Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

In the bedroom, he paused. He reached back and pulled open the drawer in the box’s base.

Right away, he knew he’d hit on something. The contents were so tidy: flattened papers stacked in order of size, and on top of them a few pieces of jewelry, no less junky than those in the main compartment but obviously dating from an earlier time. He pushed the jewelry aside and removed the papers.

A savings booklet from Mercantile Safe Deposit and Trust, showing a balance of $123.08. The title to a Chevrolet owned by Daniel C. Bedloe. A receipt from Morehead TV Repair guaranteeing all replacement parts for thirty days. A marriage certificate for Daniel Craig Bedloe and Lucy Ann Dean. (Ian paused a moment over that one. Was there any remote possibility that Ann could be a last name?) A birth certificate for Daphne Marie Bedloe. A pamphlet of instructions for filing health insurance claims. A birth certificate for Agatha Lynn Dulsimore and then one for Thomas. A receipt for—

Agatha who?

Agatha Lynn Dulsimore, born April 4, 1959. Father’s full name: Thomas Robert Dulsimore. Mother’s maiden name: Lucy Ann Dean. And Thomas Robert Dulsimore, Junior; same parents.

Why, Dean was not Lucy’s married name but her maiden name. She must have changed back to Dean after the divorce, and changed her children’s names too — at least by implication. All this time, the Bedloes had been hunting a man who didn’t exist.

Ian sifted through the few remaining papers — a hazy, unflattering photo of Lucy and the older two children, an auto insurance policy, a recipe for banana bread — but the birth certificates were the only items that told him anything. Both listed the parents’ home address as Portia, Maryland. Both carried definite dates, and a doctor’s name, and a hospital’s name in a town called Marcy, which if Ian recollected right lay not far from Portia, just below the Pennsylvania line. He had enough to track a man down by, provided a person was halfway skilled at tracking.

He slipped the papers inside his shirt and went off to see Eli Everjohn.

“Have some mashed potato. Honeybunch,” Daphne said. She held her spoon out to the little cat, who was sitting on Daphne’s lap with her front paws folded primly beneath her. First the cat peered into Daphne’s eyes, as if checking to make sure she really meant it, and then she leaned forward and lapped daintily. When she was finished, the spoon gleamed. She sat up to wash her face. “Good girl,” Daphne said, and she dipped the spoon back in her plate and took a mouthful for herself.

“Ooh, revolting!” Agatha said. “Ian, did you see what she did?”

“What? What’d I do?” Daphne asked.

“You ate from a spoon the cat licked!”

At the other end of the table, Thomas gave an elderly cough. “Well, actually,” he said, “the cat’s the one who should worry. Mr. Pratt says human spit carries more germs than any other animal’s, because humans have these fingers they keep putting in their mouths.”

Ian laughed. The others looked at him.

“I was just, ah, thinking,” he told them.

They looked away again.

You could never call it a penance, to have to take care of these three. They were all that gave his life color, and energy, and … well, life.

What he would do was, once he got Eli’s report he would file it in a drawer someplace. Then when they grew up and started wondering about their origins he would hand it over to them; that was all. He would certainly not use the information himself in any way.

People needed to know their genetic backgrounds — what diseases ran in their families and so forth. Also this would help him apply for guardianship. Social Security. That sort of thing.

He rose and started clearing the table. It was a relief to have all that settled. He was glad he hadn’t told anyone what he was doing.

But at work the next day, he did tell someone. He told Jeannie. He was teaching her how to select the right grain of wood and she asked if he’d like to go to a movie that night at the Charles. “I can’t,” he said.

“What, are movies against your religion?”

“No, it’s my turn to car-pool for Brownies.”

“Hey,” she said. “Ian. How long you going to go on living like this, anyway?”

So he told her about Eli. He didn’t know why, exactly. It wasn’t as if finding Thomas Dulsimore would change his situation. Maybe he just hoped to prove he wasn’t as passive as she supposed. And she did seem gratifyingly interested. When he mentioned the stationery box she said, “Naw! Go on!” She asked, “What-all was in it?” and she even wanted to know about the jewelry.

“It wasn’t the kind of jewelry that would give you any clues,” he said. “I honestly didn’t pay much attention.”

“And the photo?”

“Oh, well, that was … well, the detective was glad to see it, of course, so’s he’d know more or less what she looked like, but it didn’t show a street sign or a license plate or anything like that. Just Lucy.”

“Was she pretty?”

“Sure, I guess so.”

For some reason, he didn’t want to tell her how pretty.

Lucy’s image swam into his mind — not the real-life version but the version in the snapshot: out of focus, too young, still unformed, nowhere near as finely chiseled as she had seemed later. One hip was slung out gracelessly to support Thomas’s weight, and one hand was reaching blurrily to gather Agatha closer. Against all logic (he knew he was being ridiculous), he started resenting Agatha’s disloyalty in keeping her mother’s likeness. There you are: you give up school, you sacrifice everything for these children, and what do they do? They secretly hoard their mother’s photo and cling to her and prefer her. She hadn’t even taken proper care of them, willfully dying and leaving them as she did; but evidently blood motherhood won over everything.

Jeannie said, “I’m really glad to hear you’re doing this, Ian.”

“Well, it’s only so we can get straight,” he told her. “I certainly don’t plan to hand the three of them over to strangers or anything like that.”

“What are you, crazy?” she asked. “You’ve got a life to live! You can’t drag them around with you forever.”

“But I’m responsible for them. I worry I’d be, um, sinning, so to speak, to walk away from them.”

“You want to know what I think?” Jeannie asked. She leaned forward. Her face seemed sharper now, more pointed. The hollow between her collarbones could have held a teaspoon of salt. “I think you’re sinning not to walk away,” she said.

“How do you figure that?”

“I think we’re each allowed one single life to live on this planet. We’ll never get another chance in all eternity,” she said. “And if you let it go to waste — now, that is sinning.”

“Yes,” he said, “but what if I’m honor bound to waste it? What if I have an obligation?”

He worried she would make him explain, but she was too caught up in proving her point. “Even then!” she said triumphantly. “You put your regrets behind you. You move on past them. You do not commit the sin of squandering your only life.”

“Well, it sounds good,” he said.

It did sound good. He really had no argument to offer against it.

At Prayer Meeting the following night he looked for Eli Everjohn but didn’t find him, or the strawberry blonde either. He spotted Sister Bertha’s dark red pompadour and he sat down next to her and asked, “Where’s your daughter this evening?”

“She went home.”

“Home?”

“Her and Eli both, home to Caro Mill. Eli said to give you a message, though. What was it now he said? He said not to think you had slipped his mind and he would be in touch.”