Grace: A Novel

Chapter Eleven

166 Chapter Eleven • 1 When Bobby gets back from Schuster’s, he drinks a cup of hot chocolate to get warm, but it makes him feel like throwing up. To get away from Willie B.’s sharp eyes, he decides to walk over to the aunts’ house and deliver Celia’s letter. With the sun going down, it’s getting colder, so Bobby puts on his heaviest jacket over his sweaters and pulls his old hat down over his ears. Earlier, he had walked over to Schuster’s. Unless he has the car, he walks everywhere now. He doesn’t know when it came over him that he was too old to be getting around on a bicycle, but one day he was riding his bicycle all over town, and the next day he wouldn’t be caught dead on it. It’s parked in the garage now, gathering dust. By the time he got to Schuster’s the wind had picked up, and it was almost freezing. Schuster came out the back door just as Bobby was coming up the drive. “Come on, Cinco,” he said. “Let’s hit the garage.” Schuster’s garage is more like a barn than anything else. In fact, they don’t ever use it for a garage. Schuster’s father likes woodworking , so it’s full of tools for sanding and cutting and polishing, and he’s got a lathe out there and a power saw and a drill. Stuff like that. 167 Grace Inside, Schuster turned on the gas stove, and it began to throw out just enough heat to take the edge off the cold. The whiskey had done the rest. Schuster’s folks were in Kermit, visiting a new grandbaby, so he and Bobby put their gloves in their pockets and settled down on some old tires with a bottle of Jim Beam and some fuck books, kind of laughing at themselves for reading them. But pretty soon, Pearce drove into Schuster’s driveway, hollering, “Hey, Schuster. Hey, man, where are you?” “Oh, shit,” Schuster said. They just looked at each other for a second. With Pearce married ,itseemedlikekidstufftobereadingaboutsexinfunnybooks, so they jumped up and threw the fuck books behind an old trunk before Schuster opened the door. When Pearce came in, he had this phony grin on his red face, and his eyes kept shifting from Bobby to Schuster and back to Bobby again like he thought Bobby might hit him and Schuster might help. Bobby didn’t want to fight him, so the three of them finished the bottle. But when Pearce offered him a ride home, he turned it down. Now, he’s about a half a mile from the Brontës’ house and so cold his toes feel numb, his hands, too. The cloud-covered sky is pitch-black without the stars. Looking up at it, he stumbles, almost falls. His face feels like it’s frozen. He decides to run, but running tears up his stomach so that he has to step behind a tree and throw up. After that, he just walks fast. When he gets there, the house is dark, except for a couple of lights downstairs. Looking through the windows into the parlor , he sees that it’s empty. He walks around to the back. If the aunts are in the kitchen, he’ll leave the letter in the mailbox. But Celia’s at the sink. Washing dishes. He’s hardly ever seen Celia in a kitchen. “Celie,” he calls softly, and opening the back door, steps inside. She turns around and smiles so widely it shows her braces. “Oh, Bobby,” she says. “I’m glad to see you. I’m glad you came.” 168 Jane Roberts Wood She puts her arms around his waist and squeezes like she used to when she was a little kid. “I’ve missed you.” “Celie, I’ve missed you, too,” he says, surprised by the truth of these words. “Hey, what are you doing in the kitchen? I didn’t think you knew where the kitchen was. Where’s Ruth? And the aunts? Where are they?” “They go to bed with the chickens. That’s what they say.” And now Celia is giggling and sounding more like the old Celia. “But they don’t have any chickens.” Stepping back, she turns to the sink. She picks up a cup towel and dries a stove vessel. Then she turns around and looks at him. “I’m lonesome...