Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

“Children?”

“What got to me,” Danny said, “was how she wouldn’t be hurried. How it didn’t bother her what other people made of her. I mean she just stood there pondering, little bit of a person. Then finally she said, ‘Well,’ and straightened her shoulders and chose to spring for airmail.”

“It mattered just enough, I decided,” Lucy said. “It was worth it just for the satisfaction.”

“If she had said parcel post I might have let her go,” Danny said. “But airmail! I admired that. I asked if she’d like to have dinner.”

“He was the best-looking thing I’d seen in ages,” Lucy told the Bedloes. “I said I’d be thrilled to have dinner.”

Bee and Doug Bedloe sat side by side, smiling extra hard as if someone had just informed them that they were being photographed.

There was this about the Bedloes: They believed that every part of their lives was absolutely wonderful. It wasn’t just an act, either. They really did believe it. Or at least Ian’s mother did, and she was the one who set the tone. Her marriage was a great joy to her, her house made her happy every time she walked into it, and her children were attractive and kind and universally liked. When bad things happened — the usual accidents, illnesses, jogs in the established pattern — Bee treated them with eye-rolling good humor, as if they were the stuff of situation comedy. They would form new chapters in the lighthearted ongoing saga she entertained the neighbors with: How Claudia Totaled the Car. How Ian Got Suspended from First Grade.

As for Ian, he believed it too but only after a kind of hitch, a moment of hesitation. For instance, from time to time he had the feeling that his father was something of a joke at Poe High — ineffectual at discipline, and muddled in his explanation of the more complicated algebraic functions. But Bee said he was the most popular teacher Poe had ever employed, and in fact that was true. Yes, certainly it was true. Ian knew she was right.

Or look at Claudia. The family’s one scholar, she had dropped out of college her senior year to get married, and then the babies started coming so thick and so fast that they had to be named alphabetically: Abbie, Barney, Cindy, Davey … Where would it all end? some cynical voice inquired from the depths of Ian’s mind. Xavier? Zelda? But his mother said she hoped they would progress to double letters — Aaron Abel and Bonnie Belinda — like items on a crowded catalog page. Then Ian saw Claudia’s children as a tumbling hodgepodge heaped in a basket, and he was forced to smile.

Or Danny. Wasn’t it sort of a comedown that Danny had gone to work at the post office straight out of high school, when both sides of the family as far back as anyone could remember had been teachers? (“Educators,” Bee called them.) But Bee pointed out how lucky he was, knowing so early in life what he wanted and settling in so contentedly. Then Ian readjusted; he shifted gears or something and whir! he was rolling along with the others, impressed by Danny’s good fortune.

He had always assumed he was the only one who experienced that hitch in his thoughts. He assumed it until the day Lucy arrived, when he felt his parents’ hidden start at the word “ex-husband.” Wait. The girl of Danny’s dreams had chosen someone else before him? And was saddling him with someone else’s children besides? His father looked confused. His mother’s broad face developed a brittle, tight surface, like something easily broken.

Ian himself absorbed the notion with no trouble. Of course, he wanted only the best for Danny. He had worshiped Danny since infancy — the family’s all-round athlete, talented in every known sport but not the least stuck up about it, unfailingly sunny-natured and patient with his little brother. But as Ian saw it, Lucy was the best. The ex-husband was only a minor drawback; same for the children. What mattered was that pile of black hair and those long black lashes. None of Danny’s previous girls could begin to compare with this one.

But he saw how steadily his parents smiled — stony, glazed smiles as they murmured chitchat. His mother said it certainly was an unusual way for a couple to meet. His father said he’d have opted for parcel post, himself; so he would never have been asked to dinner, would he, heh-heh. His mother said that speaking of dinner, Lucy must stay for spaghetti. Danny said she couldn’t; he was taking her to Haussner’s Restaurant to celebrate their engagement. The word “engagement” sent another shock through the room; for now it was plain that, yes, Danny really was set on this. Bee said maybe later in the week, then. Lucy thanked her in her foggy, fascinating voice. They all stood up. Ian stepped away from the door frame and received his first direct glance from Lucy. She had pure gray eyes, almost silver, and up close her little nose revealed a sprinkling of freckles.

After Danny and Lucy had left, his parents returned to the living room and sat back down on the couch. Supper was more than ready, but no one mentioned eating. Ian wandered over to the upright piano in the corner. Dozens of family photos, framed in dull brass or varnished wood, stood on an ivory lace runner. Other, larger photos hung behind, nearly obscuring the flowered wallpaper that had darkened over the years to the color of a manila envelope. He studied those: his grandmother standing grimly erect beside his seated grandfather, his Great-Aunt Bess trying to master a Hula Hoop, Danny in a satin track uniform with a first-place ribbon hung around his neck. Whenever Danny did something he enjoyed, his face would shine with a fine sweat. Even eating made him sweat, or listening to music. And in this photograph — where he’d recently been sprinting under hot sunshine, after all, and then had the pleasure of winning besides — he gleamed; he seemed metallic. You could imagine he was a statue. Ian lightly touched the frame. (Dust felted his finger. For all her great clattery housecleaning, Bee tended to let the little things slide.) Behind him, his mother said, “Well, we’ve been wishing for years he’d get married.”

“That’s true, we have,” his father said.

“And now that the draft’s stepping up …”

“Oh, yes, the draft,” his father said faintly.

“Did she mention how many children she had?”

“Not that I can recall.”

“If she has lots,” Bee told him, “we can mix them in with Claudia’s and form our own baseball team.”

She laughed. Ian turned to look at her, but he was too late. Already she had passed smoothly over to unquestioning delight, and he had missed his chance to see how she did it.

Lucy did not have lots of children after all; just two. A girl aged six and a boy aged three. She lived a couple of miles away, Danny said, in a rented apartment above a Hampden pharmacy; and she left the children with the pharmacist’s wife when she went to work every day. He told Ian this later that night, when he stopped by Ian’s room on his way to bed. He said she worked as a waitress at the Fill ’Er Up Café—the only job she could find that allowed her to arrange her hours around her children’s. But he would soon put an end to that , Danny said. No working wife for Danny.

He said she had mailed that package at the request of her ex-husband. Her ex-husband was getting remarried and he wanted her to send him his things. Lucy had packed up every trace of him: the geisha girl figurine he’d won tossing darts at the fair, for instance, and the bowling ball in the red-and-white canvas bag that matched her own. Danny listed these objects in a detailed and lingering way, as if even they had fallen within the circle of his love. The bowling ball, he said, had accounted for much of the package’s weight (a total of twenty-eight pounds). Lucy had also mentioned a trophy cup, which couldn’t have been so very light either.