Little Less Than Kind Page 19
“A is for Abby B for the boy C for the company D for my Old Brother Death is his name A V E” Aaron looked up. “What is that? D A V E? Your name?”
“Oh, no, no, no,” said David. “Hail!”
“Hail?”
“As in Hail and Farewell. Ave. Ave.”
“Latin!”
“Yes, yes. But the boy asked me if we had been brothers.” David sat down with his hand shielding his eyes.
“What he needed it to mean,” murmured Aaron. He looked at his friend, concerned. “David?”
“Excuse me. I can’t help thinking of Hob. He must have done that on his last day in the office. When he knew where he was going. Thinking of him that day…” David’s eyes were hidden. “He … as Gary would say … was my best friend.”
“I loved him so,” cried Felicia. “I adored him. Everything he said or did. I was even jealous of Cousin Abby.”
They looked at her. “Hob?” said David softly.
Tears slid on her cheeks. “Why do you think,” she said to David, “that I used his name? Once, on a terrible day, he said something true to me, Hob Cunningham did. And it was the best, most loving thing! Old Brother Death, he said to me. When my mother was dead and my father kept saying she’d gone to heaven. Yes, I know. But Hob Cunningham said it was hard. And it’s very hard. Life is! So I loved him. I was so young. I see, now, I loved him—some impossible ways. He didn’t know it … In ray dreams, do you see? Do you see?”
David nodded. He could not have spoken.
And Cleona shrieked in the hall. Felicia got up and wobbled to her. Cleona enfolded the girl and wailed for joy. And Felicia wept a little.
The men were silent. Then Aaron said musingly, “And the boy didn’t recognize his father’s phrase?”
“In the years of the boy,” said David, “there was Abby.”
“Who couldn’t have borne it.” Aaron rose. “Old friend. I must get home to my dinner. Rafe Lorimer all right, is he?”
“I spoke to him at Justin’s bedside. He wept and he wailed,” said David softly, “and he called upon the Lord to witness … that Rafe knew it, all the time.”
(Felicia was asking for a glass of milk. Cleona was delighted. They went away.)
So David said, “Hob fathers a boy like Ladd. Rafe fathers a boy like Justin. And a girl like this one. What do we conclude?”
“What you already know,” said Aaron, with the faintest accent on the pronoun. “That every child is a new and holy mystery and it was God Who made him.”
“But we must raise them.”
“They grow. We train them … up, as you say … for a little while. But they are in the world, not in our pockets.”
“Ah, and that’s risky?”
“Surely.”
“They meet what they meet?”
“They do. Some of them are lucky.”
“And choose?” David swept on. “And the risk goes both ways?”
“For worse? For better? Surely.”
“Ah,” said David.
They walked to the front door together. Cleona’s rejoicing and the girl’s soft voice were a song in the kitchen.
“I see you paddled her,” said Aaron mildly.
“What?”
“Good night.”
“Thanks, Aaron, and good night. Oh, I meant to ask … When may I come to see the boy?”
“I’ll let you know,” said Aaron fondly.
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
copyright © 1963 by Charlotte Armstrong
copyright renewed 1991 by Jeremy B. Lewi, Peter A. Lewi, and JacquelinLewi Bynagta
ISBN: 978-1-4532-4562-0
This edition published in 2011 by MysteriousPress.com/Open Road Integrated Media
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