Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

“She makes less money than I made during the Depression and then she gives it all to this Church of the Second Rate.”

“Second Chance! And I do not; I tithe. I don’t have to do even that, if I don’t want to. It’s all in secret; we don’t believe in public collection. You act like they’re defrauding me or something.”

“They’re a church, aren’t they? A church’ll take its people for whatever it can get,” Mac said. He glanced at Doug. “Hope that doesn’t offend you.”

“Me? No, no.”

“Want to hear what I hate most about churches? They think they know the answers. I really hate that. It’s the people who don’t know the answers who are going to heaven, I tell you.”

“But!” his daughter said. “The minute you say that, you see, you yourself become a person who knows the answers.”

Mac gave Doug an exasperated look and chomped into a drumstick.

Bee was sitting on a chaise longue with her legs stretched out, sharing a plate with Daphne. She was the only guest who seemed to have remained outside the gathering. Everyone else was laughing, growing looser, circulating from group to group in a giddy, almost tipsy way. (Although of course there wasn’t a bit of alcohol; just that insipid fruit punch.) Reverend Emmett was holding forth on his inspiration for this picnic. “I felt led,” he told a circle of women. He had the breathless look of an athlete being interviewed after a triumph. “I was listening to one of our brothers a couple of weeks ago; he said he wished he could share his salvation with his parents except they never would agree to come to services. And all at once I felt led to say, ‘Why should it be services? Why not a picnic?’ ”

The women smiled and nodded and their glasses flashed. (One of them was Jessie Jordan, looking thrilled.) An extremely fat young woman threaded her way through the crowd with a plastic garbage bag, saying, “Plates? Cups? Keep your forks, though. Dessert is on its way.”

What could they serve for dessert if they didn’t believe in sugar? Fruit salad, it turned out, in little foil dishes. Thomas carried one of the trays around. When he came to Doug he said, “Grandpa? Are you having a good time?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Are you making any friends?”

“Certainly,” Doug said, and he felt a sudden wrench for the boy’s thin, anxious face with its dots of old chicken-pox scars. He took a step closer to Mac McClintock, although they’d run out of small talk some minutes ago.

The women were clearing the table now, debating leftovers.

“It seems a shame to throw all this out.”

“Won’t you take it home?”

“No, you.”

“Law, I couldn’t eat it in a month of Sundays.”

“We wouldn’t want to waste it, though.”

Reverend Emmett’s mother said, “Mr. Bedloe, we all think so highly of Brother Ian.”

“Thank you,” Doug said. This was starting to remind him of Parents’ Night at elementary school. He swallowed a chunk of canned pineapple, which surely contained sugar, didn’t it? “And you must be very proud of your son,” he added.

“Yes, I am,” she said. “I look around me and I see so many people, so many redeemed people, and I think, ‘If not for Emmett, what would they be doing?’ ”

What would they be doing? Most would be fine, Doug supposed — his own son among them. Lord, yes. But in all fairness, he supposed this church met a real need for some others. And so he looked around too, following Sister What’s-Her-Name’s eyes. What he saw, though, was not what he had expected. Instead of the festive throng he had been watching a few minutes ago, he saw a spreading circle of stillness that radiated from the table and extended now even to the children, so that a cluster of little girls in one corner allowed their jack ball to die and the boys gave up their violent ride in the glider. Even Bee seemed galvanized, an orange section poised halfway to her parted lips.

“It’s the table,” a woman told Reverend Emmett’s mother.

“The—?”

“Something’s damaged the surface.”

Reverend Emmett’s mother thrust her way through the circle of women, actually shoving one aside. Doug craned to see what they were talking about. The table was bare now and even shinier than before; someone had wiped it with a damp cloth. It looked perfect, at first glance, but then when he tilted his head to let the light slant differently he saw that the shine was marred at one end by several distinct, unshiny rings.

“Oh, no, ” Reverend Emmett’s mother breathed.

Everyone started speaking at once: “Try mayonnaise.”

“Try toothpaste.”

“Rub it down with butter.”

“Quiet! Please!” Reverend Emmett’s mother said. She closed her eyes and pressed both hands to her temples.

Reverend Emmett stood near Doug, peering over the others’ heads. (Above the collar of his jaunty polo shirt, his neck looked scrawny and pathetic.) “Perhaps,” he said, “if we attempted to—”

“Shut up and let me think , Emmett!”

Silence.

“Maybe if I came back tomorrow,” she said finally, “with that cunning little man from Marx Antiques, the one who restores old … he could strip it and refinish it. Don’t you suppose? But the owners are due home Tuesday, and if he has to strip the whole … but never mind! I’ll tell him to work round the clock! Or I’ll ask if …”

More silence.

Ian said, “Was it soaped?”

Everyone turned and looked for him. It took a minute to find him; he was standing at the far end of the room.

“Seems to me the finish is some kind of polyurethane,” he said, “and if those rings are grease, well, a little soap wouldn’t do any harm and it might even—”

“Soap! Yes!” Reverend Emmett’s mother said.

She went herself to the kitchen. While she was gone, the fat young woman told Doug, “Brother Ian works with wood every day, you know.”

“Yes, I’m his father,” Doug said.

She said, “Are you really!”

Reverend Emmett’s mother came back. She held a sponge and a bottle of liquid detergent. They parted to let her through and she approached the table and bent over it. Doug was too far away to see what she did next, but he heard the sighs of relief. “Now dry it off,” someone suggested.

A woman whipped a paisley scarf from her neck and offered that, and it was accepted.

“Perfect,” someone said.

This time when he craned, Doug saw that the rings had vanished.

Right away the congregation started packing, collecting coats and baskets. Maybe they would have anyhow, but Doug thought he detected a sort of letdown in the general mood. People filed out meekly, not glancing back at the house as they left it. (Doug imagined the house thinking, Goodness, what was all THAT about? ) They crossed the columned front porch with their heads lowered. Doug helped Bee into the car. “Coming?” he asked Mrs. Jordan.

“Oh, I’m going to ride in the bus,” she said. She alone seemed undampened. “Wasn’t Ian the hero, though!”

“Sure thing,” Doug said.

He watched her set off toward the bus with one hand clamping down her cartwheel hat.

Driving home, he made no attempt to stay with the others. He left the bus behind on the Beltway and breezed eastward at a speed well above the legal limit. “So now we’ve been to a Christian Fellowship Picnic,” he told Bee.

“Yes,” she said.

“I wonder if it’ll become a yearly event.”

“Probably,” she said.

Then she started talking about Danny. How did she get from the picnic to Danny? No telling. She started kneading the knuckles of her right hand, the hand that looked more swollen, and she said, “Sometimes I have the strangest feeling. I give this start and I think, ‘Why!’ I think, ‘Why, here we are! Just going about our business the same as usual!’ And yet so much has changed. Danny is gone, our golden boy, our first baby boy that we were so proud of, and our house is stuffed with someone else’s children. You know they all are someone else’s. You know that! And Ian is a whole different person and Claudia’s so bustling now and our lives have turned so makeshift and second-class, so second-string, so second-fiddle, and everything’s been lost. Isn’t it amazing that we keep on going? That we keep on shopping for clothes and getting hungry and laughing at jokes on TV? When our oldest son is dead and gone and we’ll never see him again and our life’s in ruins!”