Searching for Caleb

Duncan came in with his oldest clothes on: a white shirt worn soft and translucent and a shrunken pair of dungarees. His arms and legs gawked out like a growing boy's. He had a boy's face still, the expression trustful and the corners of his mouth pulled upward. With his hair and skin a single color and his long-boned, awkward body he might have been Justine's brother, except that he seemed to be continually turning over some mysterious private thought that set him apart. Also he moved differently; he was slower and more deliberate. Justine ran circles around him with his cup of coffee until he stopped her and took it from her hands.

"I could be dressed and gone by now, the rest of you would still be lolling in bed," she told him.

He swallowed a mouthful of coffee, looked down into the cup and raised his eyebrows.

Justine went back through the living room, where Meg's mattress lay empty with her blanket already folded in a neat, flat square. She knocked on the bathroom door. "Meg? Meggie? Is that you? We're not going to wait all day for you."

Water ran on and on.

"If you set up housekeeping there the way you did yesterday we'll leave you, we'll walk right out and leave you, hear?"

She tapped the door once more and returned to the kitchen. "Meg is crying again," she told Duncan.

"How can you tell?"

"She's shut up in the bathroom running the faucet. If today's like yesterday, what are we going to do?" she asked, but she was already trailing off, heading toward her bedroom with her mind switched to something else, and Duncan didn't bother answering.

In the bedroom, Justine dressed and then gathered up heaps of cast-off clothing, a coffee cup and a half-empty bottle of bourbon and a Scientific American. She tried to fold her blanket as neatly as Meg's.

Then she straightened and looked around her. The room swooped with shadows from the swinging lightbulb. Without furniture it showed itself for what it was: a paper box with sagging walls. In every corner were empty matchbooks, safety pins, dustballs, Kleenexes, but she was not a careful housekeeper and she left them for whoever came after.

When she returned to the kitchen her grandfather and Duncan were standing side by side drinking their coffee like medicine. Her grandfather wore his deerskin slippers: otherwise, he was ready to leave. No one was going to accuse him of holding things up. "One of the trials I expect to see in hell," he said, "is paper cups, where your thumbnail is forever tempted to scrape off a strip of wax. And plastic spoons, and pulpy paper plates."

"That's for sure," Duncan told him.

"What say?"

"Where's your hearing aid?" Justine asked.

"Not so very well," said her grandfather. He held one hand out level, palm down. "I'm experiencing some discomfort in my fingers and both knees, I believe because of the cold. I was cold all night. I haven't been so cold since the blizzard of eighty-eight. Why are there not enough blankets, all of a sudden?"

Duncan flashed Justine a wide, quick smile, which she returned with the corners tucked in. There were not enough blankets because she had used most of them yesterday to pad the furniture, shielding claw feet and bureau tops and peeling veneer from the splintery walls of the U-Haul truck, although Duncan had told her, several times, that it might be best to save the blankets out. This was still January, the nights were cold.

What was her hurry? But Justine was always in a hurry. "I want to get things done, I want to get going," she had said. Duncan gave up. There had been no system to their previous moves either; it seemed pointless to start now.

Meg came into the kitchen and claimed her coffee without looking to left or right-a neat, pretty girl in a shirtwaist dress, with short hair held in place by a sterling silver barrette. She was scrubbed and shining, buttoned, combed, smelling of toothpaste, but her eyes were pink. "Oh, honey!" Justine cried, but Meg ducked out from between her hands. She was seventeen years old. This move was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. Justine said, "Would you like some bread? It's all we've got out."

"No, thank you, Mama."

"I thought we'd have breakfast when we get to what's-its-name, if it's not too long to wait."

"I'm not hungry anyway."

She said nothing to her father. It was plain what she thought: If it weren't for Duncan they would never have to move at all. He had gone and grown tired of another business and chosen yet another town to drag them off to, seemingly picked it out of a hat, or might as well have.

"Your father will be driving the truck all alone," Justine said, "since last time it made Grandfather sick. Would you like to ride with him?" She never would let a quarrel wind on its natural way. She knew it herself, she had no tact or subtlety. She always had to be interfering. "Why not go, he could use the company."