Summer Morning, Summer Night (Green Town 4)

“Oh, go to a show maybe.”

“After we rest awhile.”

“You’re not tired!”

“No, no, no,” she cried, hastily. “You?”

“No, no!” he said, quickly.

They sat down and felt the comfortable darkness and coolness of the room after the bright, glaring warm day.

“I think I’ll just loosen my shoelaces a bit,” he said. “Just untie the knots a moment.”

“I think I’ll do the same.”

They loosened the knots and the laces in their shoes.

“Might as well get our hats off!”

Sitting there, they removed their hats.

He looked over at her and thought: forty-five years. Married to her forty-five years. Why, I can remember...and that time in Mills Valley...and then there was that other day...forty years ago we drove to...yes...yes. His head shook. A long time.

“Why don’t you take off your tie?” she suggested.

“Think I should, if we’re going right out again?” he said.

“Just for a moment.”

She watched him take off his tie and she thought: it’s been a good marriage. We’ve helped each other; he’s spoon-fed, washed and dressed me when I was sick, taken good care...Forty-five years now, and the honeymoon in Mills Valley—seems only the day before the day before yesterday.

“Why don’t you get rid of your ear-rings?” he suggested. “New, aren’t they? They look heavy.”

“They are a bit.” She laid them aside.

They sat in their comfortable soft chairs by the green baize tables where stood arnica bottles, pellet and tablet boxes, serums, cough remedies, pads, braces and foot-rubs, greases, salves, lotions, inhalants, aspirin, quinine, powders, decks of worn playing cards from a million slow games of blackjack, and books they had murmured to each other across the dark small room in the single faint bulb light, their voices like the motion of dim moths through the shadows.

“Perhaps I can slip my shoes off,” he said. “For one hundred and twenty seconds, before we run out again.”

“Isn’t right to keep your feet boxed up all the time.”

They slipped off their shoes.

“Elma?”

“Yes?” She looked up.

“Nothing,” he said.

They heard the mantel clock ticking. They caught each other peering at the clock. Two in the afternoon. Only six hours until eight tonight.

“John?” she said.

“Yes?”

“Never mind,” she said.

They sat.