The Little Friend

Harriet went upstairs and sat on her window seat and looked out her bedroom window. The streets were hot and empty. All day long, the clouds passed by. At four o’clock in the afternoon, she walked over to Edie’s house and sat on the front steps with her chin in her hands until Edie’s car rolled around the corner at five o’clock.

Harriet ran to meet her. Edie rapped on the window and smiled. Her navy suit was a little less sharp now, rumpled from the heat, and as she climbed out of the car her movements were creaky and slow. Harriet galloped along the walk beside her, up the steps and onto the porch, breathlessly explaining that her mother had proposed moving to Nashville—and was shocked when Edie only breathed deeply, and shook her head.

“Well,” she said, “maybe that’s not such a bad idea.”

Harriet waited.

“If your mother wants to be married, she’s going to have to make a little effort, I’m afraid.” Edie stood still a moment, sighed—then turned the key in the door. “Things can’t continue like this.”

“But why?” wailed Harriet.

Edie stopped, closed her eyes, as if her head hurt. “He’s your father, Harriet.”

“But I don’t like him.”

“I don’t care for him either,” snapped Edie. “But if they’re going to stay married I reckon they should live in the same state, don’t you?”

“Dad doesn’t care,” said Harriet, after an appalled little pause. “He likes things just the way they are.”

Edie sniffed. “Yes, I suppose he does.”

“Won’t you miss me? If we move?”

“Sometimes life doesn’t turn out the way we think it ought to,” Edie said, as if relating some cheery but little-known fact. “When school starts …”

Where? thought Harriet. Here, or Tennessee?

“… you should throw yourself into your studies. That’ll take your mind off things.”

Soon she’ll be dead, thought Harriet, staring at Edie’s hands, which were swollen at the knuckles, and speckled with chocolate-brown spots like a bird’s egg. Libby’s hands—though similar in shape—had been whiter and more slender, with the veins showing blue on the back.

She glanced up from her reverie, and was a bit shocked at Edie’s cold, speculative eyes observing her closely.

“You ought not to have quit your piano lessons,” she said.

“That was Allison!” Harriet was always horribly taken aback when Edie made mistakes like this. “I never took piano.”

“Well, you ought to start. You don’t have half enough to do, that’s your problem, Harriet. When I was your age,” said Edie, “I rode, and played violin, and made all my own clothes. If you learned how to sew, you might start taking a little more interest in your appearance.”

“Will you take me out to see Tribulation?” Harriet said suddenly.

Edie looked startled. “There’s nothing to see.”

“But will you take me to the place? Please? Where it was?”

Edie didn’t answer. She was gazing over Harriet’s shoulder with a rather blank look on her face. At the roar of a car accelerating in the street, Harriet glanced over her shoulder just in time to see a metallic flash vanish around the corner.

“Wrong house,” said Edie, and sneezed: ka-choo. “Thank goodness. No,” she said, blinking, fishing in her pocketbook for a tissue, “there’s not much to see out at Tribulation any more. The fellow that owns the land now is a chicken farmer, and he may not even let us up to look at the place where the house was.”

“Why not?”

“Because he’s a fat old rascal. Everything out there’s gone to pieces.” She patted Harriet on the back, distractedly. “Now run along home and let Edie get out of these high heels.”

“If they move to Nashville, can I stay here and live with you?”

“Why Harriet!” said Edie, after a shocked little pause. “Don’t you want to be with your mother and Allison?”

“No. Maam,” Harriet added, observing Edie closely.

But Edie only raised her eyebrows, as if amused. In her infuriating, chipper way, she said: “Oh, I expect you’d change your mind about that after a week or two!”

Tears rose to Harriet’s eyes. “No!” she cried, after a sullen, unsatisfying pause. “Why do you always say that? I know what I want, I never change my—”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, shall we,” said Edie. “Just the other day I read something Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams when he was an old man, that most of the things he’d worried about in his life never came to pass. ‘How much pain have cost us the evils that never happened.’ Or something of the sort.” She glanced at her wristwatch. “If it’s any comfort, I think it’ll take a torpedo to get your mother out of that house, but that’s my opinion. Now run along,” she said to Harriet, who stood staring at her balefully, with red eyes.

————

As soon as he swung round the corner, Danny pulled over in front of the Presbyterian church. “Godamighty,” said Farish. He was breathing hard, through the nostrils. “Was that her?”

Danny—too high and overcome to speak—nodded his head. He could hear all kinds of small, frightening noises: trees breathing, wires singing, grass crackling as it grew.