Morgan's Passing by Anne Tyler Page B

at the window. Morgan invented an elaborate sort of paddlewheel device to tip squirrels off the bird feeder. He sanded each paddle carefully and fitted it into place. He felt comforted and steadied by this kind of work. It made him think of his father, a methodical man who might have been much happier as a carpenter than as an ineffectual high-school English teacher. “One thing our family has always believed in,” his father used to say, “is the very best quality tools. You buy the best tools for the job: drop-forged steel, hardwood handles. And then you take good care of them. Everything in its place. Lots of naval jelly.” It was the only philosophy he had ever stated outright, and Morgan clung to it now like something carved in stone. His father had killed himself during Morgan’s last year of high school. Without a hint of despair or ill health (though he’d always seemed somewhat muted), he had taken a room at the Winken Blinken Motor Hotel one starry April evening and slit both wrists with a razor blade. Morgan hadspent a large part of his life trying to figure out why. All he wanted was a reason—bad debts, cancer, blackmail, an illicit love affair; nothing would have dismayed him. Anything would have been preferable to this nebulous, ambiguous trailing off. Had his father, perhaps, been wretched in his marriage? Fallen under the power of racketeers? Committed murder? He rifled his father’s correspondence, stole his desk key and his cardboard file box. He mercilessly cross-examined his mother, but she seemed no wiser than Morgan, or maybe she just didn’t want to talk about it. She went around silent and exhausted; she’d taken a job at Hutzler’s selling gloves. Gradually, Morgan stopped asking. The possibility had begun to settle on him, lately, as imperceptibly as dust, that perhaps there’d been no reason after all. Maybe a man’s interest in life could just thin to a trickle and dry up; was that it? He hated to believe it. He pushed the thought away, any time it came to him. And even now he often pored over the file box he had stolen, but he never found more than he’d found at the start: alphabetized instruction sheets for assembling bicycles, cleaning lawnmowers, and installing vacuum-cleaner belts. Repairing, replacing, maintaining. One step follows another, and if you have completed step two, then step three will surely come to you.
    He sanded the paddlewheel, nodding gently. He hummed without any tune.
    Butkins came up the stairs to say, “I’m going now, if that’s all you need. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
    â€œEh?” said Morgan. “Is it time?” He straightened and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. “Well, yes, surely, Butkins,” he said. “So long, then.”
    The store fell silent and grew fuzzy with darkness. Passers-by hurried home to supper without even glancing in. Morgan got to his feet, put on his parka, and made his way up the aisle. He switched off the lights and locked the three massive, burglar-proof locks. From outside, the place looked like an antique photograph: lifeless, blurred, the knobs and bulges in its window amystery forever. Maybe Grandfather Cullen’s ghost came here, nights, and roamed the aisles in a daze, ruminating over the rechargeable hedge clippers. Morgan turned his collar up and ran to catch the bus.

5
    A t supper the grownups sat bunched at one end of the table as if taking refuge from the children—Morgan in his hat, Bonny and Louisa, and Morgan’s sister, Brindle, wearing a lavender bathrobe. Brindle had her mother’s sallow, eagle face and hunched posture, but not her vitality. She sat idly buttering pieces of French bread, which she placed in a circle on the rim of her plate, while Louisa recounted, word for word, a cooking program she’d been watching on TV. “First he put the veal shanks endwise in a pot. Then he poured over them a