Very Old Bones Read Online Free PDF Page B

not put that into owning the house?” I said. “It’d make more sense.”
    “I’m not buyin’ a house!” George yelled, standing up from the table. “Has everybody got that? No house. Period.”
    “You ready to go, Orson?” Billy asked softly, reaching for his cane.
    “I guess I’m ready. I haven’t had any coffee but I guess I’m ready.”
    “Let him have his coffee,” Agnes said.
    “I don’t know if I’ll make it for dinner,” George said to Agnes. “Depends on when the picnic ends.”
    “Picnic? I thought it was a political meeting,” Agnes said.
    “It’s a political picnic.”
    “What’s not political in this town?” Billy said.
    “Buyin’ a house,” George said.
    Agnes collected Annie’s breakfast dishes and her untouched eggs and put them on the counter by the sink, gave Peg’s African violets by the windowsill of the nook
their weekly watering, then sat across from me to finish her second cup of coffee. As she sat, Billy rose up on his cane.
    “I gotta do a wee-wee before we leave,” he said.
    “Good,” I said. “Time to worry is when you can’t.”
    “Stop that talk,” Agnes said.
    I stared at her and decided she was a looker. Lucky Billy. Agnes had bottled blond hair, the color of which she changed whimsically, or maybe it was seasonally. She’d put on a few pounds
since I’d last seen her, but she could handle them. She looked crisp and fresh in a red-and-white-check house dress with a box neck and two-inch straps over bare shoulders.
    “I couldn’t butt in on that conversation about the house,” Agnes said, “but I’d be glad to give a hand with the down payment. I’ve got some dollars tucked
away.”
    “That’s real nice, Agnes,” I said. “Did you tell Peg?”
    “Nobody yet. I’m just sayin’ it now ’cause it occurred to me. But if Billy hears he’ll think I’m proposin’.”
    “Have you done that before?”
    “Twenty times, how about. But he can’t see himself married. He’s been single too long.”
    “Everybody’s single till they marry.”
    “Billy’d be single even after he got married, if he ever got married, which I don’t think.”
    “He loves you, though,” I said. “Anybody can see that.”
    “Sure. But what’s he done for me lately?”
    “Maybe you ought to go out together more often, be alone. I know you’re in a lot with the family, taking care of Annie.”
    “We go to the movies once a week, and dinner after. But you’re right. We should. I also got another obligation, a patient. An old man I sit with one night a week. And another night I
take piano.”
    “How long you been taking?”
    “Twenty-four years.”
    “You must be good.”
    “I’m terrible. Maybe I’ll be good some day, but I don’t practice enough.”
    “It’s hard without a piano.”
    “Yeah. But I get a thrill playing the teacher’s. I always do a half-hour alone, before and after the lesson. And once or twice a week I play in the church basement in the afternoons.
It fills me up, excites me. You know how it is when you feel young and you know you still got a lot to learn, and it’s gonna be good?”
    “You’re a graceful person, Agnes.”
    “Yeah, well, George shouldn’t be afraid of lettin’ people do him a favor. That down payment’s not a whole lot of money, really. But I heard him tell Peg, ‘They
don’t give loans to people like me.’ “
    “What’s he mean, ‘people like me’?”
    “He doesn’t know about credit,” Agnes said. “He’s got no credit anyplace. He paid cash all his life, even for cars. Doesn’t wanna owe anybody a nickel. He
thinks credit’s bad news.”
    “So’s not having a place to live.”
    “He said he’d live in a ditch before he bought a house.”
    “He’s batty .”
    “Could be: Wouldn’t be a first in this family.” She looked up at me. “I didn’t mean that personally,” she said.
    Billy expected to have his cast removed but that didn’t happen. After Doc McDonald read the X-rays