The Rope Walk by Carrie Brown Page B

and unfamiliar food served on plates with patterns she did not recognize, and music playing that she had never heard before. There was his lifetime of being steeped in the details of his own world, so different from hers, and all of these details had flowed into him, into his skin and his hair and his breath. Her nose and forehead were mashed against his chest as they struggled; she held his arm pinned behind his back. And then Alice was seized by homesickness like a tide swirling around her knees, threatening to take her down. How she loved the old familiars of her own life: the oval shape of the mirror above her dresser with its bunch of chipped plaster grapes at the bottom of the gold frame; the ship model sailing on its dusty green felt sea in the glass box on Eli's desk; the dining room rug, whose pattern of black lines and cream-colored diamonds and rust-colored hills and green rivers was like a topographical map over which she had moved her armies; the pin-headed pieces from the Sorry game; the lollipop-colored tiddlywinks, their perfectly smooth wafers so satisfying when she tested them between her teeth.
    With a grunt, Theo released her, and she staggered back.
    Archie held open the door. “Dance this way, please,” he called to them, beckoning them in. “Eli's eggs will be cold.”
    Theo stopped bouncing then and took a deep breath, fistscocked at Alice. Alice stopped, too, fists held before her face. They locked eyes, breathing hard.
    Then Theo grinned at her, faked a jab at her belly, and took off toward Archie.
    “This way, this way,” Archie said, waving him past. He raised his eyebrows at Alice.
“He capers, he dances, he has eyes of youth, he writes verses, he speaks holiday, he smells April and May.”
    She stopped, looking up at him. How did Archie know she had been trying to figure out what Theo smelled like? But that was it. He smelled like spring, like the month of May.
    Archie bent to kiss her head as she went past.
“Now, our joy
,” he said.
“Although the last, not least.”
    During breakfast, the telephone rang. Archie pushed his chair away from the table and went into the front hall to answer it. All the boys had cell phones, but Archie had steadfastly refused to get even a cordless telephone for the house, claiming that he wanted to keep his conversations short and to the point and that wandering around while talking loudly to someone on the telephone was a sign of boorishness and not having enough to do.
    Theo had eaten two platefuls of eggs and had said that he was still hungry; now he was standing beside Eli at the stove, watching as Eli cracked more eggs into the frying pan and scrambled them with the back of a fork. “Don't you guys have a television set? I have PlayStation,” he said. “Don't you have any video games? Do you even know what a video game is?” By the time Alice heard the rumble of Archie's voice saying goodbye in the hall, she had almost forgotten that he had been on the phone; whoever had called had talked for a long time before allowing Archie to say anything in reply.
    When Archie came back into the kitchen, his hand lingered on Alice's head. “That was Miss Fitzgerald,” he said.
    “Oh, no.” Harry hunched over his coffee cup, a pantomime of misery.
    Archie sat down at the table again and began gathering up the newspaper. He ignored Harry. “Your help has been requested,” he said. “All of you. I've said you'll be over after breakfast.”
    James came into the kitchen, a towel around his neck, his hair wet. “Where are we going?”
    Archie pushed his glasses onto his head. “I gather there's some furniture—” he began.
    A chorus of groans came from the boys. Archie held up his hand. “And some weeding.”
    James poured himself a cup of coffee from the stove. “At the Fitzgeralds’? When do we have to do this?
Now?”
    Archie stood up. “Fortify yourselves appropriately,” he said. “But don't keep Miss Fitzgerald waiting.” He picked up the