Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

“People?” the man had asked. Two furrows stitched themselves across his leathery forehead.

“I already have some experience,” Ian said. “I used to help my father in the basement. I know I could build a kitchen cabinet.”

“I dislike kitchens,” the man said harshly.

For a moment, Ian thought he still hadn’t made himself clear. But the man went on: “They’re junk. See this hinge.” He pointed to it — an ornately curlicued piece of black metal, dimpled all over with artificial hammer marks. “My real work is furniture,” he said.

“Fine,” Ian told him. What did he care? Kitchen cabinets, furniture, it was all the same to him: inanimate objects. Something he could deal with that he couldn’t mess up. Or if he did mess up, it was possible to repair the damage.

“I have a workshop. I make things I like,” the man said. He spoke like anyone else except for a certain insistence of tone, a thickness in the consonants, as if he had a cold. “These kitchens, they’re just for the money.”

“That’s okay! That’s fine! And as for money,” Ian said, “you could pay me minimum wage. Or lower, to start with, because I’m just an apprentice. Student,” he added, for he saw now that it was the uncommon word “apprentice” that had given him trouble. “And any time you have to do a kitchen, you could send me instead.”

He knew he had a hope, then. He could tell by the wistful, visionary look that slowly dawned in the man’s gray eyes.

But were his parents impressed with Ian’s initiative? No. They just sat there blankly. “It’s not brute labor, after all,” he told them. “It’s a craft! It’s like an art.”

“Ian,” his father said, “if you’re busy learning this … art, how will you help with the kids?”

“I’ll work out a schedule with my boss,” Ian said. “Also there’s this church that’s going to pitch in.”

“This what?”

“Church.”

They tilted their heads.

“There’s this … it’s kind of hard to explain,” he said. “This church sort of place on York Road, see, that believes you have to really do something practical to atone for your, shall we call them, sins. And if you agree to that, they’ll pitch in. You can sign up on a bulletin board — the hours you need help, the hours you’ve got free to help others—”

“What in the name of God …?” Bee asked.

“Well, that’s just it,” Ian said. “I mean, I don’t want to sound corny or anything but it is in the name of God. ‘Let us not love in—’ what—‘in just words or in tongue, but in—’ ”

“Ian, have you fallen into the hands of some sect ?” his father asked.

“No, I haven’t,” Ian said. “I have merely discovered a church that makes sense to me, the same as Dober Street Presbyterian makes sense to you and Mom.”

“Dober Street didn’t ask us to abandon our educations,” his mother told him. “Of course we have nothing against religion; we raised all of you children to be Christians. But our church never asked us to abandon our entire way of life.”

“Well, maybe it should have,” Ian said.

His parents looked at each other.

His mother said, “I don’t believe this. I do not believe it. No matter how long I’ve been a mother, it seems my children can still come up with something new and unexpected to do to me.”

“I’m not doing this to you! Why does everything have to relate to you all the time? It’s for me, can’t you get that into your head? It’s something I have to do for myself, to be forgiven.”

“Forgiven what, Ian?” his father asked.

Ian swallowed.

“You’re nineteen years old, son. You’re a fine, considerate, upstanding human being. What sin could you possibly be guilty of that would require you to uproot your whole existence?”

Reverend Emmett had said Ian would have to tell them. He’d said that was the only way. Ian had tried to explain how much it would hurt them, but Reverend Emmett had held firm. Sometimes a wound must be scraped out before it can heal, he had said.

Ian said, “I’m the one who caused Danny to die. He drove into that wall on purpose.”

Nobody spoke. His mother’s face was white, almost flinty.

“I told him Lucy was, um, not faithful,” he said.

He had thought there would be questions. He had assumed they would ask for details, pull the single strand he’d handed them till the whole ugly story came tumbling out. But they just sat silent, staring at him.

“I’m sorry!” he cried. “I’m really sorry!”

His mother moved her lips, which seemed unusually wrinkled. No sound emerged.

After a while, he rose awkwardly and left the table. He paused in the dining room doorway, just in case they wanted to call him back. But they didn’t. He crossed the hall and started up the stairs.

For the first time it occurred to him that there was something steely and inhuman to this religion business, Had Reverend Emmett taken fully into account the lonely thud of his sneakers on the steps, the shattered, splintered air he left behind him?

The little lamp on his desk gave off just enough light so it wouldn’t wake Daphne. He leaned over the crib to check on her. She had a feverish smell that reminded him of a sour dishcloth. He straightened her blanket, and then he crossed to the bureau and looked in the mirror that hung above it. Back-lit, he was nothing but a silhouette. He saw himself suddenly as the figure he had feared in his childhood, the intruder who lurked beneath his bed so he had to take a running leap from the doorway every night. He turned aside sharply and picked up the mail his mother had set out for him: a Playboy magazine, an advertisement for a record club, a postcard from his roommate. The magazine and the ad he dropped into the wastebasket. The postcard showed a wild-haired woman barely covered by a white fur dress that hung in strategic zigzags around her thighs. ( SHE-WOLVES OF ANTARCTICA! In Vivi-Color! the legend read.) Dear Ian, How do you like my Christmas card? Better late than never. Kind of boring here at home, no Ian and Cicely across the room oh-so-silently hanky-pankying … He winced and dropped the card on top of the magazine. It made a whiskery sound as it landed.

He saw that he was beginning from scratch, from the very ground level, as low as he could get. It was a satisfaction, really.

That night he dreamed he was carrying a cardboard moving carton for Sid ’n’ Ed. It held books or something; it weighed a ton. “Here,” Danny said, “let me help you,” and he took one end and started backing down the steps with it. And all the while he and Ian smiled into each other’s eyes.

It was the last such dream Ian would ever have of Danny, although of course he didn’t know that at the time. At the time he woke clenched and anxious, and all he could think of for comfort was the hymn they had sung in the Church of the Second Chance. “Leaning,” they sang, “leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms …” Gradually he drifted loose, giving himself over to God. He rested all his weight on God, trustfully, serenely, the way his roommate used to rest in his chair that resembled the palm of a hand.

Holy Roller, their grandma called it. Holy Roller Bible Camp. She shut a cupboard door and told Thomas, “If you all went to real camp instead of Holy Roller, you wouldn’t have to get up at the crack of dawn every day. And I wouldn’t be standing here half asleep trying to fix you some breakfast.”

But it wasn’t the crack of dawn. Hot yellow bands of sunshine stretched across the linoleum. And she didn’t look half asleep, either. She already had her hair combed, fluffed around her face in a curly gray shower-cap shape. She was wearing the blouse Thomas liked best, the one printed like a newspaper page, and brown knit slacks stretched out in front by the cozy ball of her stomach.