Read Celestial Navigation for Free Online Page B

gets worse?”
    “Oh, well, I don’t—”
    “You can’t just let it go on indefinitely.”
    “Oh, well, it’s not as if he’s hurting anyone.”
    “I will never understand this world,” I said. “More is tolerated every day. Nobody bats an eye.”
    I left. I went out through the parlor, passing Jeremy, who continued staring into space. Listen here! I wanted to say. Just come
out
of this, jerk yourself up by your own bootstraps, it’s all a matter of will. Do you think nobody else has days when he wants to give up?
    I went back into Mother’s room, squashed the letter inside the jewelry box and slammed the lid. Keep your English china. I yanked the rug straight and folded an afghan, I shook out Mother’s shapeless gray gabardine coat and took it to hang in the coat closet. And then, as I was just closing the closet door, I chanced to look again at Jeremy. He sat with his hands pressed flat between his knees as if he were cold. His eyes had an empty look. A man without landmarks, except for the unavoidable ones of getting born and dying. You could imagine that dying was what he was waiting for while sitting in that parlor chair, since there didn’t seem to be anything else ahead of him.
    I took my own coat from the closet and put it on. I went over to Jeremy and tapped him on the shoulder. “Come,” I said.
    He raised his head. “Hmm?” Then he saw me buttoning my coat and he drew back and looked alarmed.
    “All I want is for you to come outdoors a minute,” I said.
    “Um, perhaps I—”
    “Surely you’re not afraid to do
that
much.”
    He rose and stood beside the chair, with his knees bent a little like Mr. Somerset. I took his hand to lead him toward the door. As we passed the closet I thought of getting his coat, but that would have made him suspicious. We went out on the stoop. “My,” I said, “I believe it’s finally going to clear. Don’t you? Smell that air. We may have nice weather for Mother’s funeral after all.” In actuality it was still a bitdamp—spray in our faces, the streetlights misty—but I was hardly thinking of what I was saying. And certainly Jeremy was not listening. “Has it been a particularly rainy fall?” I asked him, and he said, “Hmm? No, um—no,” meanwhile looking around him nervously, first at the house and then the street and then me.
    “We’ve had
very
nice weather in Richmond,” I said.
    I heard the front door fall shut behind us. Shut and lock, automatically. Jeremy heard it too and said, “Amanda—”
    “Come and look at Mother’s poor rosebush,” I said. I led him down our walk and onto the main sidewalk. “Do you think there’s any life left in it? If it were pruned, perhaps—”
    “Yes, maybe pruned,” he said. He was so eager to agree, so glad we were only going to look at Mother’s rosebush. But I led him on, with my arm hooked through his. I could feel the lumpy weight of his body resisting me, hanging back, although both of us pretended it wasn’t happening. We reached the yard next door. “Who does this belong to?” I asked him.
    “What?”
    “Who lives here now?”
    “It’s been partitioned up, I believe,” he said. He raised his other hand to free his arm from me. I let myself be pried loose, but as he turned back toward the house I took hold of him again. “It’s a shame to see these old houses go,” I told him. “Why, I remember when those two up ahead were owned by a single family. The Edwardses, remember them? They had so many children they needed two houses to hold them all. Catholic. And
now
look. They’ve been turned into apartments too, I’ll bet you anything. Haven’t they?”
    “What? Oh, yes.”
    We had reached the end of the block, where we stopped to wait for a traffic light. Jeremy’s teeth were chattering and I wished now that I had brought his coat. Yet it wasn’t
that
cold. And he did have his sweater, his limp gray sweater withthat single button fastened. I reached over and buttoned the