Read People Who Knock on the Door for Free Online

his door. He had left a note on the floor outside his room last night: “I can sleep till 10,” and this was service, his mother arriving with a mug of coffee!
    His mother came in quietly and shut the door. “I’m making Robbie stay in bed, because the doctor’s coming at noon to look at him and I don’t want him to run up a temperature.” She was whispering. “I hear you and your father had a row last night.”
    Arthur sipped the coffee. “Not a row. He said I was out late. Hardly midnight.”
    “He’s still a bit wrought up, Arthur. You know, about Robbie.”
    “Sit down, Mom.” Arthur removed a shirt from the seat of his straight chair.
    His mother sat. “You saw Maggie last evening?”
    “Yes. But don’t mention her name again to Dad, would you?”
    “Why?” His mother smiled.
    “Because I have the feeling Dad’s against her. Against my seeing anybody in the evenings now.”
    “Oh, that’s nonsense.” Already she looked about to get up from the chair. “Richard sees the world in a different way now. I’m not sure how long it’ll last. Maybe not long.”
    The English exam that afternoon lasted two hours. Maggie was taking the same exam, and Arthur glanced at her a couple of times across the room. She sat far to his right, so he saw her in profile, her head bent, her lips slightly parted. Arthur chose a four-line poem of Byron’s of which to complete the last two lines, and as “a poem you have memorized” one of Robert Frost’s. He supplied one title each for James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, and Theodore Dreiser, a writer whom he rather liked, and completed the title of Willa Cather’s “O,—!” Then a one-page “essay” on the influence of the media on American speech. Grammar: multiple choice, and one was supposed to check the right one. At the end of the exam, when those who hadn’t already departed stood up, stiff, grinning with relief, frowning with dread, Arthur headed straight for where Maggie had been sitting and could not find her, not in the corridor either, or when he ran down the stairs to the main hall.
    Had she deliberately tried to avoid him? Maybe. But why?
    Arthur rode home on his bike. Robbie was walking around in the backyard in pajamas and bathrobe, which was probably against his mother’s wishes. He drank a glass of water, then went to the telephone and dialed Maggie’s number. She lived nearer the school than he, and had a car besides. The telephone rang seven or eight times, and finally Maggie answered.
    “Me,” Arthur said. “Looked for you just now.”
    “I wanted to get home.”
    Long pause. Arthur didn’t want to talk about the exam. “Well—I’ll see you tomorrow night?” They had made a date for Saturday night.
    “I don’t think so—after all. Because I’m going away tomorrow morning for the weekend. With my family.—I’m sorry, Arthur.”
    Arthur was baffled when they hung up. Maggie had sounded distant. Had he done something wrong last night? Nothing that he could remember or imagine.
    He resolved not to telephone Maggie on Saturday or Sunday, in case she hadn’t gone away with her family, because it would look as if he were checking on her. If she stayed in town over the weekend, it was easy enough for her to call him.
    On Saturday afternoon, Robbie was up and dressed, still in a sunny mood, and maybe he’d been born again too? Their mother made Robbie sit bundled up in a blanket in the sun every afternoon, and the sun had put roses in his cheeks and bleached the cowlick over his forehead. Robbie had missed his final exams neatly, which didn’t bother him.
    “Why’re you so down in the dumps?” Robbie asked Arthur.
    Arthur was sharpening the spade. The telephone had just rung; his mother had summoned him, and it hadn’t been Maggie but a girl acquaintance called Ruthie. She had asked him to a party tonight, one of the “grad parties” that were taking place all over town in the next days. Chalmerston’s Main Street was