Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

“Or the other grandparents! Or other aunts and uncles! Or baby-sitters! Or can’t the older ones watch the younger ones? Or maybe you could call the mothers of some of their school friends and see if—”

“It’s kind of involved,” Ian said. He was surprised at the number of options that could be produced at such short notice. “I guess I’d just better say no,” he told her.

“Christ,” she said, “what a drag. Why, even chain gangs get their Sundays off.”

Then Mr. Brant called, “Jeannie!” He towered over the bureau, glaring in her direction, and she said, “Oops! Gotta go.”

She skipped away, a juicy morsel of a girl, and Ian noticed how her long hair swung against the tight-packed seat of her jeans.

He had made it up about the children, of course. They were well past the stage when they needed sitters. But somehow he began to believe his own alibi, and as he watched her he thought, Right! Even chain gangs , he thought, are allowed a little time to themselves .

Well, no one had ever said this would be easy.

But then why didn’t he feel forgiven? Why didn’t he, after all these years of penance, feel that God had forgiven him?

* * *

The little black cat settled in immediately. She was very polite and clean, with a smell like new woolen yarn, and she tolerated any amount of petting. Daphne named her Honeybunch. Thomas named her Alexandra. Any time one would call her, the other would call louder. “Here, Honeybunch.” “No, Alexandra ! Here, Alexandra, you know who you love best.” Agatha stayed out of it. She was abstracted all that weekend, moping because a classmate had thrown a party without inviting her. The reason Ian knew this was that Thomas announced it, cruelly, during Saturday night supper. Agatha had told Thomas he was piggish to chew with his mouth open, and Thomas said, “Well, at least I don’t have to buy my clothes in the Chubbette department. At least I’m not so fat that Missy Perkins wouldn’t ask me to her slumber party!” Then Agatha threw down her napkin and bolted from the table, and Daphne said, in a satisfied tone, “You’re a meanie, Thomas.”

“Am not.”

“Are so.”

“She started it.”

“Did not.”

“Did so.”

“Quit that,” Ian said. “Both of you may be excused.”

“Why do I have to go when he’s the one who—”

“You’re excused, I said.”

They left, grumbling under their breaths as they moved into the living room.

Supper was more or less finished, anyhow. Ian’s father had already pushed away his plate and tilted back in his chair, and his mother was merely toying with her dessert. She hadn’t taken a bite in the last five minutes; she was deep in one of her blow-by-blow household sagas, and it seemed she would never get around to eating her last half-globe of canned peach.

“So there I was in the basement,” she said, “looking at all this water full of let’s-not-discuss-it, and the man pulled a kind of zippery tube from his machine and twined it down the …”

Ian started thinking about the comics. It was childish of him, he knew, but one thing he really enjoyed at the end of every day was reading “Peanuts” in the Evening Sun . It made a kind of oasis — that tiny, friendly world where everybody was so quaint and earnest and reflective. But what with Good Works, and the weekly grocery trip, and shopping for the kids’ new gym shoes, he hadn’t had a chance at the paper yet; and now he could hear the others mauling it in the living room. By the time he got hold of it all the pages would be disarranged and crumpled.

“The total bill came to sixty dollars,” his mother was saying. “I consider that cheap, in view of what the man had to deal with. When he was done he had me look down the floor drain. Big dark echoey floor drain. ‘Hear that?’ he said, and I said, ‘Hear what?’ He said, ‘All along the line, your neighbors flushing their toilets. First one here and then one far, far away over there,’ he said, ‘all connected by this network of pipes.’ ‘Well, fine,’ I said, ‘but left to my own devices I believe I could manage to live out my life not hearing, thank you very much.’ ”

In the living room, quarrelsome voices climbed over each other and Ian caught the sound of paper tearing. They were demolishing “Peanuts,” he was certain. He sighed.

Suppose, he thought suddenly, his boyhood self was to walk into the scene at this moment. Suppose he was offered a glimpse of how he had turned out: twenty-six years old and still living with his parents, tending someone else’s children, obsessed with the evening comics. Huh? he’d say. Why, what has happened here? What has become of me? How in heaven’s name did things ever get to this state?

“Give me one good reason I should have to go to church,” Agatha said on Sunday morning. “It’s hypocritical to go! I’m not a believer.”

“You can go to Grandma and Grandpa’s church if you prefer,” Ian told her.

“Listen carefully, Ian, I’ll only say this one more time: I am not a believer. ”

He wrapped an elastic around Daphne’s pony tail. “How about this,” he said. “You attend till you’re eighteen, and then you stop. That way, I won’t have to feel guilty you didn’t get the proper foundation.”

“You don’t have to feel guilty even now,” Agatha told him. “I absolve you, Ian.”

He drew back slightly. Absolve?

“Maybe she could go to Mary McQueen,” Daphne suggested.

Agatha said, “Mary Our Queen is for Catholics, stupid.”

“Agatha, don’t call her stupid. Let’s get moving. Thomas is already downstairs.”

They descended to the living room. Daphne clattering in the patent leather Mary Janes she liked to wear to church. The sound of Sunday morning, Ian thought. He told his parents, “We’re off.”

“Oh, all right, dear,” his mother said. She and his father were reading the paper on the couch.

“Take that business of the fig tree,” Agatha said as she let the front door slam behind her. “Jesus cursing the fig tree.”

“Where’s Thomas?”

“Here I am,” Thomas said from the porch swing.

“Let’s go, then.”

“Jesus decides He wants figs,” Agatha said. “Of course, it’s not fig season , but Jesus wants figs anyhow. So up He walks to this fig tree, but naturally all He finds is leaves. And what does He do? Puts a curse on the poor little tree.”

“No!” Daphne breathed. Evidently she hadn’t heard about this before.

“Next thing you know, the tree’s withered and died.”

“No.”

Ian knew that Agatha was just passing through a stage, but even so he minded, a bit. Over the years he had come to view Jesus very personally. The most trite and sentimental Sunday School portrait could send a flash of feeling through him, as if Jesus were … oh, one of those older boys he used to admire when he was small, someone he’d watched from a distance and grown to know and love without ever daring to engage in conversation.

Also, Agatha was seeding doubts in the other two.

“Doesn’t that seem petty to you?” she was asking Daphne. “I mean, doesn’t it seem unreasonable? If we behaved like that, we’d be sent to our rooms to think it over.”

“Agatha,” Ian said, “there’s a great deal in the Bible that’s simply beyond our understanding.”

“Beyond yours, maybe,” Agatha said. She told Daphne, “Or Noah’s Ark: how about that? God kills off all the sinners in a mammoth rainstorm. ‘Gotcha!’ He says, and He’s enjoying it, you know He is, or otherwise He’d have sent a few sample rains ahead of time so they could mend their ways.”