Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

Once in a while something needed fixing; that was always welcome. Bee would bring him some household object and he would click his tongue happily and ask her, “What did you do to this?”

“I just broke it, Doug, all right?” she would say. “I deliberately went and broke it. I sat up late last night plotting how to break it.”

And he would shake his head, feeling gratified and important.

Such occasions didn’t arise every day, though, or even every week. Not nearly enough to keep him fully occupied.

It had been assumed all along that he would help out more with the grandkids, once he’d retired. Lord knows help was needed. Daphne was in first grade now but still a holy terror. Even the older two — ten and thirteen — took quite a lot of seeing to. And Bee’s arthritis had all but crippled her and Ian was running himself ragged. They talked about getting a woman in a couple of days a week, but what with the cost of things … well, money was a bit tight for that. So Doug tried to lend a hand, but he turned out to be kind of a dunderhead. For instance, he saw the kids had tracked mud across the kitchen floor and so he fetched the mop and bucket with the very best of intentions, but next thing he knew Bee was saying, “Doug, I swan, not to sweep first and swabbing all that dirty water around …” and Ian said, “Here, Dad, I’ll take over.” Doug yielded the mop, feeling both miffed and relieved, and put on his jacket and whistled up the dog for a walk.

He and Beastie took long, long walks these days. Not long in distance but in time; Beastie was so old now she could barely creep. Probably she’d have preferred to stay home, but Doug would have felt foolish strolling the streets with no purpose. This gave him something to hang onto — her ancient, cracked leather leash, which sagged between them as she inched down the sidewalk. He could remember when she was a puppy and the leash grew taut as a clothesline every time a squirrel passed.

For no good reason, he pictured what it would look like if Bee were the one walking Beastie. The two of them hunched and arthritic, a matched set. It hurt to think of it. He had often seen such couples — aged widows and their decrepit pets. If he died, Bee would have to walk Beastie, at least in the daytime when the kids weren’t home. But of course, he was not about to die. He had always kept in shape. His hair might be gray now but it was still there, and he could fit into trousers he’d bought thirty years ago.

A while back, though, their family doctor had told him something unsettling. He’d said, “Know what I hate? When a patient comes in and says, ‘Doc, I’m here for a checkup. Next month I hit retirement age and I’ve planned all these great adventures.’ Then sure as shooting, I’ll find he’s got something terminal. It never fails.”

Well, Doug had avoided that eventuality. He just hadn’t gone for a checkup.

And anyhow, planned no great adventures.

The trouble was, he was short on friends. Why had he never noticed before? It seemed he’d had so many back in high school and college.

If Danny had lived, maybe he would have been a friend.

Although Ian was nice company too, of course.

It was just that Ian seemed less … oh, less related to him, somehow. Maybe on account of that born-again business. He was so serious and he never just goofed off the way Danny used to do or sat around shooting the breeze with his dad. Didn’t even have a girlfriend anymore; that pretty little Cicely had faded Clear out of the picture. She had found someone else, Doug supposed. Not that Ian had ever said so. That was the thing: they didn’t talk.

Danny used to talk.

Walking Beastie past the foreigners’ house one unseasonably mild day in February, Doug noticed someone lying face down on the roof. Good Lord, what now? They lived the strangest lives over there. This fellow was sprawled parallel to the eaves, poking some wire or electrical cord through an upstairs window. Doug paused to watch. Beastie groaned and thudded to the ground. “Need help?” Doug called.

The foreigner raised his head. In that peremptory way that foreigners sometimes have, he said, “Yes, please to enter the house and accept this wire.”

“Oh. Okay,” Doug said.

He let Beastie’s leash drop. She wasn’t going anywhere.

He had been in the foreigners’ house several times, because they gave a neighborhood party every Fourth of July. (“Happy your Independence Day,” one of them had once said. “Happy yours, ” he’d answered before he thought.) He knew that the window in question belonged to the second-floor bathroom, and so he crossed the hall, which was totally bare of furniture, and climbed the stairs and entered the bathroom. The foreigner’s face hung upside down outside the window, his thick black hair standing straight off his head so that he looked astonished. “Here!” he called.

Darned if he hadn’t broken a corner out of a pane. Not a neatly drilled hole in the wood but a jagged triangle in the glass itself. A wire poked through — antenna wire, it looked like. Doug pulled on it carefully so as not to abrade it. He reeled it in foot by foot. “Okay,” the foreigner said, and his face disappeared.

Doug hadn’t thought to wonder how the man had got up on the roof in the first place. All at once he was down again, brushing off his clothes in the bathroom doorway — a good-looking, stocky young fellow in a white shirt and blue jeans. You could always tell foreigners by the way they wore their jeans, so neat and proper with the waist at the actual waistline, and in this man’s case even a crease ironed in. Jim, was that his name? No, Jim was from an earlier batch. (The foreigners came and went in rotation, with their M.D.’s or their Ph.D.’s or their engineering degrees.) “Frank?” Doug tried.

“Fred.”

They were always so considerate about dropping whatever unpronounceable names they’d been christened with. Or not christened, maybe, but—

“Please to tie the wire about the radiator’s paw,” Fred told him.

“What is it, anyhow?”

“It is aerial for my shortwave radio.”

“Ah.”

“I attached it to TV antenna on chimney.”

“Is that safe?” Doug asked him.

“Maybe; maybe not,” Fred said cheerfully.

Doug wouldn’t have worried, except these people seemed prone to disasters. Last summer, while hooking up an intercom, they had set their attic on fire. Doug wasn’t sure how an intercom could start a fire exactly. All he knew was, smoke had begun billowing from the little eyebrow window on the roof and then six or seven foreigners had sauntered out of the house and stood in the yard gazing upward, looking interested. Finally Mrs. Jordan had called the fire department. What on earth use would they have for an intercom anyway? she had asked Bee later. But that was how they were, the foreigners: they just loved gadgets.

Fred was walking backward now, playing out the wire as he headed across the hall. From the looks of things, he planned to let it lie in the middle of the floor where it would ambush every passerby. “You got any staples?” Doug asked, following.

“Excuse me?”

“Staples? U-shaped nails? Electrical staples, insulated,” Doug went on, without a hope in this world. “You tack the wire to the baseboard so it doesn’t trip folks up.”

“Maybe later,” Fred said vaguely.

Meanwhile leading the wire directly across the hall and allowing not one inch of slack.

In Fred’s bedroom, gold brocade draped an army cot. A bookcase displayed folded T-shirts, boxer shorts, and rolled socks stacked in a pyramid like cannonballs. Doug managed to take all this in because there was nothing else to look at — not a desk or chair or bureau, not a mirror or family photo. A brown plastic radio sat on the windowsill, and Fred inserted the wire into a hole in its side.