With the pretense of looking around the interior, Joy Sweetland turns away to hide how she curls her fingers properly and types on her legs. I c-a-n n-o-t a-l-l-o-w H-e-n-r-y t-o m-a-r-r-y a c-r-a-z-y p-e-r-s-o-n. The sentence shows up in her imagination, in her mind. Her view shows clean white paper rolling around the platen. In the center of her machine metal typebars nestle in a row, raised letters at their ends, lower case and capital, ready to hit the ribbon and leave marks at her directive key strokes. Words appear facing her on the inside of her forehead. She has named the process head-typing.
Joy regrets her instructional tone when she says to Henry, “Remember, four minutes, and please stay silent.” Inside the abandoned and decaying former sanatorium, known throughout their town as the Crazy House, anxiety has made her treat her boyfriend — likely soon to be fiancé, then husband and father of her children — as if he is still in her typing class. But Henry Wilder graduated from high school her first year as a teacher, class of 1948, more than four years ago.
Two summers after that, in search of a tool to edge her lawn, Joy had walked into Trusty’s Hardware where Henry had found her the best clipper in the store and given her the on-sale price. Joy handed him the cash and noticed, besides his inviting demeanor, a wide chest and shoulders on the boy she’d remembered only for his poor grasp of spelling. At his bold suggestion that she allow him to take her to the county fair the coming weekend, Joy had hedged and stammered, distracted by the smells of aftershave and lumber emanating from his skin.
“I just turned 21.” Henry had known what she was thinking. He pointed to himself with both thumbs. “I can buy liquor, and if Uncle Sam calls me up for Korea, I’m plenty old enough for that, too.” Henry gestured around the store. “I’m sure hoping that doesn’t happen, though, because I stand to get promoted to manager here soon.” He paused to wink at her. “Anyway, I’m not going anywhere before Saturday night, so I’ll pick you up at 7:00.” He’d refused to count Joy’s change back until she said yes.
Now they’ve been going together nearly two years and, because she has given him an ultimatum for the sake of their future, Henry has acquiesced to her terms: Joy will stand in each room of the Crazy House for four minutes, waiting for a sign, while Henry keeps time. If by the end of their Crazy House tour Joy is convinced of her sanity, and after a six-month period of mourning for her parents has passed, she will allow Henry to surprise her with a ring.
It’s been four months already since the early morning, while out trolling, Tom Thompson, the fellow with the farm closest to town on the north edge, had spotted Rodney and Sally Sweetland’s Alumacraft wrong side up in a favorite cove. Joy’s parents had been faces down, the humps of their matching plaid mackinaws bobbing — the two of them capsized and drowned in their perpetual, mutual pursuit of wall-eyed pike. Outside the coroner’s office, never taking his cracked thumbs from where they hooked under his suspenders, Tom had spared Joy no details of how he’d found Rodney and Sally. Like some kind of curious ghoul, shoulder to shoulder with the police chief and Mayor Williams, Tom kept his head down, but his eyes peeked up at her standing alone while he said he thought she would want to know at least her parents had had each other and also that the boat had been righted and towed back to the marina. It was in fine shape, a better rig than his, if she was thinking of selling it.
***
In the Crazy House, Henry appears un-insulted by Joy’s reiteration of their agreement. He holds up four fingers then points to his watch to show that he understands his job. Joy has chosen four minutes in each room because, she reasoned, three minutes seemed cliché and predictable, and five minutes too long.
Growing up, like other men in town his age, Henry had used the Crazy House as a hideout and refuge. This morning in the back yard, he remembered where boys had cut it and how to pull the chain link fence apart for Joy to slip through. Then he showed her the way to move a broken back door and enter into an employee cloak room with cubbies and coat hooks still attached to the walls. In its time, the Crazy House could accommodate up to fifty patients, inmates they were called, something Joy knew from her time reading and rereading and reading again a few of the asylum’s old contracts and pamphlets filed for the sake of history in the town hall’s basement. The same old papers told how inmates could be admitted for being: manic, alcoholic, sexually immoral, criminalistic, insane, neurotic, schizophrenic, paranoid, epileptic, psychotic, feeble-minded, blind, deaf, or tubercular, among other conditions of which Joy does not understand the meaning. She’d also learned that inmates’ relatives paid — by the financial standards of when the asylum opened in the 1890s to when it closed with the onset of the Depression — substantially.
Now cobwebbed corners and chipping plaster feature in the once-posh building, every inch of the place an implication. Joy head-types, r-e-s-o-l-v-e and for a few seconds pretends to look out the broken window. While she reads the word she’s written in her head and feels it shore her up, Henry spreads his arms like a tour guide to show her the great room and its massive central staircase, which rises up three stories.
Sitting in his new Chevy before they said good night the previous evening, Henry had presented his case, again, that Joy’s scheme made no sense. He would go along with her plan, he said, but thought it was borrowing trouble to nose around in the Crazy House. He leaned over the steering wheel and looked through the windshield; two boys went by on Schwinns that were too big for them, one balancing a bucket on his handlebars while struggling to reach the pedals. “Just because I was born in a hospital doesn’t mean I am going to be a doctor.” Henry touched his chest and shook his head no. “Proof of that is I’ve been working at Trusty’s more than three years.”
“You know that’s not the same, Henry.” They were parked outside her place. Joy fiddled with the handle for rolling up the window. Her father had said he’d wanted her to feel modern and independent and so had found the house and cosigned the loan just as soon as she’d finished her degree and got her teaching job. To please Rodney Sweetland, she pretended she liked being self-reliant until it was almost true. All the time of living by herself she’d never owned up to missing, most of all, hearing her parents’ scuffing toward the kitchen in the morning followed by the bubbling of the percolator on the other side of the wall from her pillow.
“Hey!” Henry turned toward Joy and put his arms out in front of him, palms together. “Maybe if I was born in a swamp, I’d grow up to be a crocodile?” He grinned and made his fingers into crocodile teeth and chomped them at her.
“Stop acting childish, Henry.” Joy squeezed her face in her hands, stuck out her tongue at him and rolled her eyes. “I really might turn out to be crazy.”
“You look damn good to me.” Still in the crocodile pose, Henry had made the crocodile mouth say his words.
***
“I am going to start here.” Joy points to the great room’s floor. She glances out empty picture windows that open on the Crazy House yard where oaks and elms crammed with leaves surround blotches of weeds and clover gone errant. Beyond, two sailboats almost touch as their tiny wakes cross out on the water. Joy says, “Don’t watch me. Just cough a little when time is up.”
Henry rubs his hands together to show eagerness, mugging at her. “Sooner we start, sooner we’re done.” In a moment Joy hears the old stairs pop like a back bone as he sits. Then, in an acoustical trick, his voice seeps across the crumbling, vaulted, ceiling. “Don’t worry, Joy. Nothing’s going to happen.” Henry’s message arrives to her as if they are face to face. “Starting the time now,” he says.
N-o-w. Joy head-types, calmed by the taps on her legs and the word as it appears on the page in her mind. Now, she reads, now, now, now until she has mesmerized herself and instead of beginning the experiment as she’s insisted to Henry it must proceed, she checks in with her head-typewriter. It had first showed up a few days after her parents died. Once the machine became available, she’d learned to head-type in the same focused way as, when she was a little girl, she’d taught herself to jump rope. First she had jumped forward, then faster with fewer misses. It was only a few weeks until Joy could jump backward and do crisscross on one foot with her eyes closed. Now she has taught herself to head-type — tapping on her legs. But she can also head-type on her biceps while her hands are crossed over her chest. And she can do it upside down and in mirror image, hands at her waist, fingers at each side of her spine while the words come out right-side up in her mind.
N-o-w, Joy head-types again before she takes a breath and closes her eyes. She conjures a vision of the sanatorium’s clients here in the great room, sitting doing jigsaw puzzles or gazing out at the water, whatever crazy people do all day. She waits for the hair on her neck to prick up, or for a sudden wind to rush through the missing windows, or for insanity or lightning or a spirit to somehow strike her — all scenarios that seem now to point to nothing as much as Joy’s lack of imagination. She wonders if it would be possible for a ghost to pick her up or to push her down. She stands still and tries to imagine her heart being overtaken either by anguish or by amity.
Then Henry coughs, and by the time she blinks her eyes open, he is half way to her. “Well?” His eyes trace the room.
“Nothing.” Joy looks again out on the water. The lake gives a thousand winks under late morning sun, as if they have a secret together, as if it expects her to pretend it has not so recently swallowed her parents.
Besides the great room, on the Crazy House first floor, Joy and Henry work their way through what must have been a cafeteria, as well as two large rooms, probably dormitories. After those, they go through their protocol in several smaller rooms — perhaps offices and single or double occupancy inmate bedrooms, which open around the back of the bottom of the stairs — before they move up to the second floor.
***
After only perfunctory condolences, before her parents were even buried, people had started approaching Joy about what they called the truth of her origins. Some folks had stolen looks and kept quiet, peering at her over their shoulders as if they hadn’t known Joy her whole living life. But some had asked her outright, “Do you know, Joy, where you actually came from?” These people always included her name in the question. They stretched out the word actually and stretched their necks when they said it. They stopped her in the street or at the IGA. They came toward her on her front stoop if she was sitting there, like museum-goers gawking at an exhibit. A week after her parents’ funerals, the priest met her outside the confessional before she could even pray her penance. A smattering of old ladies in the pews had lifted their eyes from their rosaries when he placed his heavy, veined hand on her forearm, and told her that there were things she was going to have to take into consideration now.
The Sweetlands had adopted Joy as a baby in 1926; that had never been a secret. In timbres meant to quiet further questions, her childhood inquiries were brushed off with loving authority: “We are your mom and dad forever.” “You were a gift to us from God.” Joy’s name was chosen, “Because you brought us sweet joy.” Usually when her mother said this, she held Joy’s cheeks and searched her eyes, like for the last tiny shard when a plate has shattered on the floor.
“Always remember who y’are.” Her father’s recurring line had most often floated up and around from behind the Milwaukee Journal, which he snapped into a perfect fold when he finished reading. That her father wished, every time Joy heard her name, for her to assume responsibility for embodying mirth or delight did not seem to match the sentiments of his at-all-times-practical personality. More than likely he’d meant — but would never be so forward with emotion so as to speak — reassurance that her surname was given with the full measure of love and expanse it suggested. But, as she grew, the onus of Joy Sweetland’s first and last names together did lurk about the cusp of her consciousness, forcing her shoulders back, her chin high, the edges of her mouth to curve up into a smile, even when she would rather for a moment or two have felt angry, or contrary, or reckless. Or felt no particular way at all.
“I’ve told you what I think about your names.” On their regular summer, Saturday night date the week before, Henry had pumped his eyebrows at her from across a picnic table outside the A&W. While he spoke, Joy tried to imagine him as her husband, but ended up concentrating, instead, on a spot of foam from their shared root beer float which had somehow stuck on his forehead; the tiny island was melting away without anyone but her ever seeing it was there. Joy knew Henry’s shtick by heart, but he had been a true gentleman and put aside hinting about a wedding and a wedding night and honeymoon plans.
That evening was the first since the shock of her parents’ accident that he’d again taken up with his declamation saying it was a joy just to look at her, and how her body was a sweet landscape. If Joy hadn’t stopped him, he’d have gone on about exploring all of that landscape’s features. She did always appreciate Henry’s unflagging flattery and most times felt herself flush. So when she knew he was about to go on with more lascivious suggestions, she’d reached across the table, pinched his lips together, feeling the tiny crop of his whiskers, and told him to shush. With his eyes all scamp and sparkle, Henry managed to look handsome and sincere even when he’d tried to smile and looked ridiculous with his lips held tight between her finger and thumb.
***
In each room with a door still on its hinges, Joy closes it behind her and waits for some kind of supernatural assurance that she isn’t out of her mind. Not even half way through her chore, Crazy House dust has collected in the fine lines of her elbows, wrists and hands. So much standing still has already made her weary. She can’t remember anything that she’d been hoping for, and in room after room, empty space after empty space, finds herself alone in a maze of thought — worried, irrational, and foolish in the Crazy House, begging the question of her own sanity.
Through the years, to fend against the mean and nagging fact of being unwanted, Joy has created whole catalogs of scenarios that might explain her abandonment. She’s been able to discover nothing about the mother who bore her, or about her biological father’s identity. Relief and dismay had come together in a cloud when at last she’d found her birth certificate buried in her parents’ papers. The façade was printed and official: Sally and Rodney Sweetland listed as the parents of Joy’s birth. As an adult, to ward off self-doubt, she has told her heart that her biological parents must surely both be dead.
In the next cell-like Crazy House room, Joy veers all the way off task, doesn’t even bother to close her eyes, and tries to think. She head-types on her thighs. C-o-g-i-t-a-t-e. R-u-m-i-n-a-t-e. The sister-words line up in a column. Eight letters each, everything neat, everything orderly until a crow flies by the single, miniscule, high window and Joy wedges herself against the opposite wall to see. With a shudder, she supposes the window might have been made little and placed high to discourage patients from jumping out. D-e-f-e-n-e-s-t-r-a-t-e she head-types, pleased that even with an extra syllable the word rhymes with the others. “Cogitate, ruminate, defenestrate,” she’s reading when Henry’s cough tugs her back to the present.
Abandoning protocol entirely, in the next tiny space, identical to the previous, Joy motions for Henry to come inside with her. “Doctor’s office,” Henry says. “Or where a patient stayed if they weren’t behaving.” Maybe, like her, he’s thinking about inmates strapped to beds, or about Joy’s real mother, or about the myriad ways a person could be deemed crazy. Or the ways people acted crazy when really, at least for the most part, they weren’t.
For all her efforts to be reasonable and calm, there have been times in the four months since her parents’ accident that Joy has been overcome. Thoughts her father would have called “wrong headed” and her mother would have called “stinky thinking,” bad notions, terrible feelings of being lost and understanding nothing: these sometimes accost her, unawares. Only a few weeks ago, she’d been alone in her parents’ house organizing stacks of her mother’s embroidered tea towels — the never-been-used towels apart from the old and ragged ones, with a stack of used but still good candidates between them. Hand-stitched with colored thread, there were towels with pictures of mushrooms, frogs, birds, ears of corn, the cow jumping over the moon, pigs, snowmen, barns, flowers, a farmer, a farmer’s wife in an apron, and more. Overwhelmed by the thought of her mother’s hands and the countless stitches, Joy had scooped the stacks to her chest and hugged the cloths. There must have been a hundred of them, with Joy determined to hold on to every one while desolation and desperation carried on a wrestling match in her chest. Determined not to cry, though, she’d dropped the tea towels on the kitchen counter, then splashed her face in the sink.
After letting the screen door slam behind her, she’d walked the seven blocks to the alley behind Trusty’s Hardware where Henry could reliably be found at 2:45, his scheduled afternoon break. Instead of resting, he always used the time to sweep around the store’s back door, straighten Trusty’s garbage cans and give a scratch to the neighborhood kitty. As Joy approached, the fat yellow tom cat curled himself in, out, and around Henry’s ankles. Seeing her, Henry leaned on his broom as if to keep himself from swooning and lobbed Joy a moony expression she knew was meant to convey fondness. Were it not unseemly while he was on the clock, she would have thrown herself at his tall frame, his strength, his man’s body that would surely have held her up.
But, when she took a step closer, the cat had hissed at her, showing his teeth and his alarmingly pink tongue. The display of rejection had made Joy stop, grit her teeth together, and then demand of Henry. “Exactly since when have you known?”
Obviously taken aback, Henry had wagged his fingers hello and straightened his red Trusty’s apron. Instead of answering he bowed toward Joy, stood straight and spun his broom on the ground. As if it were much thicker, about the size of a woman’s waist, Henry curved his arm in the air around the broom’s handle and for the time of several measures, smooth like Gene Kelly, danced with the invisible girl he made. He dipped her, holding her gaze a long moment before he pulled her up, held her next to his body, and put his forehead against hers. He closed his eyes, as though he were enjoying being close enough to inhale her fragrant breath. A few seconds passed during which Joy felt warmth drop right through her center and also acute jealousy toward Henry’s skinny old broom.
Still gazing at the handle Henry said, “The truth, Miss Sweetland, is that everyone talked about it in school.” Henry gave the broom-girl one last spin and finished his little show. “It was just rumors, Joy. What high school boy wouldn’t want to believe his gorgeous typing teacher was born in the Crazy House?” He said high school boy the same way he might talk about the moon — a thing of which he had some working knowledge but was very far off. Henry added, “Remember there was gossip that Greta Garbo stayed a while in the Crazy House? We boys all thought probably she was your mother from the looks of things.” Henry slid his eyes up and down Joy, head to toe and back to head again.
“You never told me!” Joy crossed her arms over her chest as she accused him.
Henry had capped one hand over the other over the end of the handle of his broom and set his chin on top. “Your mother must have been terribly beautiful,” he said.
***
In the room that was probably a doctor’s office, Henry takes two giant steps toward the tiny window, then leaps up, grabs the sill and begins chinning himself. Joy places her hands around her waist so that her fingers rest on the small of her back for head-typing. F-o-r-e-v-e-r-? she taps out.
“There’s a bunch of crows out there,” Henry reports while his face is at the window, before he lets his body dip again, muscles flexing, his nose near the wall.
Looking at his back, Joy writes H-e-n-r-y-? just underneath forever. Henry has done eleven pull-ups when he drops to the floor, reporting that besides the birds, all he could see out there were branches and a little bit of sky. “Back to business!” Joy declares as she leads Henry out of the room and up the stairs to the third story. They begin in a corner room, where a swath of cut-up carpet softens the steps of Joy’s Keds.
“I think Dent stays here sometimes rather than home.” Henry points to the rug then a milk crate set in the corner.
“An exemplary typist.” Joy makes her voice sad. “And always so polite.” They are talking about Dent Shanahan, who had managed to finish high school this past spring despite the disadvantage of being raised by a drunk father. There had been teachers’ lounge talk, besides which the whole town knew.
Joy recognizes Dent’s rug. When she’d gone to ask about consolidating her father’s account balance with her own, Dent had been one of several workers cutting the old carpet away in the bank’s lobby. That day Joy sat opposite Herman Slake, hoping the banker would say the transaction would be simple. Instead, he said, “But you were an adopted child, weren’t you, Joy?” then shrugged, as if losing parents should be rote and procedural for her.
Herman Slake had been the one to help them when Joy’s father brought her to open a savings account with five dollars of Christmas money and five more she had earned babysitting. She’d been thirteen. From across his broad desk while he considered her request to put all the money that was rightfully hers into one account, Joy believed the man to be leering at her bust line. She watched as he leaned away and weaved his fingers together behind his head. She saw the outline of his undershirt and his armpit hair where sweat had caused the fabric of his shirt to go transparent. As a bank official, Slake told her, it was his job to help her make decisions where her monies were concerned. “At least,” he said, “until such a time as you are properly married.”
On the other side of the room, the workers, all boys in high school, grunted, pulling carpet from the floor. “Hello, Miss Sweetland.” Dent gave a courteous wave, then some other boys nodded toward her too.
Joy turned from them back to the banker. “I am twenty-six years old now, Mr. Slake.” She set her jaw and grasped the top of her purse in her lap. “Nearly twenty-seven.”
“Just the same. You think about it.” Slake took his hands off his head and behaved for a few minutes as if Joy were not there at all. He sorted and resorted papers. He tapped his head with a pen, sighed, then cleaned his glasses with a tissue.
In the end Joy had triumphed by sitting quietly and waiting, and Herman Slake had filled out documents to move her father’s money into her account. Joy had felt pity but resisted helping Slake as he fumbled at his typewriter. While she’d made her way out of the bank, a flap of maroon hung like a grotesque, wide tongue from the last roll of dusty carpet the working boys were carrying out. Dent must have lugged the rug all the way to the Crazy House and up the stairs.
On the third floor, Joy kicks the toes of her sneakers into the carpet remnant and motions for Henry to go outside and start the time. Up on the highest floor it seems a contradiction for the windows to be set large and low. Perhaps for calm, tubercular patients, Joy thinks, perhaps for the deaf, or the simple but content patients labeled idiots — for anyone admitted who did not require protection from their own mind. Unchallenged by glass, a breeze comes at her. Earlier in the day, Joy could have believed it was the sign she had been waiting for, air on her cheek, like the touch of a mother’s finger to a baby’s head. But it was nearly evening now, and she knew what she felt was only wind off the lake.
It had probably been decades since the window was intact; now there’s no worry about cutting herself on any jagged edges of glass when Joy braces in the open space. With her hands each on a side of the window frame, without thinking, she head-types the phrase every student must type efficiently in order to pass her class, no exceptions. N-o-w i-s t-h-e t-i-m-e f-o-r a-l-l g-o-o-d m-e-n t-o c-o-m-e t-o t-h-e a-i-d o-f t-h-e-i-r c-o-u-n-t-r-y. She passes her test, yawns, and sees plainly that the words mean nothing at all in relation to typing proficiency. She is extra glad that no sign arrives from her mother or any other ghost as she looks across the water, which is wide and calm and makes Joy think of death.
Rodney and Sally Sweetland had died while Joy was sleeping safely, bedspread folded back, quilt pulled up as she liked it, almost to her chin. It must have been that way because that’s the way she always arranges her covers. She had been to Henry’s rented apartment that evening for dinner. To keep appearances of propriety she’d sat herself on the front stairs and waited while he fixed hamburgers. Henry’d served the burgers on fresh buns from the bakery, and they ate out on the concrete steps, each burger on a plate with ketchup and a lonely pickle set to the side. Her father liked only sweet, Joy reflects, her mother only dill, but she herself likes both kinds of pickles, all kinds of pickles. Henry had eaten his pickle before his burger, but she’d saved hers for last.
In the Crazy House, Henry coughs, and Joy turns to him. Air studded with tiny, glittering bits swirls in slow tornados, perhaps like her parents’ minds as they stared toward the bottom of the dark lake, surprised, no doubt, by their fates. In the vision, Joy watches Rodney and Sally a while, willing them to tread water, to lift their heads and breathe, before she hears herself screaming and Henry engulfs her. She pounds her useless fists into his chest while he consoles, “Joy. Joy. Joy.”
Henry holds her so tightly she thinks of straight jackets — there are pictures in the town hall files, men and women with their arms tied around themselves. She places her palms, one on each side of Henry’s wide chest, her fingers just above the pockets of his shirt. If he released her, she might float up and away through the ceiling of the Crazy House and be happy looking down as if she were the sun, or a bird, or an angel.
“Henry!” Joy feels tears streaking down her face and knows she must look a fright. Stale air of nervousness leaks from out the top of her blouse, rising on her body heat.
But Henry is all business. “I think you just miss your mom. Sally Sweetland, I mean, not your Crazy House mom. And your dad too. Of course you miss them. Look here, Joy, it hasn’t been so long since.” Henry stops his sentence short.
“S-i-n-c-e t-h-e-y d-r-o-w-n-e-d.” Joy reaches up so that her hands are on his shoulders where she types. Between sobs, she says the letters out loud for Henry.
“Yes.” Henry nods. The dark blanket of his whiskers is starting to creep out.
Joy leaves her hands up high and lets her head rest on his chest while they face the window. Sun spills in. Smell of heated dust fills the room. Joy tries to be calm and thinks of the many times as a child she had gone fishing with her parents at night. Most often she fell asleep, her young body across the boat’s bench, hugged by the flanges of a bulky orange life vest. She can hear her parents dip the net in the minnow bucket, can hear line rolling off their reels, the plop of the bait in the water, all verses in a lullaby.
“W-e w-i-l-l n-e-v-e-r k-n-o-w,” Joy spells it out as she taps his shoulders and Henry’s face opens, smiling at her like she’s Barbara Stanwyck and he’s Cary Grant. If she were not exhausted from the day and from crying, she would type on about all the things that will stay mysteries: her parents, who was sane and who crazy, why she was born here, her exact birth date. And how, at the end of this day, despite despair, she feels serene standing here like a queen on Dent Shanahan’s square of maroon carpet, looking out over the lake.
Henry guides her by the waist, as sweetly as if she was his push broom in the alley. “I don’t know how to waltz,” he says.
For a few minutes, Henry dances her around the top floor, in and out of rooms, until they come back to where they began. Afternoon air changes to evening air moving in off the water. Joy spells out loud again as she types into Henry’s shoulders. “A-m I a m-a-n-i-a-c-?”
“No.” Henry says and gives her a single strong squeeze around the waist.
“F-r-u-i-t-c-a-k-e-?”
“I like it,” Henry says. “The dark kind, made with rum and molasses.”
In years to come, Joy’s thoughts will often wind back to see Henry’s face at this moment. When the vision comes in class, she will call out the letters for students to type the words: steadfast, unfaltering, devoted. No one will ever question Mrs. Wilder about this quirk in her curriculum. And no one ever notices when she puts her thumbs over her hip bones, fingers on her back and types out, quick as light across the lake, A-n-d t-h-e-n I d-e-c-i-d-e-d n-o-t t-o b-e a-l-o-n-e.
Hugging him in the Crazy House, Joy asks “You don’t think I am a lunatic, Henry?”
“N-o.” Henry squeezes her.
“C-r-a-z-y-?”
“N-o spells no!” Henry says. “Do you hear me, J-o-y-? N-o spells no.” He pulls her to his chest and taps up and down her back in unintelligible, erratic, nonsensical typing.
Image by jules a. on Unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
So good! I loved this quirky, moving story.