Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

By now, those words were like some secret joke. Thomas giggled. Ian looked at him in the rearview mirror.

“You’re laughing?” he asked.

Thomas got serious.

“You think Sister Audrey is funny?”

A driver behind them honked his horn; the light had turned green. Ian didn’t seem to hear. “She’s just a kid,” he told Thomas. “She’s not much older than you are, and had none of your advantages. I can’t believe you would find her situation comical.”

“Ian, cars are getting mad at us,” Agatha said.

Ian sighed and started driving again.

I’m just a kid too , Thomas wanted to tell him. How would I know what her situation is?

They took a left turn. Daphne sucked her thumb and slid her curled index finger back and forth across her upper lip, the way she liked to do when she was tired. Thomas kept his eyes wide open so no one would see the tears. He wished he had his grandma. Ian was his favorite person in the world, but when you were sad or sick to your stomach who did you want? Not Ian. Ian had no soft nooks to him. Thomas tipped his head back against the seat and felt his eyes growing cool in the breeze from the window.

On Lang Avenue, with its low white houses and the sprinklers spinning under the trees, Ian parked and got out. He climbed the steps to Cicely’s porch, meanwhile taking off his cap. “Ooh,” Agatha said. “He’s got horrible hat-head.” Thomas had never heard the phrase before, but he saw instantly what she meant. All around Ian’s shiny brown hair the cap had left a deep groove. “He looks like a goop,” Agatha said. That was her way of comforting Thomas, he knew. It didn’t really help much, but he tried to smile anyhow.

When Cicely came to the door, she was wearing bell-bottom jeans and a tie-dyed T-shirt. A beaded Indian headband held back her long messy waterfall of curls. First she stood on her toes and gave Ian a kiss. (All three of them watched carefully from the car. For a while now they had been worrying that Cicely didn’t like Ian as much as she used to.) Then she waved at them and started down the porch steps. Ian followed, clamping his cap back on.

Daphne took her thumb out of her mouth. “Hi, Cicely!” she called.

“Well, hey, gang,” Cicely said. “How we doing?” She opened the door on the passenger side and slid across to the middle of the front seat. The car filled with the moldy smell of the perfume she’d started wearing.

Ian got in on the driver’s side and asked, “Have a good day at work?”

“Great,” Cicely said. (This summer she worked part-time at a shop where they made leather sandals.) She moved over very close to him and brushed a wood shaving off his shoulder. “How was your day?”

“Well, we got a new order,” Ian said.

“Right on!”

He pulled into traffic and said, “This woman came all the way from Massachusetts with a blanket box, her great-grandfather’s blanket box. Asked if we knew how to make one just like it, using the same methods. Exactly the kind of thing Mr. Brant likes best.”

Cicely made a sort of humming noise and nestled in against him.

“Soon as she left Mr. Brant told me, ‘Go call those kitchen people.’ People who wanted an estimate on their kitchen cabinets. ‘Call and cancel,’ he said. Cicely hon, stop that, please.”

“Stop what?” she asked him, in a smiling voice.

“You know what.”

“I’m not doing anything!” she said. She sat up straight. She slid over to her side of the car and set her face toward the window. “Mr. Holiness,” she muttered to a fire hydrant.

“Pretty soon we may give up kitchens altogether,” Ian said, turning down Waverly. He parked at the curb and cut the engine. “We’ll build nothing but fine furniture. Custom designs. Old-style joinery.”

Cicely wasn’t listening. All three of them sitting in back could tell that, just from the way she kept her face turned. But Ian said, “We might hire another worker, too. At least, Mr. Brant’s thinking about it. I said, ‘Good, hire several, and give me a raise while you’re at it,’ and he said he might do it. ‘I won’t be a single man forever,’ I told him.” Ian glanced over at Cicely when he said that, but Cicely was still looking out the window.

It was amazing, how he could talk on like that without realizing. When even they realized! Even little Daphne, sucking her thumb and watching Cicely with round, anxious eyes!

Thomas all at once felt so angry at Ian that he jumped out of the car in a rush and slammed the door loudly behind him.

Their grandma said they had to change clothes at once, this instant, because Aunt Claudia was arriving at five-thirty and they looked as if they’d spent the day rolling in a barnyard. She told Ian to run Daphne a bath, and she said, “Clean shirts for the other two! And clean shorts for Thomas. Hair combed. Faces washed.”

But the minute Ian’s back was turned, Thomas followed Agatha up the narrow, steep wooden stairs to the attic. He trailed her into the slanty-ceilinged attic bedroom that was hers and Daphne’s, that used to be Aunt Claudia’s when she was a girl at home. “Agatha,” he said, putting on a fake frown, “do you think we should’ve bought Aunt Claudia a present? Maybe a card will be too boring.”

What he was after, of course, was a glimpse of their mother’s jewelry box. He knew Agatha had to open it to return the mustard seed.

“You heard what Grandma said,” Agatha told him. “A handmade card means more than anything. What are you in my room for?”

“But she gives us presents,” Thomas said. He sat on her bed and swung his feet. “Maybe we should’ve made her something bigger, a picture for her wall or something.”

“I mean it, Thomas. You’re trespassing in my private room.”

“It’s Daphne’s room, too,” Thomas said. “Daphne would be glad to have me here.”

“Get out, I tell you.”

“Agatha, can’t I just watch you put the mustard seed away?”

“No, you can’t.”

“She wasn’t only your mama, you know.”

“Maybe not,” Agatha said, “but you don’t keep secrets good.”

“I do so. I didn’t tell about the jewelry box, did I?”

“You told our father’s name, though,” Agatha said, screwing up her eyes at him.

“That just slipped out! And anyway, I was little.”

“Well, who knows what’ll slip out next time?”

“Agatha, I implore you,” he said, clasping his hands. “How about I look at the picture and nothing else?”

“You’ll get it dirty.”

“How about I hold it by the edges, sitting here on the bed? I won’t ask to look at anything else, honest. I won’t even peek inside the box.”

She thought it over. She had taken the mustard seed from her pocket and he could see it glimmering between her fingers, so close he could have touched it.

“Well, okay,” she said finally.

“You’ll let me?”

“But just for a minute.”

She crossed to the closet, which was only more attic — the lowest part of the attic, where the ceiling slanted all the way down. It didn’t even have a door to shut. Thomas would have been scared to sleep near so much darkness, but Agatha wasn’t scared of anything, and she stepped inside as bold as you please and knelt on the floor. He heard the box’s bottom drawer slide open, and then the clink of the mustard seed against other clinky things — maybe the charm bracelet Agatha had let him sleep with once when he was sick, with the tiny scissors charm that could really cut paper and the tiny bicycle charm that could really spin its wheels.

She came back out, holding the picture by one corner. “Don’t you dare get a speck of dirt on it,” she said. He took it very, very gently between the flat of his hands, the way you’d take an LP record. The crinkly edges felt like little teeth against his palms.