the baby, and then scolded Sarah for not bringing him down sooner.
“He has your color and complexion,” Herb said. “And I think he’s going to have your eyes, when they get done changing.”
“If only he has his father’s brains,” Sarah said. She had put an apron on over the blue wool dress. Outside, the sun was going down. Ano
ther twenty minutes and it would be dark.
“You know, the cooking is supposed to be Johnny’s job,” Herb said.
“Couldn’t stop her. She put a gun to my head.”
“Well, maybe it’s all for the best,” Herb said. “Everything you make comes out tasting like Franco-American spaghetti.”
Johnny shied a magazine at him and Denny laughed, a high, piercing sound that seemed to fill the house.
Can he see? Johnny wondered. It feels like it’s written all over my face. And then a startling thought came to him as he watched his father digging in the entryway closet for a box of Johnny’s old toys that he had never let Vera give away: Maybe he understands.
They ate. Herb asked Sarah what Walt was doing in Washington and she told them about the conference he was attending, which had to do with Indian land claims. The Republican meetings were mostly wind-testing exercises, she said.
“Most of the people he’s meeting with think that if Reagan is nominated over Ford next year, it’s going to mean the death of the party,” Sarah said. “And if the Grand Old Party dies, that means Walt won’t be able to run for Bill Cohen’s seat in 1978 when Cohen goes after Bill Hathaway’s Senate seat.”
Herb was watching Denny eat string beans, seriously, one by one, using all six of his teeth on them. “I don’t think Cohen will be able to wait until ’78 to get in the Senate. He’ll run against Muskie next year.”
“Walt says Bill Cohen’s not that big a dope,” Sarah said. “He’ll wait. Walt says his own chance is coming, and I’m starting to believe him.”
After supper they sat in the living room, and the talk turned away from politics. They watched Denny play with the old wooden cars and trucks that a much younger Herb Smith had made for his own son over a quarter of a century ago. A younger Herb Smith who had been married to a tough, good-humored woman who would sometimes drink a bottle of Black Label beer in the evening. A man with no gray in his hair and nothing but the highest hopes for his son.