Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

Bee smiled, and he saw that they weren’t real tears after all. “I suppose,” he went on more lightly, “there was some stage when we were equals. I mean while she was on the rise and we were on the downslide. A stage when we were level with each other.”

“Well, I must have been on the phone at the time,” Bee said, and then she laughed.

Her hand in the glove felt dead to him, like his own hand after he’d slept on it wrong and cut off the circulation.

The foreigners set their car on fire, trying to install a radio. “ I didn’t know radios were flammable,” Mrs. Jordan said, watching from the Bedloes’ front porch. Doug was a bit surprised himself, but then electronics had never been his strong point. He went over to see if he could help. The car was a Dodge from the late fifties or maybe early sixties, whenever it was that giant fins were all the rage. Once the body had been powder blue but now it was mostly a deep, matte red from rust, and one door was white and one fender turquoise. Whom it belonged to was unclear, since the foreigner who had bought it, second- or third-hand, had long since gone back to his homeland.

John Two and Fred and Ollie were standing around the car in graceful poses, languidly fanning their faces. The smoke appeared to be coming from the dashboard. Doug said, “Fellows? Think we should call the fire department?” but Fred said, “Oh, we dislike to keep disturbing them.”

Hoping nothing would explode, Doug reached through the open window on the driver’s side and pulled the first wire his fingers touched. Almost immediately the smoke thinned. There was a strong smell of burning rubber, but no real damage — at least none that he could see. It was hard to tell; the front seat was worn to bare springs and the backseat had been removed altogether.

“Maybe we just won’t have radio,” John Two told Ollie.

“We never had radio before,” Fred said.

“We were very contented,” John Two said, “and while we traveled we could hear the birds sing.”

Doug pictured them traveling through a flat green countryside like the landscape in a child’s primer. They would be the kind who set off without filling the gas tank first or checking the tire pressure, he was certain. Chances were they wouldn’t even have a road map.

One morning when he came downstairs he found Beastie dead on the kitchen floor, her body not yet stiff. It was a shock, although he should have been prepared for it. She was sixteen years old. He could still remember what she’d looked like when they brought her home — small enough to fit in her own feed dish. That first winter it had snowed and snowed, and she had humped her fat little body ecstatically through the drifts like a Slinky toy, with a dollop of snow icing her nose and snowflakes on her lashes.

He went upstairs to wake Ian. He wanted to get her buried before the children saw her. “Ian,” he said. “Son.”

Ian’s room still looked so boyish. Model airplanes sat on the shelves among autographed baseballs and high-school yearbooks. The bedspread was printed with antique cars. It could have been one of those rooms that’s maintained as a shrine after a young person dies.

Danny’s room, on the other hand, had been redecorated for Thomas. Not a trace of Danny remained.

“Son?”

“Hmm.”

“I need you to help me bury Beastie.”

Ian opened his eyes. “Beastie?”

“I found her this morning in the kitchen.”

Ian considered a moment and then sat up. When Doug was sure he was awake, he left the room and went downstairs for his jacket.

Beastie had not been a large dog, but she weighed a lot. Doug heaved her onto the doormat and then dragged the mat outside and down the back steps. Thump, thump, thump — it made him wince. The mat left a trail in the sparkling grass. He backed up to the azalea and dropped the corners of the mat and straightened. It was six-thirty or so — too early for the neighbors to be about yet. The light was nearly colorless, the traffic noises sparse and distant.

Ian came out with his windbreaker collar turned up. He had both shovels with him. “Good thing the ground’s not frozen,” Doug told him.

“Right.”

“This is probably not even legal, anyhow.”

They chipped beneath the sod, trying as best they could not to break it apart, and laid it to one side. A breeze was ruffling Beastie’s fur and Doug kept imagining that she could feel it, that she was aware of what they were doing. He made his mind a blank. He set up an alternating rhythm with Ian, hacking through the reddish earth and occasionally ringing against a pebble or a root. In spite of the breeze he started sweating and he stopped to take off his jacket, but Ian kept his on. Ian didn’t look hot at all; he looked chilly and pale, with that fine white line around his lips that meant he had his jaw set. For the first time, Doug thought to wonder how this was hitting him. “Guess you’ll miss her,” he said.

“Yes,” Ian said, still digging.

“Beastie’s been around since you were … what? Eight or so, or not even that.”

Ian nodded and bent to toss a rock out of the way.

“We’ll let the kids set some kind of marker up,” Doug told him. “Plant bulbs or something. Make it pretty.”

It was all he could think of to offer.

They ended up cheating a bit on the grave — dug more of an oval than a rectangle, so they had to maneuver to get her into it. She fit best on her side, slightly curled. When Doug saw her velvety snout against the clay, tears came to his eyes. She had always been such an undemanding dog, so accommodating, so adaptable. “Ah, God,” he said, and then he looked up and realized Ian was praying. His head was bowed and his lips were moving. Doug hastily bowed his own head. He felt as if Ian were the grownup and he the child. It had been years, maybe all the years of his adulthood, since he had relied so thankfully on someone else’s knowledge of what to do.

The two younger children came down with chicken pox — first Daphne and then Thomas. Everybody waited for Agatha to get it too but she must have had it earlier, before they knew her. Daphne was hardly sick at all, but Thomas had a much worse case and one night he woke up delirious. Doug heard his hoarse, startled voice, oddly bright in the darkness—“Don’t let them come! Don’t let their sharp hooves!”—and then Ian’s steady “Thomas, old man. Thomas. Tom-Tom.”

In that short-story course, Doug had read a story about an experiment conducted by creatures from outer space. What the creatures wanted to know was, could earthlings form emotional attachments? Or were they merely at the mercy of biology? So they cut a house in half in the middle of the night, and they switched it with another half house in some totally different location. Tossed the two households together like so many game pieces. This woman woke up with a man and some children she’d never laid eyes on before. Naturally she was terribly puzzled and upset, and the others were too, but as it happened the children had some kind of illness, measles or something (maybe even chicken pox, come to think of it), and so of course she did everything she could to make them comfortable. The creatures’ conclusion, therefore, was that earthlings didn’t discriminate. Their family feelings, so called, were a matter of blind circumstance.

Doug couldn’t remember now how the story had ended. Maybe that was the end. He couldn’t quite recollect.

In the dark, Bee’s special white arthritis gloves glowed eerily. She lay on her side, facing him, with the gloves curled beneath her chin. The slightest sound used to wake her when their own three children were little — a cough or even a whimper. Now she slept through everything, and Doug was glad. It was a pity so much rested on Ian, but Ian was young. He had the energy. He hadn’t reached the point yet where it just plain didn’t seem worth the effort.