Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

“I don’t remember,” Agatha said, switching to a yellow crayon.

“It was rolled up in Bisquick dough.”

“I remember she talked about it but I don’t remember the name.”

“Bisquick dough sprinkled with herbs of some kind. She had it at their neighbors’.”

“Maybe you could call and ask her.”

“I can’t do that. She’d want to know who I was making it for.”

Her mother set down the drumstick and wiped her fingers on a paper towel before turning another page. “Beef a la Oriental,” she read out.

“Couldn’t you just say you were making it for the typewriter man?”

“These things are touchy,” her mother said. “You wouldn’t understand.”

That hurt Agatha’s feelings a little. She scowled and kicked her feet out. By mistake, she kicked Thomas. He was drowsing over a plastic cup of grapefruit juice. He opened his eyes and said, “Stop.”

“Always serve a man red meat,” her mother told Agatha. “Remember that for the future.”

“Red meat,” Agatha repeated dutifully.

“It shows you think of them as strong.”

“What if you served them fish?”

“Men don’t like fish.”

“They like chicken, though.”

“Well, yes.”

“If you served them chicken, would they think you thought they were scared?”

“Hmm?” her mother said.

Thomas said, “Mama, Agatha kicked me.” But his eyes were closing again.

“Well, here goes,” their mother said, and she reached for the phone.

“You’re calling Grandma Bedloe?” Agatha asked.

“No, silly, I’m calling Mr. Rumford.”

She dialed in that special way she had, very fast and zippy. She must know the number by heart. She had called two earlier times that Agatha was aware of — one morning while he was at work, just to make sure he didn’t have anyone else; and then one evening, hanging up when he answered. Also they’d gone in person to see where he lived. They’d ridden the bus out to Ruxton in the company of nothing but colored maids; they’d peered through the window at his red brick house. “Deserted,” their mother had said in a pleased, flat voice. “And no one has tended those shrubs in ages.” Then they rattled back to town all by themselves, having left the maids behind.

“Hello?” their mother said into the receiver.

Her forehead was suddenly creased.

“Hello, is this … who is this?”

She listened. She said, “You mean the, um, the wife Mrs. Rumford?”

Then she said, “Sorry.” And hung up.

Thomas said, “Agatha kicked me, Mama.”

Their mother closed the cookbook and stared down at it. She stroked the cover, the golden letters stamped into the cloth.

“Mama?”

“We’d better go to bed,” Agatha told Thomas.

“You’re not the boss of me!”

“It’s time, Thomas,” she said, and she made her voice very hard.

He slid off his chair and followed her out of the kitchen.

In the children’s room, Daphne was asleep. They undressed in the dark, using the light from the hallway. Thomas wanted his cowboy pajamas but Agatha couldn’t find them. She said he’d have to wear his airplane pajamas instead. He climbed into them without an argument, staggering around the room as he tried to fit his feet through. Then he said he had to pee. “Use Mama’s bathroom,” Agatha told him.

“What for?”

“Just do.”

She’d kept him away from the other one all evening. She worried the toilet would flood again.

She lay down in bed and pulled the covers up and listened to her mother moving around the house. Every sound meant something: the TV clicking on and then off, a drawer in the living room opening and then closing, the clang of a metal ashtray on the coffee table. Their mother smoked only when she was upset, holding the cigarette in some wrong-looking way with her fingers sticking out too straight. Agatha heard the scrape of a match, the pushed, tired sound of her breath whooshing forth.

Where were the pills? The popping of the lid off the pill bottle?

At least when she took pills she didn’t fidget around like this.

Thomas appeared in the doorway — a black-and-gray shape against the yellow light. He crossed not to his own bed but to Agatha’s. She had more or less expected that. She grumbled but she slid over to make room. His hair smelled like sugar browning in a saucepan. He said, “She didn’t come kiss us good night.”

“Later she’ll come.”

“I want her to come now.”

“ Later, ” Agatha said.

“She didn’t read us a story, either.”

“I’ll tell you one.”

“Reading’s better.”

“Well, Thomas! I can’t read in the dark, can I?”

Sometimes she noticed how much she sounded like her mother. Same sure tone, same exasperated answers. Although she failed to resemble her in any other way. At a family dinner last winter Grandma Bedloe had said, “What a pity Agatha didn’t inherit Lucy’s bone structure.”

“Once upon a time,” she told Thomas, “there was a poor servant girl named Cinderella.”

“Not that one.”

“Once upon a time a rich merchant had three daughters.”

“Not that one either. I want ‘Hansel and Gretel.’ ”

This was no surprise to Agatha. (He liked things that rhymed. Nibble, nibble, like a mouse, who is nibbling at my house? ) But Agatha hated “Hansel and Gretel.” There wasn’t any magic to it — no fairy godmothers, or frogs turning into princes. “How about ‘Snow White’?” she asked. “That’s got Mirror, mirror, on the wall …”

“I want ‘Hansel and Gretel.’ ”

She sighed and resettled her pillow. “All right, have it your way,” she said. “Once upon a time Hansel and Gretel were taking a walk—”

“That’s not how it starts!”

“Who’s telling this: you or me?”

“First there’s their parents! And dropping breadcrumbs on the path! And the birds eat all the crumbs and Hansel and Gretel get lost!”

“Keep your voice down!” Agatha hissed.

Daphne slept on, though. And in the living room their mother’s footsteps continued. Pace, pace. Swish of kimono. Pace, pace.

The night after Danny’s funeral, she had paced till morning. (Back then she didn’t have her pills yet.) The next day when Agatha got up she found the ashtray heaped with nasty-smelling butts and her mother asleep on the couch. Danny’s picture stood on the coffee table nearby — the one she usually kept on her bureau. He was laughing under a beach umbrella. His eyes were dark and curly and full of kindness.

Agatha never thought about Danny anymore.

“I have to pee,” Thomas whispered.

“What, again?”

He slid out of bed and hitched up his pajama bottoms. “It was too much grapefruit juice,” he said.

Agatha leaned against her pillow and folded her arms and watched him go. The cigarette smoke from the living room made her nose feel crinkly inside. Wasn’t it strange how dead butts smelled so dirty, but lighted cigarettes smelled exciting and promising.

Something nagged at her mind, a bothersome thought she couldn’t quite get hold of. Then she noticed what she was hearing: the flushing of the toilet. Oh, no. She threw back her covers and started out of bed.

Too late, though. Thomas shrieked, “Mama! Mama!” and their mother cried, “Thomas?” Her bare feet came rushing down the hall. Her kimono made a crackling sound like fire.

Agatha decided to stay where she was.

“Oh, my God,” her mother said. “Oh, my Lord in heaven.”

She must be standing in the bathroom doorway. Her voice echoed off the tiles.

“What did you put down that toilet?” she asked.

“Nothing! I promise! I just flushed and the water poured everywhere!”