And yet Kerrigan felt envious. The fishwife and her man would wind up in bed hugging each other. They’d stay together because they belonged together. They both came from the same roots, Vernon cradles.
He heard the calm voice of Loretta Channing, the voice of a stranger asking for directions. He scarcely heard his own reply. As he told her to make a turn on Vernon, a chorus of Vernon voices came to him with the sullen query, what’s she doing down here if she don’t know her way around.
On Vernon Street the car was moving very slowly. A stumbling drunk lurched into the path of the car, was missed by inches, and shouted some dirty words to the driver. The words were very dirty and she winced. Kerrigan looked back and recognized the man. It was his next-door neighbor.
She put more pressure on the gas pedal. The MG leaped away from the flood of obscenity.
She said, “I’m glad we got away from that.”
He told himself to keep his mouth shut.
At Third and Vernon he told her to make a right turn and they went down Third going past the street lamps, and toward the middle of the block he told her to stop the car. She looked at him questioningly. He pointed to a two-storied wooden dwelling that had a cardboard placard in its front window. The glow from the nearest street lamp showed two words scrawled in crayon on the placard. One word was in Greek letters. Under it was the same word in English — “Marriages.”
He motioned her out of the car. Then together they stood at the front door and he rapped his knuckles on the wood. There were no lights in the house and he had to rap for several minutes before the door opened. The old Greek stood there, wearing a tattered bathrobe, needing a shave, his eyes clouded with interrupted slumber.
“You got a license handy?” Kerrigan asked.
The Greek blinked once. Then he was fully awake. “Plenty of licenses,” he said. “I always have licenses.”