Anne Tyler - The Amateur Marriage

“Mergers for small businesses,” Lindy repeated. George glanced at her suspiciously, but she seemed merely to be turning the phrase over in her mind. “You used to make model airplanes covered with tissue paper,” she told him.

He gave a short laugh and said, “Not anymore.”

“And Karen? Is she married too?”

“Nope. She’s a hotshot lawyer, something to do with the homeless.”

He expected Lindy to be impressed, and might even have been trying for it. (Karen wasn’t really as hotshot as all that.) But she wore the distracted expression of someone preparing to speak the instant the other person shut up; and almost before George had finished she said, “Please, George, will you call him for me?”

He didn’t have to ask whom she meant.

“Please?” she said. “And then if he wants — if he doesn’t say no — I could get on the line.”

“Well,” he said.

“I couldn’t bear it if I called and he hung up on me.”

No convincing excuse came to mind. He couldn’t explain even to himself why he was so reluctant. In the end he had to say, “Well, all right, Lindy.”

He rose and waited for her to rise too. “The phone’s in the den,” he told her.

“Oh,” she said, but she went on sitting there. Then slowly, like a much heavier woman, she collected her purse and hauled herself up and wrapped her layers of sweaters more closely around her. “I’m scared to pieces,” she told him. “Isn’t that ridiculous?”

He led her back across the front hall without answering.

In the den, he switched on a lamp and settled her in a leather recliner. Then he sat down at his desk and reached for the phone. It was a newfangled phone with automatic dialing — a mystery to him, but Sally was good at these things and she had programmed it for him. All he had to do was punch a single button. In Lindy’s presence, this felt like showing off: See how effortlessly I, at least, can get in touch with your son? And it was misleading as well, because Sally was the one who kept in touch with the family, most often. Still, when Pagan answered, George did his best to sound hearty and familiar. “Pagan. Hi. It’s George,” he said.

“George? What’s up?”

Somehow, the Antons had reached the stage where a phone call meant bad news; you could tell it from the apprehensive note in Pagan’s voice. It must have been Pauline’s death that had led them all to that expectation. So George drawled his answer out long and slow and easy. “Oh, nothing much. Not a whole lot. Can’t say much is doing at this end, but…”

Oddly enough, he felt his heart start to pound. And Lindy, perched on the edge of the recliner, was gripping her bag so tightly that he could see the waxy white of her knuckles beneath the skin.

“… but I do have something of a surprise for you,” he said. “You’ll never guess who I’ve got sitting across from me.”

“My mother,” Pagan said flatly.

George said, “You knew?”

Lindy raised her chin and watched him.

“No,” Pagan said, “but who else would it be?”

“Right. You’re right. So. Would you like to tell her hello?”

“Why not,” Pagan said.

George passed the receiver to Lindy and then (against every inclination) rose to leave. He was nearly out of the room before she spoke. “Hello?” she said.

He hung around in the hall long enough to hear her say, “Oh, I’m fine. And you?”

In the living room, he sat back down in his chair and stared into space. The unreal feeling still buzzed around his head. He searched his mind for images of the Lindy he had known — a bony child, all knees and elbows, forever clambering over him or nudging him aside or reaching past him for something. Her shins covered with bruises from roller-skating and stoopball. Her hair matted and tangled, no matter how often their mother tried to comb it.

He remembered how they’d compete with each other, fight over every candy bar and comic book. “Me first!” Lindy would tell him, and he would say, “No fair!” and their mother would call, “Stop that, you two!” He saw Lindy playing jacks on the sidewalk in front of the store, snatching up ninesies and tensies in a heedless, all-out swoop that kept the backs of her fingers perpetually scraped raw. He pictured the bedroom on St. Cassian Street that he and his sisters had shared, which had formerly been their parents’ room and long before that, their grandmother’s — he and Lindy in the double bed and Karen in the crib. At night Lindy whispered stories to him. “Once there was a man with no eyes who died in this very house, did you know that?” He would clap his hands over his ears but then remove them, horrified and intrigued in equal parts. “And then what?” he would ask.

Maybe the woman in the den was an impostor.

The front door slammed, and Sally called, “George?” He heard her heels tapping across the parquet. When she appeared in the living-room entranceway she seemed to have come from a whole different planet, with her ash-blond hair as sleek as brushed aluminum, her cheeks bright from the cold, the collar of her cashmere coat standing up around her face. “George, is Sam home yet? I forgot to tell her — what is it?”

“What’s what?” he said.

“Why are you looking like that?”

“I’m not looking any way.”

“What’s going on, George?”

“Nothing’s going on!” He stood up with elaborate slowness and loosened his tie. “Though one thing I guess I should mention,” he said. “Lindy’s here.”

“Lindy who?” Sally asked.

“Lindy, my sister.”

She stared at him. She said, “Here in this house?”

“She’s on the phone just now with Pagan.”

At that moment, Lindy arrived in the hall behind her. Sally spun around.

“How’d it go?” George asked.

But she appeared not to hear him. She was looking at Sally with a strangely blank expression. Just as George was realizing that he ought to make introductions, Sally rushed over to her and seized both her hands and said, “Lindy! Oh, this is so exciting! This is so unexpected! I’m Sally, by the way — George’s wife. I am so, so happy to meet you!”

Lindy used to hate it when people fussed like that. (Their own mother, for instance.) But now she took it in stride, or perhaps didn’t even notice. She allowed Sally to lead her to the couch.

“Have you been here long? Where’d you come from? How’d you find us?” Sally asked. She perched next to her, still in her coat, so that she seemed to be the one visiting. “What do you think of your brother? Would you know him? You don’t much look like him, do you? I guess you got your dad’s coloring.”

George said, “Sally, could we just hear how her talk with Pagan went?”

“I’m sorry! Listen to me run on!” Sally cried. Then she sat up straighter and laced her fingers together and waited primly for Lindy to speak.

Lindy said, “Oh. Well.”

“Was it very emotional?” Sally asked. “I can’t even imagine! All these years, and then, why, you must have had so much to say to each other!”

“Not really,” Lindy said.

“Was he just speechless with amazement?”

George said, “For God’s sake, Sally, let her talk, will you?”

Sally blinked. Lindy said, “That’s all right.”

She spoke somehow without moving her lips, her face stiff and numb-looking. “His voice had changed,” she said. “That’s the kind of thing you don’t think to brace for — that he wouldn’t have that clear little sweet little voice anymore.”

“But what did he say?” Sally asked, and then she shot a quick glance at George.

“He was perfectly polite. He asked how I was; he said it was nice to hear from me; he said yes, he had a family now… I said to him, I said, ‘Do you think maybe we could meet?’ He said, ‘Meet.’ He said, ‘Oh.’ He said, ‘Oh, I don’t know. I don’t really see the point, do you?’”