“”Musical talent‘? Since when?“

Anytime there was music on the radio, Rebecca said, he stopped whatever he was doing to listen. He seemed excited by music. He tried to sing, dance. Tignor said, “No kid of mine is going to be a dancer, for sure. Some tap-dancing darkie.” Tignor spoke with the teasing exaggeration of one who means to be funny, but Rebecca saw his face tighten.

“Not a dancer but a pianist, maybe.”

“”Pianist‘-what’s that? Piano player?“

Tignor sneered, he was coming to dislike his wife’s big words and pretensions. Yet he was sometimes touched by these, too, as he was touched by his son’s clumsy crayon drawings and attempts at walking-fast-like-Daddy.

Tignor came upon the sheet of paper with Niley’s crayon-printed T E T A N U S. And others: A I R P L A N E, P U R P L E, S K U N K. Tignor laughed, shaking his head. “Jesus. You could teach the kid every word in the damn dictionary, like this.”

“Niley loves words. He loves the feeling of ”spelling‘ even if he doesn’t know the alphabet yet.“

“Why doesn’t he know the alphabet?”

“He knows some of it. But it’s a little long for him, twenty-six letters.”

Tignor frowned, considering. Rebecca hoped he wouldn’t ask Niley to recite the alphabet, this would end in a paroxysm of tears. Though she suspected that Tignor didn’t know the alphabet, either. Not all twenty-six letters!

“This is more like you’d expect, from a kid.” Tignor was looking at Niley’s banana hat drawing. A figure meant to be Daddy (but Tignor didn’t know this clumsily drawn fattish cartoon figure was meant to be Daddy) with a yellow banana sticking from its head, half the figure’s size.

Later, restless and prowling the old house, upstairs where Rebecca kept her private things, Tignor found her word sheets and scribbled doodlings. She was stricken with embarrassment.

Mostly these were lists comprised from her dictionary. And from discarded public school textbooks in biology, math, history. Tignor read aloud, amused: “gymnosperms-angiosperms. What the hell’s this-sperms?” He glared at her in mock disdain. “Chlorophyll-chloroplast-photosynthesis.” He was having difficulty pronouncing the words, his face reddened. “Cranium-vertebra-pelvis-femur-”

Femur he uttered in a growl of disgust as feeeemur.

Rebecca took the pages from him, her face smarting.

Tignor laughed. “Like some high school kid, eh? How the hell old are you, anyway?”

Rebecca said nothing. She was confused, thinking he’d taken the dictionary from her too, and thrown it into the stove.

Her dictionary! It was her most secret possession.

Grunting, Tignor stooped to pick something fallen onto the floor. This was a sheet of paper upon which Rebecca had written, in a lazy sloping script floating down the page-

“Who’re these? Friends of yours?”

Now Rebecca was stricken with fear. The way Tignor was glaring at her.

“No. They’re no one, Tignor. Just…names.”

Tignor snorted in derision, crumpled the page and tossed it at Rebecca, striking her chest. It was a harmless blow with no weight behind it yet it left her breathless as if he’d punched her.

Yet he wasn’t in a really mean mood. Rebecca heard him laughing to himself, whistling on the stairs.

“Mommy, what’s wrong?”

Niley saw her pressing both her fists against her forehead. Her eyes reddened, shut tight.

“Mommy is ashamed.”

“”Shamed‘…?“

Niley came to stroke Mommy’s heated forehead. Niley was frowning, that old-young look to his face.

God damn why hadn’t she hidden her papers from Tignor! Better yet, thrown them away.

Now that Tignor was home, she needed to keep the run-down old house clean and neat and “sparkly” as possible. As much like the rooms of a good hotel as she could manage.

No mess. No clothes tossed about. (Tignor’s clothes and things, Rebecca put away without a word.)

The irony was, she’d stopped thinking about Hazel Jones. The man in the panama hat. The look of urgency in his face. All that seemed long ago now, remote and improbable as something in one of Niley’s picture books.

Why’d anybody give a shit about you, girl!

A man’s scornful voice. She wasn’t sure whose.

Niley was sick. A bad cold, and now flu.

Rebecca tried to take his temperature: 101° F?

Her hand trembled, holding the thermometer to the light.

“Tignor? Niley needs to see a doctor.”

“A doctor where?”

It was a question that made no sense. Tignor seemed confused, shaken.

Yet he carried Niley, wrapped in a blanket, out to his car. He drove Niley and Rebecca into Chautauqua Falls and waited in the car in the parking lot outside the doctor’s office, smoking. He’d given Rebecca a fifty-dollar bill for the doctor but had not offered to come inside. Rebecca thought He’s afraid. Of sickness, of any kind of weakness.

She was angry with him, in that instant. Shoving a fifty-dollar bill at her, the mother of the sick child. She would not give him change from the fifty dollars, she would hide it away in her closet.

Tignor was away from home often. But never more than two or three days at a stretch. Rebecca was coming to see he’d lost his job with the brewery. Yet she could not ask him, he’d have been furious with her. She could not plead with him What has happened to you? Why can’t you talk to me?

When Rebecca returned to the car with Niley, an hour later, she saw Tignor on his feet, leaning against a front fender, smoking. In the instant before he glanced up at her she thought That man! He is no one I know.

Quickly she said, “Niley just has a touch of the flu, Tignor. The doctor says not to worry. He says-”

“Did he give you a prescription?”

“He says just to give Niley some children’s aspirin. I have some at home, I’ve been giving him.”

Tignor frowned. “Nothing stronger?”

“It’s just flu, Tignor. This aspirin is supposed to be strong enough.”

“It better be, honey. If it ain’t, this ”peedy-trician‘ is gonna get his head broke.“

Tignor spoke with defiance, bravado. Rebecca stooped to kiss Niley’s warm forehead in consolation.

They drove back to Four Corners. Rebecca held Niley on her lap in the passenger’s seat, beside Tignor who was silent and brooding as if he’d been obscurely insulted. “I’d think you would be relieved, Tignor, like me. The doctor was very nice.”

Rebecca leaned against Tignor, just slightly. The contact with the man’s warm, somehow aggrieved skin gave her pleasure. A small jolt of pleasure she hadn’t felt in some time.

“The doctor says that Niley is very healthy, overall. His growth. His ”reflexes.“ Listening through a stethoscope to his heart and lungs.” She paused, knowing that Tignor was listening, and that this was good news.

Tignor drove for another few minutes in silence but he was softening, melting. Glancing down at Rebecca, his girl. His Gypsy-girl. At last he squeezed Rebecca’s thigh, hard enough to hurt. He reached over to tousle Niley’s damp hair.

“Hey you two: love ya.”

Love ya. It was the first time Tignor had ever said such a thing to them.

And so she thought I will never leave him.

“He loves us. He loves his son. He would never hurt us. He is only just…Sometimes…”

Waiting? Was Tignor waiting?

But for what was Tignor waiting?

He’d ceased to shave every day. His clothes were not so stylish as they’d been. He no longer had his hair trimmed regularly by a hotel barber. He no longer had his clothes laundered and dry cleaned in hotels. He’d spent money to look good though he’d never been overly fastidious, fussy. Now he wore the same shirt for several days in a row. He slept in his underwear. Kicked dirty socks into a corner of the bedroom for his wife to discover.