Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

“Right,” Ian said. “Stop by home first, though.”

“Stop by home first,” Danny repeated meekly.

Ian tapped a foot against the floorboards. He felt commanding and energetic, charged up by righteous anger.

Dimly lit houses slid past them, and a dog chased the car a block or so before giving up. Danny started whistling a tune, something sort of jazzy and hootchy-kootchy. Probably they’d had a stripper at Bucky Hargrove’s party, and waitresses in fishnet stockings and girls popping out of cakes and such. And Ian, meanwhile, had been warming baby bottles. He swung toward Danny sharply and said, “I might as well inform you right now that you have lost your favorite sitter for all eternity.”

“Huh? What say?” Danny asked.

“I had a huge, important engagement at eight-thirty. I’m talking crucial. Lucy knew that. She swore on a stack of Bibles she’d be back in time.”

“Where is she, anyhow?” Danny asked, flicking his turn signal.

“Drinking with a girlfriend. So she says.”

“I didn’t even know she was planning to go out.”

“Her waitress friend, Dot. Is what she claims. ”

“Dot from the Fill ’Er Up Café,” Danny agreed.

“Goddamnit, Danny, are you blind?” Ian shouted.

Danny’s eyes widened and he looked frantically in all directions. “Blind?” he asked. “What?”

“She’s out more often than she’s in! Don’t you ever wonder who she’s with?”

“Why, no, I …”

“And how about that baby?”

“Baby?”

“Premature baby? Get serious. Premature baby with dimples?”

Danny opened his mouth.

“Two months early and breathing on her own, no incubator, no problems?”

“She was—”

“She was somebody else’s,” Ian said.

“Come again?”

“I just want to know how long you intend to be a fall guy,” Ian said.

Danny turned onto Waverly and drew up in front of the house. He cut the engine and looked over at Ian. He seemed entirely sober now. He said, “What are you trying to tell me, Ian?”

“She’s out all afternoon any time she can get a sitter,” Ian said. “She comes back perfumed and laughing and wearing clothes she can’t afford. That white knit dress. Haven’t you ever seen her white dress? Where’d she get it? How’d she pay for it? How come she married you quick as a flash and then had a baby just seven months later?”

“You’re talking about that dress with the kind of like crisscrossed middle,” Danny said.

“That’s the one.”

Danny started rubbing his right temple with his fingertips. When it didn’t seem he meant to say anything further, Ian got out of the car.

Inside the house, only the hall lamp was lit. His parents must still be at the Finches’. Beastie rose from the rug, yawning, and followed him up the stairs, which he climbed two steps at a time. He went directly to his room, fell to his knees in front of the closet, and rooted through the clutter for his gym shoes. Once he’d located the foil strip, he slid it into his rear pocket and stood up. Then he ducked into the bathroom. The biggest night of his life and he couldn’t even stop to shower. He wet his fingers at the sink and ran them through his hair. He bared his teeth to the mirror and debated whether to brush them.

In the street below, an engine roared up. What on earth? He drew aside the curtain and peered out. It was Danny’s Chevy, all right. The headlights were two yellow ribbons swinging away from the curb. The car took off abruptly, peeling rubber. Ian dropped the curtain. He turned to confront his own stunned face in the mirror.

Near the stone wall at the end of the block the brakes should have squealed, but instead the roaring sound grew louder. It grew until something had to happen, and then there was a gigantic, explosive, complicated crash and then a delicate tinkle and then silence. Ian went on staring into his own eyes. He couldn’t seem to look away. He couldn’t even blink, couldn’t move, because once he moved then time would start rolling forward again, and he already knew that nothing in his life would ever be the same.

When the baby woke from her afternoon nap, she made a noise like singing. “La!” she called. But the only ones who heard were Thomas and Agatha. They were coloring at the kitchen table. Their crayons slowed and they looked at each other. Then they looked toward their mother’s room. Nowadays their mother took naps too. She said it was the heat. She said if they would just let her be she would stay in bed from spring till fall, sleeping away this whole hot, muggy summer.

“La!” Daphne called again.

They couldn’t pick her up themselves because last week Thomas had dropped her. He’d been trying to feed her a bottle and she had somehow tumbled to the floor and bumped her head. After that their mother said neither one of them could hold her anymore, which wasn’t at all fair to Agatha. Agatha had turned seven this past April and she was big for her age besides. She would never have allowed Daphne to wiggle away like that.

Now Daphne was talking to herself in a questioning tone of voice, like, Where is everybody? Have they all gone off and left me?

Agatha’s page of the coloring book had an outline of an undressed man full of veins and arteries. You were supposed to color the veins blue and the arteries red. A tiny B and R started you off and from then on you were on your own, boy. Tough luck if you slipped over onto the wrong branch accidentally and started coloring the red parts blue. It was just about the most boring picture in the world but Agatha kept at it, even when the veins narrowed to black threads and she didn’t have a hope of staying inside the lines.

Thomas’s page was boring too, but at least there were more shapes to it. His undressed man had different organs — pipes and beans and balloony things. He got to do that page because the coloring book was his, but then he pretended the organs didn’t exist. He smeared over them every which way with a purple crayon, giving the man a suit that ended jaggedly at his wrists and bare ankles. “Now you’ve gone and ruined it,” Agatha told him.

“I did not. I made it better.”

“You’re bearing down too hard, too. Look at what you did to your crayon.”

He looked. Earlier he’d peeled the paper off and now the crayon curved sideways in the heat from his hand, like their mother’s poor bent candles in the napkin drawer.

“I don’t care,” he said.

“Your last purple crayon!”

“I didn’t like it anyhow,” he said, “and this coloring book is stupid. Who gave me this stupid coloring book?”

“Danny gave it to you,” Agatha said.

He clapped a hand over his mouth.

Danny hadn’t given him the coloring book; it was Grandma Bedloe. She’d picked it up at the Pantry Pride one day when she went to buy their mother some food. But Thomas always worried that Danny was listening to them up in heaven, so Agatha said, “He bought it as a special, special present, and he hoped very much you would like it.”

Thomas removed his hand and said loudly, “I do like it.”

“Then why’d you mess all over it?”

“I made a mistake.”

Daphne said, “Oho! Oho!”—not laughing, as you might imagine, but starting to complain. The next step would be real wailing, all sad and lost and lonely. Thomas and Agatha hated that. Thomas said, “Go tell Mama.”

“You go.”

“You’re the oldest.”

“I’m not in the mood.”

“Last time I went, she cried,” Thomas said.

“She was having a difficult day.”

“Maybe this day is difficult too.”

“If you go,” Agatha said, “I’ll give you my patent leather purse.”