Sweet Everlasting

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was playing children's games again. It helped me out so much that when I'd start to have a spell, sometimes I could think about Ruth's face or try to hear the way she laughed and it would bring me out of it. It didn't happen a lot, but sometimes. The glider had a squeak to it, a little cricket sound when it went back and forth, and I'd been pushing off with my foot the whole time I'd been telling the story, and now Susan put her hand on my knee and held it still and the sound stopped, and she cried so hard it took me by surprise. I don't know what I expected, but I didn't think it would tear her up like that. !9 I reckon Pete ain't seen either one of his children now for about two and a half years. They got their own families and jobs, and times are pretty hard for them. The daughter, she'll write him a letter or a postcard once a month or so, and they'll both of them call him every now and then, but not regular. The only regular thing about it is the time of day they call, if they do. They'll both of them call him right after suppertime, and before nine o'clock. Never known either one to phone earlier or later, except on Christmas once. So from about seven to nine o'clock I can see Pete get different. He likes to go for his drive late in the day, but he won't ever be out of the house from seven to nine. And he gets real quiet, and this is while one of the news shows is still on, when he wants to be talki56 ing back to the television. Sometimes I catch him looking at the phone, and if it rings, he won't let it ringtwice. Every so often, he'll call them too, but it ain't the same. After they've called him and he hangs up, he'll act like he's just had him two cups of strong coffee —talking and arguing with the television or with me —but if he's the one that called them, after he hangs up, he ain't solively. And some nights, when nine o'clock has come and gone he'll get to looking older than he is, like some of the folks I've seen at the nursing home that don't have no hope left. One night he got to looking that way, and we'd sat together not saying nothing for a good while when he up and told me maybe I was lucky not to have ever had no children. I just let him talk. He said some folks you choose to love and some you don't. He'd chose to love his wife, he said, and he'd loved her true—and after he'd been with her a long time, it was too deep to ever let go—but he said he hadn't decided to love his children. Didn't have no choice about it. He said it's strange how you start to look at things different when you got children, said this to me real serious, like he wasexplaining something to me that I didn't know nothing about. He said as long as you only got to worry about yourself and maybe somebody else that's grown and can take care of themselves anyhow , the world looks one way.But let a baby come, and things start to look different. You start to think about the years ahead, when maybe you never did before. He said that having a child would even make you look back at things in a different way.You can't ever see your mama and daddy the same, he said, once you've got somebody of your own to take care of. You start to realize what they went through, and what all *57 they wanted for you, and maybe why they done some things you always thought was wrong. He said he didn't think he'd ever really seen his own daddy for the man he was till his own baby was born. I didn't say nothing. After a while Pete got tired, I reckon, and...