Morgan's Passing by Anne Tyler Read Free Book Online Page A

couldn’t backtrack all that way, havingstarted out so speedy and chipper. Instead he turned and took off at a run, holding on to his hat, pounding down the sidewalk with the dog not far behind. The dog began to lose heart. Morgan felt her lose it, though he didn’t dare turn to look. He felt her falter and then stop, gazing after him and spasmodically wagging her tail. Morgan clutched his aching chest and stumbled up onto a bus. Puffing and sweating, he rummaged through his pockets for change. The other passengers darted sidelong glances and then looked away again.
    They passed more stores and office buildings. They whizzed through a corner of Morgan’s old neighborhood, with most of the windows boarded up and trees growing out of caved-in roofs. (It had not done well without him.) Here were the Arbeiter Mattress Factory and Madam Sheba, All Questions Answered and Love Problems Cheerfully Solved. Rowhouses slid by, each more decayed than the one before. Morgan hunkered in his seat, clutching the metal bar in front of him, gazing at the Ace of Spades Sandwich Shop and Fat Boy’s Shoeshine. Now he was farther downtown than he had ever lived. He relaxed his grip on the metal bar. He sank into the lives of the scattered people sitting on their stoops: the woman in her nightgown and vinyl jacket nursing a Rolling Rock beer and breathing frost; the two men nudging each other and laughing; the small boy in a grownup’s sneakers hugging a soiled white cat. A soothing kind of emptiness began to spread through him. He felt stripped and free, like the vacant windows, frameless, glassless, on the upper floors of Syrenia’s Hot Pig Bar-B-Q.

3
    T he downtown branch of Cullen Hardware was so old and dark and filthy, so thick with smells, so narrow and creaking, that Morgan often felt he was not so much entering it as
plunging
in, head first, leaving just his bootsoles visible on the rim. There was a raised platform at the rear, underneath the rafters, for his office: a scarred oak desk, files, a maroon plush settee, and a steep black Woodstock typewriter whose ribbons he had to wind by hand. This used to be Bonny’s grandfather’s office. This store was Grandfather Cullen’s very first establishment. Now there were branches everywhere, of course. Nearly every shopping mall within a fifty-mile radius had a Cullen Hardware. But they were all slick and modern; this was the only real one. Sometimes Bonny’s Uncle Ollie would come in and threaten to close it down. “Call this a store?” he would say. “Call this a paying proposition?” He would glare around him at the bulky wooden shelves, where the Black & Decker power tools looked foolish beside the old-fashioned bins of nails. He would scowl at the rusty window grilles, which had been twisted out of shape by several different burglars. Morgan would just smile, anxiously tugging his beard, for he knew that he tended to irk Uncle Ollie and he was better off saying nothing at all. Then Uncle Ollie would storm out again and Morgan would go back to his office, relieved, humming beneath his breath. Not that closing this branch down would have left him unemployed; for Bonny’s sake, the Cullens would feel bound to find him something else.But here he had more scope. He had half a dozen projects under way in his office—lumber stacked against the stairs, a ball-peen hammer in his OUT basket. He knew of a good place to eat not far off. He had friends just a few blocks over. His one clerk, Butkins, did nearly all the work, even if he wasn’t so interesting to talk to.
    Once, a few years back, Morgan had had a girl clerk named Marie. She was a very young, round-faced redhead who always wore a loose gray smock to protect her clothes from the dust. Morgan started pretending she was his wife. It wasn’t that he found her all that appealing; but he slowly built this scene in his mind where she and he were the owners of a small-town