A Hole in the Universe by Mary Mcgarry Morris

should’ve asked first,” he said as she continued to stare down at him. He gestured up at the plywood nailed to the window. “If you want, I could go up and measure for the glass. Might as well, now that the ladder’s out.”
    “No, thank you.” She shut the door.
    He lifted the heavy wooden ladder onto his shoulder and carried it into his garage. It gave him great pleasure to slide it over the rafters where his father had stored it.
    He had just sat down to eat when the phone rang. Dennis said Mrs. Jukas was very upset. She thought Dennis would be taking the ladder. She didn’t know it was just going to go into the garage right next door where anyone could still go get it to break into her house.
    “I locked the garage,” Gordon said.
    “That’s what I told her, but she says she’s calling the Salvation Army to come for it.”
    “No! That’s Dad’s ladder. You tell her I want it, I’m keeping it.” In the silence his voice faltered. “It was Dad’s.”
    “Jesus Christ, don’t you get it?”
    “Yes. I know. She’s scared.”
    “She’s scared all right. She’s scared of you.”
    Delores Dufault called the Dearborn store and left a message for Albert that she had to close early today because of a dentist’s appointment. She outlined her eyes in dusky blue, put on fresh lipstick and generous spritzes of Sweet Freesia, the cologne she’d always worn to Fortley. At four-fifteen she was steering a grocery cart through the Nash Street Market. She pushed it all the way back to the meat counter, moving slowly as she looked down each aisle. Gordon was in the farthest corner, arranging mounds of green and red grapes in the slanted case. Every time he reached forward, his shirt hiked up his bare back. His red apron ties dangled at his sides.
    In a smaller person, shyness often bestows obscurity, an easy invisibility. But with Gordon’s size it seemed to convey a brooding force, as contradictory as it was intimidating. In school she had understood his ducked head and averted eyes when he entered the classroom, then his quick cringing slide into the seat. Always big herself, she knew the misery, after some blunder, gaffe, wrong answer, or startling barrage of allergic sneezes, of wanting to disappear, to just shrivel up and die.
    Delores had managed to keep her Fortley visits a secret from her family until one day last year when Lisa Loomis had rushed Jimmy into the clinic with a bad reaction to a bee sting.
    “Loomis . . . Loomis . . . My sister Delores knew a Loomis once.” Her sister Karen, the triage nurse, had pretended to struggle for the connection, when everyone of a certain age knew exactly who the Loomises were. There had been only one Loomis family in town, and the trial had been covered by all the Boston papers. Jerry Cox’s father had been an all-American football player, and until that unthinkable night, Jerry had been on a similar track. The papers had even printed variations of Gordon’s hated nickname: Gloomis. The Gloom. Gloomer. Loomer. The stories had depicted a dramatic contrast between Gloomis and the handsome, sandy-haired Jerry Cox, who had made the mistake of trying to be kind to the class creep.
    “Oh! So you must be Delores Dufault’s sister,” Lisa had said in her easy way. “Delores is great. She always manages to make our trips to Fortley seem like fun.”
    With that revelation, the four Dufault sisters had descended upon Delores the very next morning. What was wrong with her? My God, hadn’t she read enough Dear Abby letters to know what happened to women who got mixed up with prisoners? Was she that lonely? If she had that much time on her hands, then why not spend some of it with her nieces and nephews instead of trying to impress Lisa Harrington with what a good sport she was?
    “I hope you’re not going to be seeing him now that he’s home,” Karen had said just the other day when she called. She’d heard that Gordon Loomis was back living in the old house on