Anne Tyler - Saint Maybe

“No, seriously. I’ve been thinking. I’d break into a supermarket, and I’d settle our family inside. That way we’d have all the supplies we needed. Canned goods and bottled goods, enough to last us forever.”

“Well, not forever,” Thomas said.

“Long enough to get over the radiation, though.”

“Not a chance. Right, Ian?”

Ian said, “Hmm?”

“The radiation would last for years, right?”

“Well, so would the canned goods,” Agatha said. “And if we still had electricity—”

“Electricity! Ha!” Thomas said. “Do you ever live in a dream world!”

“Well, even without electricity,” Agatha said stubbornly, “we could manage. Nowadays supermarkets sell blankets, even. And socks! And prescription drugs, the bigger places. We could get penicillin and stuff. And some way we’d bring Claudia and them from Pittsburgh, I haven’t figured just how, yet—”

“Forget it, Ag,” Thomas told her. “That’s ten more mouths to feed.”

“But we need a lot of kids. They’re the future generation. And Grandma and Grandpa are the old folks who would teach us how to carry on.”

“How about Ian?” Thomas asked.

“How about him?”

“He’s not old. And he’s not the future generation, either. You have to draw the line somewhere.”

“Gee, thanks,” Ian said, lazily toeing the swing. But Agatha turned a pensive gaze on him.

“No,” she said finally, “Ian comes too. He’s the one who keeps us all together.”

“The cowpoke of the family, so to speak,” Ian told Thomas. But he felt touched. And when his father called from the doorway—“Ian? Telephone”—he rested a palm on Agatha’s thick black hair a second as he rose.

The receiver lay next to the phone on the front hall table. He picked it up and said, “Hello?”

“Brother Ian? Wallah,” a man said from a distance.

“Pardon?”

“This is Eli Everjohn. Wallah, I said.”

“Wallah?”

“Wallah! I found your man.”

“You … what?”

“Except he’s dead,”

Eli said. Ian leaned one shoulder against the wall.

“Appears he didn’t live much past what your sister-in-law did. Hello? Are you there?”

“I’m here.”

“Maybe this is a shock.”

“No, that’s all right,” Ian said.

The shock was not Tom Dulsimore’s death but the fact that he had lived at all — that someone else in the world had turned up actual evidence of him.

But Eli started breaking the news all over again, this time more delicately. “I’m sorry to have to tell you that Thomas Dulsimore, Senior has passed away,” he said. “Had himself a motorcycle crash back in nineteen sixty-seven.”

“ ’Sixty-seven,” Ian said.

“Seems he was one of those folks that don’t hold with helmets.”

So Tom Dulsimore was not an option anymore — not even in Ian’s fantasies.

“Reason I know is, I phoned his mother. Mrs. Millet. She’d remarried, is the reason it took me a while. I told her I was a buddy of Tom’s wanting to get in touch with him. I didn’t say no more though till I got your say-so. Should I go ahead now and pay her a visit?”

“No, never mind.”

“She’s bound to know the kids’ relatives. Small-town kind of lady; you could just tell she would know all about it.”

“Maybe I should get her address,” Ian said.

“Okay, suit yourself. Mrs. Margie Millet. Forty-three Orchard Road, Portia, Maryland. You need to write that down?”

“I have it,” Ian said. (He would have it forever, he felt — chiseled into his brain.) “Thanks, Eli. I appreciate your help. You know where to send the bill.”

“Aw, it won’t amount to much. This one was easy.”

For you, maybe , Ian thought. He told Eli goodbye and hung up.

From the kitchen, his mother called, “Agatha? Time to set the table!”

“Coming.”

Ian met Agatha at the door and stepped past her onto the porch. She didn’t notice a thing.

The evening was several shades darker now, as if curtain after curtain had fallen in his absence. Thomas was swinging the swing hard enough to make the chains creak, and down on the sidewalk the little girls were still playing hopscotch. Ian paused to watch them. Something about the purposeful planting of small shoes within chalked squares tugged at him. He leaned on the railing and thought, What does this remind me of? What? What? Daphne tossed the pebble she used as a marker and it landed in the farthest square so crisply, so ringingly, that the sound seemed thrown back from a sky no higher than a ceiling, cupping all of Waverly Street just a few feet overhead.

* * *

“Lucy Ann Dean was as common as dirt,” Mrs. Millet said. “I know I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but there’s just no getting around it: she was common.”

They were sitting in Mrs. Millet’s Pennsylvania Dutch-style breakfast nook, all blue painted wood and cut-out hearts and tulips. (Her house was the kind where the living room waited in reserve for some momentous occasion that never arrived, and Ian had caught no more than a glimpse of its white shag rugs and white upholstery on his journey to the kitchen.) Mrs. Millet slouched across from him, opening a pack of cigarettes. She was younger than he had expected, with a very stiff, very brown hairdo and a hatchet face. Her magenta minidress struck him as outdated, although Ian was not the last word on fashion.

He himself wore a suit and tie, chosen with an eye to looking trustworthy. After all, how did she know he wasn’t some knock-and-rob man? He hadn’t phoned ahead because he hadn’t fully acknowledged he was planning this; he had dressed this morning only for church, he told himself, although he almost never wore a tie to church. After services he had eaten Sunday dinner with his family and then (yawning aloud and stretching in a stagy manner) had announced he was feeling so restless, he thought he might go for a drive. Whereupon he had headed north without consulting a map, relying on the proper road signs to appear or else not, as the case might be. And they did appear. The signs for Portia, the signs for Orchard Road. The giant brass 43 glittering, almost shouting, from the lamppost in front of the redwood cottage. “My name is Ian Bedloe,” he had said when she opened the door. “I hope I’m not disturbing you, but I’m Lucy Dean’s brother-in-law and I’m trying to locate some of her family.”

She hadn’t exactly slammed the door in his face, but her expression had frozen over somehow. “Then maybe you better ask her,” she told him.

“Ask who?”

“Why, Lucy Dean, of course.”

“But … Lucy’s dead,” he said.

She stared at him.

“She died a long time ago,” he told her.

“Well,” she said, “I’d be fibbing if I said I was sorry. I always knew she was up to no good.”

He was shamed by the rush of pleasure he felt — the bitter, wicked pleasure of hearing someone else agree with him at long last.

Now she said, “First off, her parents drank.” She took a cigarette from her pack and tamped it against the table. “How do you suppose they had that car wreck? Three sheets to the wind, both of them. Then her aunt Alice moved in with her, and she was just plain cracked, if you want my honest opinion. I don’t think the two of them had anything to do with each other. It’s more like Lucy just raised herself. Well, for that much I give her credit: she’d come out of that run-down shack every morning neat as a pin, every hair in place, every accessory matching, which heaven knows how she did on their little pittance of money …”

She stole it, is how. Shoplifted. Not even you know the worst of it .

“… and she’d sashay off to school all prissy and Miss America with her books held in front of her chest. The boys were fools for her, but my Tommy was the only one she’d look at. You should’ve seen my Tommy. He was movie-star handsome. He could pass for Tony Curtis, ought to give you some idea. He and Lucy went steady from ninth grade on. Went to every dance and sports event together. Well, excepting Junior Prom. They had a little disagreement the week before Junior Prom and she went with Gary Durbin, but Tommy beat Gary to a pulp next morning and him and Lucy got back together. At their Senior Prom they were King and Queen. I still have the pictures. Tommy wore a tux and he looked good enough to eat. I said, ‘Tommy, you could have any girl you wanted,’ but then, well, you guessed it.”