Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

His grandma was passing the cake around on her big tole tray. She served the grownups first. She said, “Macy, cake? Jim, cake?” She offered some to Ian, too, but of course he said no. (At church they didn’t approve of sugar, as Grandma surely knew by now.) She thinned her lips and passed on. “Jessie? You’ll have cake.”

Ian asked Cicely, “What do you say to a movie after this?”

“Well, I kind of like made plans with some friends from school,” Cicely told him.

“Oh.”

“Melanie and them from school.”

“Okay.”

“I’d ask you along except it’s, you know, like all just college talk about people you never heard of.”

“That’s okay,” Ian said.

Thomas hooked his fingers into one of Ian’s rear pockets. He slid his thumb back and forth across the puckery seam at the top. What did this remind him of? Daphne sucking her thumb, that was it. Curling her index finger across her upper lip. He leaned his head against Ian’s side, and Ian put his arm around him. “I should get to bed early anyhow,” he was telling Cicely. “Rumor has it tomorrow’s another workday.”

Now Grandma was offering her tray to the children. She said, “Thomas? Cake?”

“No, thanks.”

“No birthday cake?” she asked. She put on a look of surprise.

“Sugar is an artificial stimulant,” he reminded her.

He expected her to argue like always, but he didn’t expect she’d get angry. Ian was the one she seemed angry with, though. She turned toward Ian sharply and said, “Really, Ian! He’s just a little boy!”

“Sure. He’s free to make up his own mind,” Ian said.

“Free, indeed! It’s that church of yours again.”

“Excuse me. Mrs. Bedloe?” Cicely said. “Maybe Thomas is just listening to his body. Processed sugar is a poison, after all. No telling what it does to your body chemistry.”

“Well, everybody in this room eats sugar and I don’t exactly notice them keeling over,” Grandma said.

“Me, now,” Cicely said, “I’ve started using non-pasteurized honey whenever possible and I feel like a whole new person.”

“But honey is a stimulant, too,” Thomas told her.

Ian said, “Thomas. Hey, sport. Maybe if we just—”

“Do you hear that?” Grandma asked Ian. “Do you hear how he’s been brainwashed?”

“Oh, well, I wouldn’t—”

“It’s not enough that you should fall for it yourself! That you’d obey their half-wit rules and support their maniac minister and scandalize the whole neighborhood by trying to convert the Cahns.”

“I wasn’t trying to convert them! I was having a theoretical discussion.”

“A theoretical discussion, with people who’ve been Jewish longer than this country’s been a nation! Oh, I will never understand. Why, Ian? Why have you turned out this way? Why do you keep doing penance for something that never happened? I know it never happened; I promise it never happened. Why do you persist in believing all that foolishness?”

“Bee, dear heart,” Grandpa said.

Now Thomas noticed how still the room had grown. Maybe Grandma noticed too, because she stopped talking and two pink spots started blooming in her cheeks.

“Bee,” Grandpa said, “we’ve got a crew of hungry kids here wondering if you plan on coming their way.”

The others made murmury laughing sounds, although Thomas didn’t see anything so funny. Then Grandma quirked the corners of her mouth and raised her chin. “Why! I certainly doo-oo!” she said musically, and off she sailed with her cake.

The frosting was caramel. Thomas had checked earlier. His grandma made the best caramel frosting in Baltimore — rich and deep and golden, as smooth as butter when it slid across your tongue.

Daphne went off at nine, kicking up a fuss in Ian’s arms because the cousins were still there, but Thomas and Agatha got to stay awake till the last of the guests had said good night — almost ten-thirty, which was way past their normal bedtime.

“Don’t forget your baths!” Ian called after them as they climbed the stairs, but Thomas was too sleepy for a bath and he fell into bed in his underwear, leaving his clothes in a heap on the floor. He shut his eyes and saw turquoise blue, the color of Sister Myra’s swimming pool. He heard the clatter of china downstairs, and the rattle of silver, and the slow, dancy radio songs his grandma liked to listen to while she did the dishes. (She would be washing and Ian would be clearing away and drying; she always said the hot water felt so good on her finger joints.) “Where do you want these place mats?” Ian called. Loud announcers’ voices interrupted each other in the living room; Grandpa was hunting baseball scores on TV. “… never saw Jessie Jordan so gossipy,” Grandma said, and someone shouted, “BEEN IN A BATTING SLUMP SINCE MID-JUNE—”

“Could you turn that down?” Grandma called.

Then Thomas must have slept, because the next thing he knew the house was silent and he had a feeling the silence had been going on a long time. There wasn’t even a cricket chirping. There wasn’t even a faraway truck or a train whistle. The only sounds were those scraps of past voices that float across your mind sometimes when there’s nothing else to listen to. “Thank you, Sister Audrey,” Reverend Emmett said, and Grandma said, “Why, Ian? Why?”

Thomas should have told her why. He knew the answer, after all. Or, at least, he thought he did. The answer is, you get to meet in heaven. They’ll be waiting for you there if you’ve been careful to do things right. His mother would be waiting in her frilly pink dress. She would drive her station wagon to the gate and she’d sit there with the motor idling, her elbow resting on the window ledge, and when she caught sight of him her face would light up all happy and she would wave. “Thomas! Over here!” she would call, and if he didn’t spot her right away she would honk, and then he would catch sight of her and start running in her direction.

After Doug Bedloe retired, he had a little trouble thinking up things to do with himself. This took him by surprise, because he was accustomed to the schoolteacher’s lengthy summer vacations and he’d never found it hard to fill them. But retirement, it seemed, was another matter. There wasn’t any end to it. Also it was given more significance. Loaf around in summer, Bee would say he deserved his rest. Loaf in winter, she read it as pure laziness. “Don’t you have someplace to go?” she asked him. “Lots of men join clubs or something. Couldn’t you do Meals on Wheels? Volunteer at the hospital?”

Well, he tried. He approached a group at his church that worked with disadvantaged youths. Told them he had forty years’ experience coaching baseball. They were delighted. First he was supposed to get some training, though — spend three Saturdays learning about the emotional ups and downs of adolescents. The second Saturday, it occurred to him he was tired of adolescents. He’d been dealing with their ups and downs for forty years now, and the fact was, they were shallow.

So then he enrolled in this night course in the modern short story (his daughter’s idea). Figured that would not be shallow, and short stories were perfect since he never had been what you would call a speed reader. It turned out, though, he didn’t have a knack for discussing things. You read a story; it’s good or it’s bad. What’s to discuss? The other people in the class, they could ramble on forever. Halfway through the course, he just stopped attending.

He retreated to the basement, then. He built a toy chest for his youngest grandchild — a pretty decent effort, although Ian (Mr. Artsy-Craftsy) objected to particleboard. Also, carpentry didn’t give him quite enough to think about. Left a kind of empty space in his mind that all sorts of bothersome notions could rush in and fill.