Chapter 5 Under the Streetlight

Romy Fraley came to the January meeting because Miss Upham had made her promise, and because she had run out of reasons that felt like reasons. She walked in with her coat still on and stood just inside the door, and the room did the thing she had been dreading for four months: it went quiet, and then it went loud, and then it was careful. "Romy." Junie was already up. "Tea." "I don't need tea." "You need tea," Junie said, and went for the pot. Romy sat in her usual chair, the one with the split cane seat, which had been left in the ring all winter by nobody's arrangement and everybody's. The table was the same. The two doors on sawhorses. The brown teapot with the chipped spout. She had been sleeping in a hatchback for four months and the room had kept her chair, and she did not know what to do with the fact that this made her want to leave more than it made her want to stay. They talked about the book for a while. The January book was a slim novel about a woman who returns to her hometown to sell her mother's house, and it was fine, it was more than fine, and Romy had not finished it, and she said so, and Annette said, "You can have mine next month," in a tone that Romy had heard her use with students. Around the third cup, Annette said it. "You'll come stay with me," she said. "I have the room that was my son's. It's just sitting there. There's no reason for it to sit there." The room held still. Romy looked at her. "I'm not asking," Annette said. "I'm offering. You'd have your own key. Come and go." "Annette," Romy said. "I'm not a fool, Romy. We all know. Blythe saw the car in December and we've been sitting on it like — " "Like a casserole," Romy said. "Yes," Annette said, meeting her eyes. "Like a casserole. So let me just say it plainly. There's a bed. It's empty. Say yes." And Romy, who had spent nine years cleaning the houses of women like Annette Wickersham, who had scrubbed the grout in Annette's guest bath once for six hours and been paid in cash and told she had done a *thorough* job, in the tone of a woman grading a hard test — Romy felt the floor of herself go out from under her and did not know where the anger came from, only that it was there, hot and exact and older than the winter. "Say yes to the room your son left," she said. Annette went white. "Romy," Junie said. "No," Romy said. "She brought him up. Not me. I've been sleeping in a car and keeping my mouth shut for four months so that no one in this town would have to say the sentence *poor Romy Fraley* in the grocery store, and I'm not going to trade that for a bed in the house of the woman who — " She stopped. She had gone somewhere she did not want to go and she made herself stop, and the stopping cost her something. Vernon, who had said nothing all meeting, said, "That was low, Romy." "Yes," Romy said. "It was." Annette stood up and walked out into the bakery, and they heard the bell over the door, and then the street was quiet. Nobody looked at Romy. That was worse than if they had. Sadie had her hands wrapped around a cup she wasn't drinking. Cassie was looking at the baby, who was asleep. Maeve was looking at the table. Junie stood by the teapot with her shoulders low. Sadie was doing the arithmetic of the last four months, and the arithmetic did not make her look good. The car under the maple. The one-word message. The flyer at the library she had photographed eleven times because she had wanted a room full of people, and then, when one of the people had gone missing, she had wanted, more than anything, not to be the one who asked. She thought about her mother, who would have called. She thought about the salary that made her mother stop asking questions. She wanted to say something and knew that anything she said now would be for her own benefit, so she said nothing, and hated the nothing, and promised herself a future action, which is the most comfortable promise a person can make. Only Glenna looked at her, and Glenna's look had no pity in it at all, which Romy recognized the way you recognize water after a long time in the desert. "Walk me to my car," Glenna said, to the room, and it was not a request, and it got everyone moving at once, stacking cups and finding sleeves, and it gave Romy a door to stand near that was not a door she had to leave through alone. The meeting ended. People found their coats. Nobody said anything meaningful, which was the mercy of the circle and also, on some nights, its cowardice. Romy got as far as the door and Glenna said her name. "Not tonight," Romy said. "Not tonight," Glenna agreed. "Next month. Come early." "What?" "Come early," Glenna said. "Half past one. I set the chairs alone and I'm seventy next year and it takes me longer than it used to. Come early and help me carry them." Romy stood in the doorway with her hand on the frame. "I'm not offering you a bed," Glenna said. "I'm asking for help. You're the only one of them who knows how the table goes together." It was the most ordinary sentence said to her in four months, and Romy had to look at the wall for a second because of it. "Half past one," she said. "Half past one." Romy went out. The streetlight over Court Street was on, and it was snowing again, the soft windless kind that made the town look gently handled. She walked to the lot and did not let herself turn around, because she could feel Glenna at the window watching, and she did not want to see it, and she also did not want it to stop. Behind her, in the back room, Glenna stood at the glass with her bag on her arm until the gray hatchback pulled out of the lot and turned toward the river and was gone. She had known the shape of it since September. She had known it the way she had known about her own money, the way you know a thing you are not ready to say, which is to say she knew it and had arranged her days around not knowing it. That was the trouble with a warm room. You could keep a person in it for two hours a month and call that company, and then send her out into the snow at five o'clock, and drive home, and sleep. Glenna turned off the lamp and locked the back door and went out through the bakery, where the day's unsold bread sat bagged on the counter with a hand-lettered card that said *free to a good home.* She took one loaf, because Junie would only throw it out, and walked the four blocks to her house with the snow settling on her collar, and stood a while on her own porch before going in, looking at the streetlight, and at her own dark windows, and at the size of a house that had held two people once and now held one, and did not go in for a long time. ---