Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

“It’s a girl, I think,” Thomas announced.

“Leave her alone, Thomas!”

“She’s not just yours, Daphne,” Agatha said. She had risen too and was scratching the cat behind its ears.

“She is so mine! Ian said so! You’re mine, mine, mine, you little sweetums,” Daphne said, nuzzling the cat’s nose with her own. “Oh, what kind of monstrous, mean person would just ditch you and drive off?”

All of a sudden Ian had an image of Agatha, Thomas, and Daphne huddled in a ditch by the side of a road. They were hanging onto each other and their eyes were wide and fearful. And far in the distance, almost out of sight, Ian’s car was vanishing around a curve.

But then immediately afterward, he felt such a deep sense of loss that it made his breath catch.

His mother was truly disabled now. Oh, she still hobbled from room to room, she still insisted on standing over the stove and creeping behind the dust mop, but the arthritis had seized up her hands and the finer motions of day-to-day life were beyond her. Folding the laundry, driving the car, buttoning Daphne’s dress down the back — all that was left to Ian and his father. And Ian’s father was not much help. Any task he began seemed to end in, “How the dickens …?” and “Ian, can you come here a minute?” In the old days Claudia had stopped by once or twice a week to see what needed doing, but she had moved to Pittsburgh when Macy found a better job; and first they’d returned for holidays but now they didn’t even do that very often.

Meanwhile, these children were a full-time occupation. They were good children, bright children; they did well in school and never got in serious trouble. But even nonserious trouble could consume a great deal of energy, Ian had learned. Agatha, for instance, was suffering all the miseries of adolescence. Every morning she set off for school alone and friendless — the earnest, pale, studious kind of girl Ian had ignored when he himself was her age, but now he cursed those callow high-school kids who couldn’t see how special she was, how intelligent and witty and perceptive. Thomas, on the other hand, had too many friends. Tall and graceful, his voice already cracking and a shadow darkening his upper lip, he was more interested in socializing than in school-work, and one or another of the Bedloes was always having to attend parent-teacher conferences — most often Ian, it seemed.

As for Daphne, she wound through life sparkling at everyone and lowering her long black lashes over stunning blue-black eyes; but any time you crossed her there was hell to pay. She was fierce , that Daphne. “I think she had a difficult infancy,” Ian was always explaining. “She’s really a good kid, believe me. She just feels she’s got to fend for herself,” he told a teacher. Yet another teacher. At yet another parent-teacher conference. (His second of the year, and school had been in session only ten days.)

Cicely was living out in California now with a folk guitarist. Pig Benson’s family had moved away while he was in the army. Andrew was in graduate school at Tulane. And anyhow, the last time Andrew came home it turned out he and Ian didn’t have much to talk about. At one point Andrew had referred to the “goddamned holiday traffic,” and then reddened and said, “Sorry,” so Ian knew he’d heard about Second Chance from someone. And then Ian had to take Daphne for her booster shots, and that was that. Andrew had not suggested getting together again.

Bachelor . What a dashing word. Ian the bachelor. He would live in an apartment all his own. (A bachelor pad.) He’d have friends his own age dropping by to visit. Young women going out with him. And no one trailing behind to ask, “But how about us? Who will see to us? Who will find our socks for us and help with our history project?”

At work, he was putting the final touches on a drop-front desk. He was rubbing linseed oil into the wood, while Bert, one of the new men, worked on a bureau across the room.

Their kitchen-cabinet days were over, thank heaven. Now rich young couples from Bolton Hill showed up at Mr. Brant’s shop to commission one-of-a-kind furniture: bookcases custom-fitted to Bolton Hill’s high ceilings, stand-up desks made to measure, and Shaker-looking benches. Everything was built the old way, with splines and rabbets and lap joints, no nails, no stains or plastic finishes. Orders were backed up a year or more and they’d had to hire three new employees.

You’d think this would delight Mr. Brant, but he remained as morose as always. Or was that only his deafness? No, because whenever his wife dropped by — a much younger woman who’d been deaf from birth, unlike Mr. Brant — she would sign to him with flying fingers, her face lighting up and clouding over to go with what she said; and Ian could see she lived a life as full and talkative as any hearing person’s. Mr. Brant would watch her without altering his expression, and then he would make a few signs of his own — clumsy, blunt signs, stiff-thumbed. Ian wondered how on earth they had courted. What could Mr. Brant have said that would win such a woman’s heart? When Mrs. Brant watched his hands, her eyes grew very intent and focused and all the animation left her. Ian had the feeling her husband was somehow dampening her enthusiasm, but maybe it only seemed that way.

One of the new employees was Mrs. Brant’s niece, a rosy, bosomy girl named Jeannie who’d dropped out of college to do something more real. (They were seeing a lot of that nowadays.) Jeannie said Mrs. Brant was a regular social butterfly. She said Mrs. Brant had dozens of friends who’d gone to Gallaudet with her, and they would sit around her kitchen talking away a mile a minute, using their special sign language with lots of inside jokes and dirty words; but her husband had come late to sign and could barely manage such basics as “Serve supper” and “Mail letter” (like Tonto, Jeannie said), so of course he was left in the dust. He was neither fish nor fowl, Jeannie said. This made Ian feel fonder of the man. He had long ago given up all hope of befriending him, or of seeing any hint of emotion in that handsome, leathery face; but now he regretted dismissing him so easily. “He must be awfully lonesome,” he told Jeannie, “watching his wife enjoy herself with her friends.”

“Oh, he doesn’t care,” Jeannie said. “He just stomps off to his garden. None of us can figure why she married him. Maybe it was sex. I do think he’s kind of sexy, don’t you?”

Jeannie often talked that way. She made Ian feel uncomfortable. Several times she had suggested they go out together some evening, and although he did find her attractive, with her streaming hair and bouncy peasant blouses, he always gave some excuse.

This afternoon she was helping Bert with his bureau. (She didn’t know enough yet to be entrusted with a piece all her own.) Her job was to attach the drawer knobs — perfectly plain beechwood cylinders — but she kept leaving them to come over and talk to Ian. “Pretty,” she said of the desk. Then, without a pause, “You like nature, Ian?”

“Nature? Sure.”

“Me and some friends are taking a picnic lunch to Loch Raven this Sunday. Want to come?”

“Well, I have church on Sundays,” Ian told her.

“Church,” she said. She rocked back on the heels of her moccasins. “But how about after church?” she said. “We wouldn’t be leaving till one or so.”

“Oh, uh, there’s my nephew and nieces, too,” Ian said. “I sort of have to keep an eye on them on weekends.”

“Why can’t their parents do that?”

“Their parents are dead.”

“Their grandparents, then,” she said, instantly readjusting.

“My mother’s got arthritis and my dad is kind of tied up.”