Songs in Ordinary Time

by Mary McGarry Morris

“Mom!” Norm said as she slid the meat onto his plate.

  “I cut them all the same size!” she said.

  “No, I mean your…your choice of conversation when we’re trying to eat here,” he said, and she laughed as she came to Alice. Laughed gratefully, Benjy knew.

  “No,” Alice said, her hand over her plate.

  “You love steak!” his mother said.

  “Not anymore.” She looked around the table. “I don’t eat flesh.”

  Norm started to put down his fork. “Here,” his mother said quickly, dividing the extra piece between Norm and Omar.

  Benjy stared down at the rare meat, its red juice spreading over the plate, seeping into his potatoes. He watched Omar slice a ragged wedge, then stuff it into his mouth, his eyes closing with pleasure. A trace of meat juice welled on his lower lip, and he licked it away. Benjy forced himself to cut a small piece. He held his breath while he chewed, looking at Omar as he and Norm discussed the best way to move the washing machine down into the cellar next to the dryer. The cellar stairs were steep, and the narrow landing had a high railing. Eyes wide, Benjy swallowed and tried not to gag.

  “Simple enough,” Omar said. “We’ll remove the railing.”

  Look at him, he kept thinking. Look at him, and everything will be all right.

  His mother said she didn’t care how they did it as long as it was soon. She couldn’t wait to get it out of this tiny kitchen.

  Omar glanced toward the vibrating machine. “It’ll leave a good-size space in there,” he said in a mushy voice, his cheeks bulging with food.

  Alice half turned in her chair and shaded her eyes so she wouldn’t have to see him eat. His mother glared at her.

  “Mom,” Benjy said to get her attention. “What’ll you put there?”

  She wasn’t sure, she said, maybe one of those tall metal cupboards with all the shelves.

  The Klubocks had one of those, he told her. Only it was out in the back hall. Mrs. Klubock didn’t like the look of it. Mr. Klubock kept his house tools, and nails, and stuff like that in it.

  “Well, maybe one of those utility carts,” she said uneasily.

  Omar was swabbing up his steak juice with his bread. Instead of eating the bread, he sucked the juice from it.

  Alice groaned.

  “Get one with a plug in it,” Norm said. “Remember that old lady in Sutwell, Omar? She had one. She had everything on it, even her hot plate.” Now Norm was soaking up the juice with his bread. Even in this he imitated Omar now. “She had this big house, but she only lived in two rooms. Remember her, Omar? The one that started to shiver.” Norm laughed. He looked at his mother. “She said Omar made her cold. Her teeth were chattering,” he said, making his chatter, too.

  “Some people,” Omar sighed, with a quizzical glance at Benjy’s plate. Benjy gratefully passed the uneaten steak.

  Alice rolled her eyes.

  “What do you think?” his mother asked Alice, who only shrugged and kept eating. “You could at least say something,” she said in a low voice.

  “What?” said Alice. “What do you want me to say?”

  His mother took a deep steadying breath, and Norm shook his head in disgust. Alice and Norm hadn’t spoken in days.

  “Now, Mother,” Omar chided, wagging his head at Marie.

  “Mother?” Alice said under her breath.

  He reached for the last of the potatoes. “I think Alice has more important things on her mind than refurbishing this here kitchen.”

  “What do you mean by that?” Alice asked, staring at him.

  “Alice!” His mother hit the table.

  “Jesus,” Norm groaned and threw up his hands.

  “Well, what does he mean?” Alice said to Norm.

  “He doesn’t mean anything! Jesus, what’re you…what’re you doing?” Norm said.

  She looked at Omar now. “You don’t know what I have on my mind. Maybe you think you do, but you don’t.”

  “No, I do not.” Omar sat stiffly and looked directly at her. “As a matter of fact, I can’t imagine.”

  “That’s right, because if you did…” Alice began.

  “Alice!” his mother warned. “You apologize right now.”

  “For what?” she asked.

  “No, no,” Omar protested, raising his finger. “Your point is well taken, Alice. No one can know the mind of another, and to suggest as much is nothing less than belittling. Actually, I find your candor quite refreshing.”

  “Thank you,” she said with a bright smile. “Mother taught me that, to be honest no matter what. To hold my head up high and never quit, never give in. And most important of all, to never ever fall for anyone’s bullshit.”

  The washing machine stopped. Into the silence came the clink of forks as they busied themselves with the food on their plates. From the corner of his eye, Benjy saw Alice still smiling. He saw his mother’s hands shake as she put down her knife and fork and reach for her milk glass. Norm pushed back his plate. Omar kept clearing his throat. “Well,” he sighed, patting his belly. “That was a fine meal.”

  They all shared Marie’s vacillation between anger at Alice’s foul moods and fear that the wrong word might send her over the edge again, Benjy more than any of them. Yesterday a letter had come for her from Father Gannon. Benjy had slipped it out of the mailbox and called his mother at work. She told him to hide it. When she got home she ripped it up, unopened, then flushed the pieces down the toilet. She made him promise not to say anything. “It’s for her own good,” she said, adding that someday he’d understand, but she needn’t have; he knew about such things and had for a long, long time.

  Alice got up and scraped her dish into the garbage. She had barely eaten anything. As she went upstairs they just sat there listening to her footsteps. The minute her door closed, Norm stood and put his arms around the washing machine. With a grunt he tilted it forward. He was sure the two of them could carry it down. Omar said he didn’t doubt Norm’s strength, certainly not with that physique. It was himself, his own back he didn’t trust, he said, wincing as he massaged his neck. “Somewhere along the line, I managed to throw it all out of whack.”

  “Were you ever in a fight?” Norm asked with a hopeful smile.

  “Only when I had to,” Omar said. “When there was no other choice.”

  “How many?” Norm asked.

  “Not as many as you, I’m sure,” his mother snapped.

  “They weren’t really fights,” Omar said in a grave tone. “They were more like standoffs. Tests of will in the field of moral combat.” He winked at Norm.

  The image of two men grappling in a bright clearing flashed into Benjy’s thoughts, and he could not take his eyes from Omar.

  “Which are the only fights worth fighting!” his mother said, her stern gaze on Norm.

  “Exactly!” said Omar with a brisk salute that made her laugh.

  Norm was outside cleaning Omar’s car, as he did every night after supper. Benjy stayed at the table. His mother was reading the paper with her usual commentary between paragraphs. The thought of a corpse rotting all summer long out in those woods did something to her, she said, shuddering. Omar murmured agreement as he ate butterscotch pudding and tallied the day’s sales.

  Benjy had stopped going on the road with Norm and Omar. Omar said there was no sense in Benjy sitting in the back seat of the car all day, when he probably had better things to do. So he was back to watching television and answering the phone, with the fear it might be his father, or the police wanting to know about Earlie Jones. School started next week. Last night he had dreamed that his father pushed him into the pool. He kept his eyes closed as he sank to the bottom. A hand touched his, and he grabbed it, but it was the hand of a dead man, Earlie Jones, lying as he had in the woods, on his back, staring up at nothing. The shows and the dreams and the lies were all merging into one strange story. It was too close. There was the dead man’s sodden leather shoe he had wrested from Klubocks’ dog and thrown into the ga
rage. There might still be strips of the red-and-yellow shirt in the damp mulch of the lilac shrub. There might be Luther and Reverend Pease returning to Atkinson, their quarry the boy who had sent them on a wild-goose chase, the boy who had not only spoken to Earlie Jones, but had seen a thick wad of bills in Earlie’s hands. He imagined them telling the police, Find the boy and you will find the killer.

  She looked up from the paper. “It’s weird how it just throws everything off,” she said. “I mean, it makes you think back. You say, ‘August third, oh that was the day the car broke down, or July fourth, the night we went to the band concert.’ But then you realize how much more there was to it. I mean, the car broke down, and I was so upset, it was just about the worst thing that could have happened, and the whole time something so much worse, something horrible was happening.” Frowning, she shook her head. “Do you know what I mean?”

  “Yes,” Omar said, spoon clinking as he scraped the pudding bowl clean. “You mean it’s all a matter of perspective.”

  “That’s right! It’s like you have this set picture and then all of a sudden,” she said with a swirl of her hands, “all the parts in it change.”

  Spoon poised, Omar looked at her. “No. Nothing really changes. Life keeps on happening. Right?”

  “I know. It just gives me a funny feeling, I guess,” she sighed, taking up the paper again.

  It wasn’t until Benjy exhaled that he realized he had been holding his breath.

  She read for a few minutes more, then looked up. “Well, I’ll tell you one thing. Grondine Carson might be odd, but he’s no killer.”

  “I’m sure he’s not,” Omar murmured, rising from the table.

  Benjy watched him put his bowl in the sink. He rinsed his hands, then turned with a pensive look and stood wiping them on a dish towel. He chewed his lip. Was this it? Was he going to tell her? It would be a relief. He looked at his mother’s troubled expression as she continued reading, and knew it would be the end of everything.

  She slapped the paper closed. “I mean, I knew him when I was a little girl. And there’s certain things children just know!” she said with a startling vehemence.

  Omar chuckled. “And I’ll bet you were just one darling child.” He kissed the top of her head, then went to use the phone.

  Benjy’s chest hurt. At times Omar’s equanimity seemed a force, a strength to emulate. If he wasn’t worried or frightened, then everything must be all right, but how could it be when Benjy couldn’t think straight, because nothing made sense, because he had seen the knife in the swollen flesh, and now the police said there had been no weapon near the body. Through it all, Omar continued to seem so unperturbed, so uninvolved, that in these last few days Benjy had begun to feel a new kind of terror. If only Omar would glance his way, break into a sweat, tremble, or stammer. If he would pull him aside once, just once, to say something, anything, whether in fear or reassurance, but he did not. Omar had known Earlie Jones, and yet it was as if the death had nothing at all to do with him. How could that be? Benjy wondered, hearing him dial the phone. Even if everything he had told Benjy was true, even if he was innocent, how could he be so unconcerned unless there was something wrong with him? Something terribly wrong.

  “Lord, Lord, Lord,” Omar sighed, turning from the phone. “He went and did it again. Roy Gold’s got himself another unlisted number.”

  His mother spun around. “He can’t do that! What about us? What about all his investors?”

  “Don’t worry,” Omar said, bending to kiss the top of her head again. “It’s just Gold’s way of stepping out of the limelight a bit.”

  “But what’ll we do?” she asked.

  “Same as last time,” Omar assured her. “I’ll give him a few days; then I’ll just hop in the car and drive down myself.”

  “But…” she began.

  “Faith,” he cut in. “Faith,” he said, smiling down at her. Faith. Yes, Benjy hoped, faith.

  Like faith, there seemed no end to the money. There was the new electric dryer, the new vacuum cleaner, the new bedspread, thick and snowy-white, the flacon of French perfume, the white urn lamp, the freezer filled with real ice cream instead of the insipid store brand. Alice’s tuition had been paid, and tonight Omar had given Marie the day’s receipts so Alice could buy clothes for school. A hundred dollars. That was a lot of money for a day’s worth of selling soap, Alice had said. It was still on the table.

  When Benjy wondered about this, Norm confided that Omar must have been trying to impress their mother and Alice. They had made only twenty dollars today, so that was probably a few days’ worth of sales.

  “He does that. Sometimes he says it’s more so she won’t worry,” Norm admitted, adding that Omar was a super salesman. He could sell anything to anyone.

  “But you’re doing all the selling,” Benjy reminded him. “You said he stays in the car now.”

  “Well, yah,” Norm said. “Now that I’ve learned all his techniques.”

  “So Omar just drives you around now?”

  “Yah, basically,” Norm said with a proud shrug.

  “That’s weird,” Benjy said.

  “You think everything’s weird,” Norm said. “That’s because you’re so weird.”

  That was certainly true, Benjy knew. Weird and getting weirder. All day long he had been thinking of Grondine Carson being strapped into the electric chair. Maybe the pigman had killed Earlie Jones. According to the paper, he still wouldn’t talk to the police about it. But if he was innocent, wouldn’t he want to talk to everyone, to anyone who would listen?

  It was nine o’clock, and Omar and his mother had gone out for a ride. Alice was upstairs. Norm had fallen asleep on the couch watching television. Benjy dozed next to him.

  The phone rang and Benjy sprang for it.

  “Hello?” he said, then winced at the familiar sound of his father’s ragged breathing. Yesterday he had come here banging on the doors and windows until Jessie Klubock told him to go away before she called the police.

  “Marie?” his father cried. “Oh pet…”

  “She’s not here,” he said.

  “She’s there,” his father insisted. “I know she’s there.”

  He held his breath as his father began to sob. It was true in every way. She wasn’t here. The angry panicky woman she’d been was gone. That was Omar’s power, he suddenly realized, the calm, the force that could pull them along with him. Bad things happened, and yet Omar was able to rise above it all.

  Norm grabbed the phone away, but Benjy could still hear his father’s voice. “You tell her over my dead body she’ll marry that fucking—”

  “I’ll tell her, Dad!” Norm shouted over the drunken raging. “I’ll gladly tell her!” He slammed down the phone, then stood there, hand poised, waiting. It rang again, and he jerked it to his ear so suddenly that Benjy heard it clunk against his head. “Don’t call here again, you hear me? If you—” Norm’s head shot up. “Oh. Umm, no, he’s not. Can I take a message?” He gestured for Benjy to get him a pen and some paper. “Claire Mayo,” he repeated, then nodded, listening. “Yah, yah, I’m getting it. I’m writing it all down. Basement filled with sister’s soap nobody wants…. Better come get it out or you’ll call the police…. Gee, Miss Mayo, have you tried selling it? Okay, okay, I’m listening. Yah, I’m writing it down. A what? A shower hookup? A turquoise bath mat and eight dove-gray plates?” He looked at Benjy now with disbelief. “Your white urn lamp and the month’s rent he still owes you.” They both stared at the lamp their mother was so proud of.

  “What the fuck does this mean?” Norm said after he hung up. He threw down the list.

  “May Mayo’s crazy, so maybe they both are,” Benjy said weakly.

  The phone rang again. It was their father. Norm bellowed that if he called again he’d go over there and rip the goddamn phone out of the wall.

  Norm waited until their mother had gone to bed before he showed Omar the list. Omar laughed and said May Mayo had sold him th
ose things and now must be afraid to tell her sister. The month’s rent had been part of the price of her franchise, which she was also probably afraid to admit to her sister.

  “Oh well,” Omar sighed. “The Good Samaritan gets it again, right between the eyes.” He started up the stairs, sighing with every step.

  “Didn’t he say he bought the shower thing from some plumbing guy or something?” Norm asked after they heard the door close.

  “I don’t know,” he said. But he knew, just as Norm did.

  “Boy, they must really be weird, huh? Those Mayo sisters,” Norm said.

  “Yah,” he said. “They must be.”

  They turned off the lights and had started up the stairs when the slow creaking began overhead. They whispered good night and tiptoed to their rooms. Benjy knelt on his bed and forced the window open. Cool air rushed into the room. He lay down and tried to hear only the crickets.

  On Saturday, Benjy was helping Norm transfer the junk from Norm’s dead car into their mother’s trunk. They had just returned from the dump, with another trip to go. This morning Omar had told Norm that when he got the car cleaned out and had all his parts together he would give him a hand on the engine.

  “Check under the seats,” Norm ordered before Benjy could close the front door. Norm’s back glistened with sweat as he stretched and grunted with a pleasure Benjy did not share. Didn’t he know Omar wasn’t going to help fix his car, that it was just another promise, as easily uttered as his compliments, and as empty? The washing machine was still in the kitchen, the paint can still in the corner. Last night’s wind had bounced the last shutter off the house. The back door squeaked again, the kitchen chairs had begun to wobble, and the shower hose had slipped from the tile so often it always lay in the tub now, like a long green snake slick with soap slime.

  “What the hell’s this?” Norm said, pulling a stained leather shoe from under his seat. “Oh,” he groaned, flinging it into the tall grass. “What a disgusting smell.”

  It was Earlie’s shoe. In panic, Benjy kicked the grass to cover it.