He turned onto his own street and glanced down the block. By some miracle, there was a parking space free directly in front of his house. He pulled up next to it and checked his rearview mirror. Above the row of cartons looming in his backseat he could just make out Lily’s Toyota slowing to a stop behind him. He shifted to neutral and got out to speak with her, and Lily rolled down her window as he approached and looked up at him expectantly.
“You take this space here,” he told her, “and I’ll look for something up ahead.”
“Okay,” she said, and she closed her window again while he returned to his car.
But up ahead he found nothing—not in his own block or in the next one. He had to turn down a side street, where he parked clumsily and too far from the curb because he was in such a rush to get back to the house. By that time, he’d kept Lily waiting so long that he didn’t even bother unloading a couple of cartons to take with him before he hurried to meet her.
She was no longer in her car, though. The driver’s seat was empty. And when he peered through the rear window he found that the recliner was gone.
He glanced up at his front porch and saw the inner door standing open. He climbed the steps two at a time, already calling “Hello?” as he entered.
Lily was in the living room. She was shoving the recliner a few inches right, a few inches left as she positioned it in a corner. And Claude was dragging away the rocking chair that had stood in that corner till now.
“Oh,” Eddie said. “Well, hi, Claude! How are you?”
“What do you think?” Lily asked, straightening up and brushing her palms off. “Is this the right place for it?”
“Sure! It’s great! Aunt Lily, this is Claude Evers. Claude, this is—”
“Oh, yes, we two are bosom buddies,” Lily said. “We’ve just lugged a recliner up an entire set of porch steps together.” She laughed and turned to Claude. “You’ve got dust all across your front,” she told him. “I guess my housekeeping’s showing.”
“That might actually be from the rocker,” Claude said. He looked ruefully down at his T-shirt.
“I’m sorry it took me so long to park,” Eddie told Lily.
“That’s quite all right!” she said, and she picked up her purse from the seat of the recliner and gave him a kiss on the cheek. “Okay, buddy, I’m off. I’ll call to say goodbye before I leave for good, though. It won’t be for another week or so.”
“Okay…well…thanks again for all the stuff, Aunt Lily. And for lunch.”
“My pleasure!” she said. “Thank you for that lovely wine.” She trilled her fingers at Claude. “Bye, Claude.”
“Bye, Lily. Nice meeting you.”
Eddie walked her to the front door, and he stood watching till she got into her car. Then he returned to the living room. “What happened?” he asked Claude.
“What do you mean, what happened?” Claude said. He had hold of the rocking chair again and was sliding it toward the stairs.
“How come you two ran into each other?” Eddie asked.
“She just told you how. I look out the front window; I see this woman trying to haul this huge recliner out of her car; what am I supposed to do? You can’t expect me to let her struggle with it on her own.”
“Well, that is just…transparent,” Eddie said.
“Excuse me?”
“You must have at least suspected who she was, and yet you fall all over yourself rushing out to be seen.”
“I’m thinking we could put the rocker up in the guest room,” Claude said.
“And how did you explain your presence?” Eddie demanded.
Claude released the rocker and turned to look at him. He said, “Why should I have to explain my presence?”
Eddie didn’t even have words for this. He just flung his hands out helplessly. There was a silence.
Then Claude said, “Oh, babe. She knows.”
Eddie dropped his hands.
“She knew all along,” Claude said.
And he resumed sliding the rocker across the room. When he reached the stairs, he picked it up by both arms and began trudging upward as Eddie watched.
A slow bloom was coming over him, a flush that warmed his face. Of course she knew. He saw that now. And it wasn’t only Lily who knew, because here he was, forty-one years old, and yet no one in his family had ever asked him whether he had a girlfriend. No one had said, at weddings, “Your turn next, Eddie!” And he remembered how his cousin Robby the Boy, watching TV with him years ago, had abruptly switched channels when somebody onscreen called somebody else a faggot.