“We don’t want it,” said Arch. “What happened to Joe Wear?”
“Joe Wear.” Margaret put her hand over her mouth. From the outside you could not tell whether she was remembering or failing to remember. Even inside she was not sure. She saw the very letters of his name but could not find his face. “Joe Wear,” she said again. “He got run off is my guess.”
“By who?”
“Anybody might have done it.”
But Arch remembered the name. Joe Wear was the boogeyman who’d lived in the rooms above the alley before they did. When something inexplicable or inconvenient occurred, his father blamed Joe Wear. This damn bad knife Joe Wear left behind. This faucet never did work after Joe Wear balled it up.
“Where’d he go?” said Arch.
Margaret looked placidly at the candy in the counter. “Who? Oh darling,” she said. “I am tired.”
He couldn’t stand it, her calm, the impossibility of knowing what had actually happened. “Maybe you should go back to Little Sisters of the Poor,” he said.
Margaret turned to him. Behind the fingerprints and thumbprints, her eyes were panicked. “The orphanage?”
“The old-age home,” said Arch. “Let them take care of you.”
“I’d rather die,” she said.
Arch shrugged. So she was forgetful: she’d forget this. He could say anything to her, at long last. “OK,” he said. “You’d rather die. That’s fine”
“Betty!” said Margaret.
“Leave her alone,” said Cracker to Arch. “It’s been fifty years, nearly. Jesus, Arch. You want more coffee, Mother?”
“I always want more coffee,” said Margaret cautiously, though she hadn’t drunk a drop.
Arch kept thinking that if he asked in the right way his mother would confess. Her memory wasn’t gone entirely, just illegible in spots, like a letter long-ago wept over. It was hard for Arch not to take it personally. It felt like forgetting things was something Margaret was doing to him.
“You can’t take umbrage,” said Cracker.
“Umbrage is all I can take,” said Arch.
Just like his mother to hold on to her secrets till her memory failed. He kept looking at her. If his parents had stolen a bowling alley out from under somebody, what else might they have done?
“I think she should go to Little Sisters of the Poor,” said Arch to Cracker. “I think it’s time.”
“I thought you didn’t want to put her in a home.”
He shook his head. “All I can think,” he said.
“So we’ll see if we can find Joe Wear or his descendants.”
“It’s not that,” said Arch. “It’s, who would I have been? I hated that place.”
“Roy hated that place.”
“I am not Roy!” Arch roared. “And I hated that place! He got out and I got swallowed up.”
“You mean you married me.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“You married me and you had kids. I guess I know you didn’t like that, you walked away from it.”
“That’s not what I meant,” said Arch. “You’re not listening to me, nobody ever listens to me.”
She was quiet. “Go ahead,” she said. “Here I am listening.”
He said, “I don’t know. I don’t know. I feel like I got trapped and I only realized once I started to starve to death. And it’s nobody’s fault but that old woman’s, and she doesn’t even know what she did.”
“She did her best,” said Cracker, because that’s what you said in these cases. “And we don’t know what she did, either. Nothing would make me happier than getting rid of the bowling alley. I mean, sell it. We can’t give it away, all the years we’ve put into it.”
“I thought you were the moral one.”
“I’m the practical one,” said Cracker. “We’ll sell it. We’ll move your mother someplace she can be looked after. Mass every day if she wants, volunteers who’ll play cards with her. Then we’ll decide what to do with the rest of our lives.”
The next morning Margaret took the bus in the dark to the bowling alley and unlocked the door. Everyone thought she was past such things, buses and bus fare, keys and locks. One day you’d handled all the keys of your life and it was somebody else’s turn. She wore her nightgown and house slippers, but she carried her pocketbook. Nobody questioned an old woman, as long as she had the authority of her pocketbook.
She locked the alley door behind her. The place was hers. Not everyone has the privilege of locking people out. She’d missed it. She closed the toothy key in her fist. She was headed home.
The candy counter was full and lovely. She filled her pocketbook: lemon drops, her favorite, Mary Janes, though how would she chew them? Up the interior stairs to the old apartment. It had a forsaken smell, as though a pan had been forgotten on the burner over the tiniest flame, but for months. The quilt tossed over the sofa looked like the Sunday funnies—not jokes, but soap operas, Rex Morgan, M.D., Mary Worth, Smilin’ Jack, people in airplanes and under duress.
She had a sense she was escaping but she was not sure from what. Cold storage. Betrayal. Arch was mad at her. He’d yelled, who never yelled. She found the hidden door in the front closet and opened it up. At first she despaired, the ladder was so far overhead, but then she saw an old suitcase and she used it as a step. She was a very old woman but she could climb a ladder, so little and light it took no more effort to move her body up the rungs than it had to cross the floor. At the top she found the slide bolt but could not budge it.
Then she did. Not adrenaline but memory. As a young mother she had done this, come up to the roof. Old Margaret Vanetten Truitt got to the top of the ladder and realized this was the tricky part. The tops of ladders took scramble. Bertha gave birth at the top of a ladder! Nearly. Why had she ended up there? In emergencies you got yourself to the highest point.
Margaret dragged herself out, unfolded herself. The lights of Salford! Not really. She was only two stories up, and it was five in the morning, the darkest time. Cold up here—Margaret was always cold—and she could only just see Phillipine Square, the dark of the movie marquee, Sutherland’s Market store across the street. Nobody knows where I am, she thought, though that wasn’t true: in the apartment building behind her, an old man in his living room looked out and saw her in her nightgown, then turned back to his television. She walked to the edge. There was a wine bottle here. Maybe one of the boys had found the roof.
Windy higher up. What did that? The hatch slammed shut over the ladder. She would never be able to bend over and yank it back up. Anyhow, she’d lost the key somewhere and she was furious for reasons she could not remember except they were genuine.