Read People Who Knock on the Door for Free Online Page A

bedecked with orange and white streamers saying “Congrats Grads!” Arthur had thanked Ruthie and said he would come. But he was not sure whether he would or not.
    “I’m not down in the dumps,” Arthur said.
    “You’re sorry because I got well,” Robbie said like a flat statement of truth.
    Arthur leaned on the spade handle. “Wha-at? Are you nuts, little brother?” Had their father been feeding Robbie some kind of crap, Arthur wondered, some kind of anti-Arthur propaganda? Arthur got to work on the spade again. “What’s Dad been telling you?”
    “He just said—God touched me.”
    “I see. Wa-al, you just keep that in mind,” Arthur drawled like a Westerner. “You be a good boy from now on.”
    Arthur went to the party at Ruthie’s at half past 10. It was good to get out of his house’s atmosphere. Rock music pulsed half a block away from Ruthie’s. Three or four bikes lay on the grass near the front door, and several cars were at the road edge and in the driveway. Arthur walked in the front door, which was open.
    People were dancing in the living room. At a glance, Arthur recognized a lot of faces from school, and there were a few older boys whom he didn’t know, probably students from C.U.
    “Hi, Arthur,” said a girl named Lucy, in blue jeans and T-shirt, barefoot. “By yourself? Where’s Maggie?”
    He was surprised that Lucy knew about Maggie, but at the same time pleased. “Away. She’s—”
    Roxanne danced in, snapping her fingers over her head, twisting. “Hi there, Art!”
    “Out of town this weekend!” Arthur shouted to Lucy over the music.
    “Right, she is,” said Roxanne, still dancing, and winked at Arthur.
    “She told you?” Arthur didn’t think Maggie and Roxanne were at all chummy.
    “Ye-es,” said Roxanne, and with a sweep of her dark eyes past Arthur to Lucy, she twirled into the thick of the dancers.
    “Get yourself a Coke or something in the back!” Lucy said, drifting off.
    Arthur tossed his jacket on a sofa which already held a heap of outer garments. He didn’t feel like dancing. He looked around for Gus and didn’t see him. A fellow and a girl were smooching on another sofa. Dull as all hell, Arthur thought, without Maggie! Might as well be another classroom, except for the booming music and the shrieks of the girls and the big laughs from the fellows. Arthur made his way to the kitchen at the back.
    A husky fellow in a white sweater was trying to persuade a girl—Sandra Boone, an idiot in Arthur’s English class—to take off with him, probably to his C.U. dorm room.
    “—nobody there this minute! My roommate’s out and won’t be back till four; I know him.”
    Sandra giggled, plucked at the boy’s sleeve, and seemed unable to make up her mind.
    Lout , Arthur thought about the husky guy, who looked maybe twenty-one and hadn’t bothered to shave, probably because he thought stubble made him look older.
    Then a little while later, Arthur was dancing, because the music was good and someone had said, “Aren’t you gonna dance tonight?” and Arthur didn’t want to look sour, because that reminded him of his father.
    Then he was riding home on his bike, having drifted out when the serious eating started in the kitchen. Ruthie had boiled a couple of cauldrons of frankfurters.
    Amazing that it was already nearly 2, and amazing that Norma’s living room light was still on behind her drawn curtains, but Arthur didn’t feel like calling on her tonight. He felt more like cruising by Maggie’s house, to see it silent and black—yet belonging to Maggie and familiar to her—but he didn’t do that either.

5
    T here was no school the following Monday or during that week. The exam results were due next Friday, and graduation, the ceremony which Arthur considered ducking out of, came on the Monday after.
    Sunday had brought, of course, the churchgoing, with Robbie, though Robbie would have fitted in better at Sunday School, Arthur thought. In the past, when